The Intimacy of Great Men

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The world gets nostalgic for great men. Plutarch felt similarly wistful around A.D. 100, when he wrote his wonderful Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans — shrewd side-by-side comparative biographies of dozens of bygone political characters: Demosthenes and Cicero, for example, Caesar and Alexander.

In Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (Random House; 490 pages), Jon Meacham, the No. 2 editor at Newsweek, has written a handsomely Plutarchan study that weaves together the lives, characters and fates of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the years of their wartime partnership. Most of the anecdotes have been told a thousand times, but Meacham manages to align the two giants in a way that makes the stories seem fresh, the two men, seen so close together, casting interesting lights upon each other.

Roosevelt and Churchill were born eight years apart (Churchill being the elder). As Meacham writes, "They loved tobacco, strong drink, history, the sea, battleships, hymns, pageantry, patriotic poetry, high office, and hearing themselves talk. 'Being with them was like sitting between two lions roaring at the same time,' said [Churchill's daughter] Mary Soames." Each had a powerful sense of the stagecraft of statesmanship. Each was physically brave, profoundly ambitious, a consummate actor and a superb politician. Each was the son of a rich American mother. (Roosevelt, infinitely doted upon, had a happy childhood; Churchill was famously neglected.)

Meacham's version contains no revisionism or lese majeste. On the contrary, it is written with a sort of intelligent reverence and ends by looking at the Churchill and Roosevelt memorials in Westminster Abbey in light filtered through stained-glass windows: "Light from a world Roosevelt and Churchill together delivered from evil."

In some ways Churchill — a sweeter man, more exterior, spontaneous, decent, forgiving — emerges as a more attractive human being than Roosevelt, whose magnificently confident facade concealed a character capable of immense deceit, chilling detachment and cunning superficiality. Roosevelt and Churchill had become fast friends in the early days of the war, when Churchill stayed in the White House for weeks at a time. Churchill said, "No lover ever studied the whims of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt." Roosevelt, on the other hand, told Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, "I'm nearly dead. I have to talk to the PM all night, and he gets bright ideas in the middle of the night and comes pattering down the hall to my bedroom in his bare feet. I have to get my sleep."

Meacham's study is a close-focus historical tracking shot of the two men, very human, heroic and imperfect, moving along through — and making — great history.