Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets - Hardcover

David Stafford

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316648485 ISBN 13: 9780316648486

Publisher: Little, Brown & Co., 1999

Synopsis

Visiting London in 1918 as American Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt met the young Winston Churchill for the first time. Roosevelt's reported comments on Churchill did not bode well for the future. According to Roosevelt, "He acted like a stinker." However, over 20 years later, Roosevelt and Churchill were to find themselves forging one of the most crucial alliances in military and political history in the face of the Axis forces of Nazi Germany and Japan. The story of their remarkable political alliance and personal friendship is vividly recounted in David Stafford's Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets, which charts the intense relationship between the two men, from Churchill's elevation to Prime Minister in 1940 to Roosevelt's death in April 1945. The story of the development of the abiding "Special Relationship" established between the US and the UK by the two men has often been told, but Stafford intelligently reveals the personal dimensions of both men--Roosevelt the democratic, modernising anti- colonialist, Churchill the conservative, traditional imperialist--insisting that they both "knew the political value of the personal touch." In the process he carefully paints a picture of a relationship which ultimately defeated Hitler: "Seventeen hundred messages passed between them, and in nine meetings and several conferences they had spent a hundred and twenty days of close personal contact together." In the process Stafford revisits the manoeuvrings prior to Pearl Harbour which brought the US into the war, as well as fascinating new information on both men's obsession with clandestine military intelligence, and the various forms of political and diplomatic skullduggery which they shared in their ultimate pursuit of a new world order. Jerry Brotton

About this title

About the Author:

David Stafford is an historian and former diplomat who has written extensively on espionage, intelligence, Churchill, and the Second World War. The former Project Director at the Centre for The Study of the Two World Wars at the University of Edinburgh, he is now an Honorary Fellow of the University and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where he and his wife now live. In April 2005 he was appointed by the Prime Minister to write the official history of SOE in Italy, which was published by the Bodley Head in March 2011.

From AudioFile:

The much vaunted cooperation between Great Britain and the United States during WWII has long been due for reassessment, and this study of the intelligence services of both countries may signal its start. Stafford's close examination suggests as much competition as cooperation, for the ambitions of both leaders--Roosevelt and Churchill--and their national interests, beyond winning the war, were largely incompatible. In a forceful narration Richard McGonagle produces near lifelike imitations of the two men--the urbane, upper-Hudson Roosevelt and the gravelly, sardonic Churchill--that at times brim over with their delight in each other and their work. Underneath, however, boils a tension that always threatens to break out, as the two try to balance the competing demands of their intelligence services against common strategic interests. In a voice familiar to those of us who cut our teeth on TV documentaries like "Victory at Sea," McGonagle recreates those tense moments between Allies whose secret interests were worlds apart, yet who nonetheless assembled the most effective spy network in the history of the world. P.E.F. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown & Co.
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0316648485
• ISBN 13: 9780316648486
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 359