Eisenhower and Churchill
The Partnership That Saved the World
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Although born and raised more than an ocean apart, Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill—the two titans of the greatest generation—led remarkably parallel lives whose paths would intersect during history's most harrowing days. Through their youth, education, and military training, both men experienced similar triumphs and failures that shaped their lives, though they met only for the first time upon the eve of war in 1941.
Eisenhower and Churchill tells the magnificent story of these two great leaders and their exemplary partnership in war and peace. Through enlivened pages and fascinating anecdotes, author James C. Humes illuminates the human side of each man, who had more in common with each other than a world war. You'll discover the extraordinary stories of how both were born to domineering mothers and failed fathers, both did not qualify for the military academy on the first try, both were traumatized by experiences in World War I, both were talented writers, and both lost a child in the very same year (1921). Remarkably, each man did not warm to the other at first; but as they worked together, their respect for one another grew to become a powerful friendship that lived long after the echoes of war had receded into the past.
As allies, they shared a hatred for tyranny and led the world through the greatest war of the twentieth century. As friends, they shared a sense of trust and cooperation that should be raised as a standard. Containing new research and memorable insights, Eisenhower and Churchill brings to life the two lions of the twentieth centruy.
"Who would not welcome an intimate book about Churchill and Eisenhower, and who is better situated to write it than Professor Humes, who knew them both, and studiously—and ardently—records their careers and their friendship?"
—William F. Buckley Jr.
"James C. Humes's Eisenhower and Churchill is a wonderful dual biography laced with lively anecdotes, engaging prose, and shrewd analysis. A truly welcome addition to our growing literature on the Second World War."
—Douglas Brinkley, professor of history and director of the Eisenhower Center, University of New Orleans
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though Humes was briefly a staffer in the Eisenhower White House, his book is unreliable as fact and as florid as an after-dinner speech. Much more than half the narrative is a compilation of unrelated parallels and coincidences in the lives of his two subjects, who met only after Pearl Harbor. Their relationship materialized when Eisenhower was assigned to lead Anglo-American forces in the invasion of North Africa, a follow-up in Sicily and then the D-Day operation, which Churchill had long resisted. Rather than a partnership, their relationship was one of a veteran politician who fancied himself a strategist, and a shrewd general who was politic enough to organize a collection of egos into executing vast military operations. While Churchill wanted to keep Russia out of what he considered British spheres of influence and to prevent a doomed British Empire from disintegrating, Eisenhower's orders from President Roosevelt were to win the war. Eisenhower's confident serenity and stubborn affability were keys to his success in keeping Churchill focused on common goals. While the subtitle claims much more than Humes (a professor of language and leadership at the University of Southern Colorado and author of Nixon's Ten Commandments of Leadership and Negotiation) delivers, the text is equally flawed, replete with hasty judgments, suspect political bias and numerous factual errors. Eisenhower, for example, did not racially integrate the army: Truman did. Rather, we have FDR's "New Deal crowd" and Truman's "deficit populism." Churchill's support for Eisenhower is claimed to be the reason he was selected to command the North Africa invasion. Names are wrong; anecdotes become fact; Ike even turns to medicine, it seems, having "supervised the recovery" of Churchill from pneumonia. The lack of source notes underscores that no one should take this book seriously as history. Illus. and foreword by David Eisenhower not seen by PW.
