Jon Meacham: Franklin & Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

Wednesday, October 20th, 2004 Jon Meacham visited the library to talk about his new book Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (Random House 2003).

From his website:
Jon Meacham is the managing editor of Newsweek. He arrived at the magazine as a writer in January 1995, became National Affairs Editor in June of that year, and was named managing editor in November 1998. He supervises the magazine's coverage of politics, international affairs, and breaking news, and has written cover stories on guns in America, race in the new millennium, the theological implications of the sexual-abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, and the fall of Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott. In 2001, Newsweek won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence the industry's highest honor for its coverage of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath.

Born in Chattanooga in 1969, Meacham graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English Literature from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where was the salutatorian and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He is a now a member of the University's governing Board of Regents. A contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, Meacham began his journalism career as a summer intern at The Chattanooga Times, where he also worked from 1991-1992.

In 2001, he edited Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement (Random House), a collection of distinguished nonfiction about the midcentury struggle against Jim Crow. Reviewing the book in Mother Jones, Tom Wicker wrote: "Jon Meacham & has done about the best job of anthologizing the movement that I've seen," and Juan Williams of NPR called the book "compelling & Acting as a maestro for an orchestra of gifted writers, Meacham succeeds at transporting the reader to the confused heart of American relations, down to the core of the misunderstandings, the invitations to hate, and the violence."

Meacham's new book, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, a chronicle of the wartime relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill, will be published by Random House on October 21, 2003.

Meacham and his wife, Keith, live in New York City with their son.

From Publishers Weekly: 
Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek (editor, Voices in Our Blood), delivers an eloquent, well-researched account of one of the 20th century's most vital friendships: that between FDR and Winston Churchill. Both men were privileged sons of wealth, and both had forebears (in Churchill's case, Leonard Jerome) prominent in New York society during the 19th century. Both enjoyed cocktails and a smoke. And both were committed to the Anglo-American alliance. Indeed, Roosevelt and Churchill each believed firmly that the "English-speaking peoples" represented the civilized world's first, best hope to counter and conquer the barbarism of the Axis. Meacham uses previously untapped archives and has interviewed surviving Roosevelt and Churchill staffers present at the great men's meetings in Washington, Hyde Park, Casablanca and Tehran. Thus he has considerable new ground to break, new anecdotes to offer and prescient observations to make. Throughout, Meacham highlights Roosevelt's and Churchill's shared backgrounds as sons of the ruling elite, their genuine, gregarious friendship, and their common worldview during staggeringly troubled times. To meet with Roosevelt, Churchill recalled years later, "with all his buoyant sparkle, his iridescence," was like "opening a bottle of champagne"-a bottle from which the tippling Churchill desperately needed a good long pull through 1940 and '41, as the Nazis savaged Europe and tortured British civilians with air attacks. One comes away from this account convinced of the "Great Personality" theory of history and gratified that Roosevelt and Churchill possessed the character that they did and came to power at a time when no other partnership would do.