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Welcome to the Anglotopia Podcast, where we explore British history, travel, and culture. I'm your host, Jonathan Thomas. Today we're telling the story of one of the most consequential friendships of the 20th century. A friendship that quite literally helped shape the modern world that we live in now. On the one side, you have Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The soldier statesman from Abilene, Kansas, who commanded the largest invasion in history and went on to become America's 34th president. On the other side, we have Winston Churchill, the British lion who refused to surrender in democracy's darkest hour. Across a quarter of a century, with the grim early days of the Second World War through D-Day, and on to the uneasy dawn of the Cold War and the nuclear age, these two men launched invasions, toppled tyrants, argued fiercely, and
And forged a bond that endured even as the British Empire declined and the American superpower rose to take its place. My guest today has written the definitive account of that relationship. Jonathan W. Jordan is a New York Times best-selling military historian and a book critic for the Wall Street Journal. He's author of Brothers, Rivals, and Victor, Victors, his best-selling book on Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley. He writes this richly researched history while practic while practicing law and is now a federal judge.
⁓ his new book is Ike and Winston, World at War and an Extraordinary Friendship. And then it has drawn praise from the likes of Andrew Roberts, John Meachum, and Admiral John Stavridis. So here's a here it is here. Well Jonathan, welcome to the Anglotopia Podcast.
Jonathan, thanks. It's great to be here ⁓ talking as two Americans about ⁓ an American and half Briton, half American.
And on the cusp of the ⁓ English ⁓ run through the knockout stage in the World Cup.
Yeah, so the the it'll have already happened by the time this is released, but that's go on England. So
⁓ we we see a lot of lions here, three we see a lot of lions here in Atlanta.
So Jonathan, before we get to to your new book, I'd love your listeners to know a little mid a little bit about you. So you you're a New York Times best selling military historian historian, you're also a federal judge. How on earth do those lies fit together and how did you become a historian in the first place?
thanks so much, Jonathan. ⁓ you know, I used to say that ⁓ writing history was a lot more fun than lawyering, and that I probably did my best writing work when I was supposed to be slaving away twenty four hundred hours a year for my law firms. but in truth, being a litigator, which which I was for about thirty-three years before ⁓ taking the bench, ⁓ being a litigator, especially with jury trials, is not all that different from being a historian.
You sift through a bunch of old documents, you interview witnesses, which is basically a deposition, and then you package all that information together in a way that makes it hopefully accessible and if possible, ⁓ engaging and even entertaining for a lay audience, whether that lay audience is twelve jurors or thousands of history buffs.
So you you grew up on Air Force bases, your father flew C one hundred forty ones during the Vietnam War. So how much did that upgreen upbringing shape your fascination with war command and the people at the top of it?
Jonathan, that was certainly a part of it. growing up as a kid around big airplanes like the ones on the shelf behind you, ⁓ going to ⁓ places like the Aberdeen Proving Grounds collection, where as a kid you could climb all over tanks and howitzers, ⁓ that must have made an impact on me. ⁓ but as I got older, I became more interested in the collision of politics.
and military operations and military history. And that's really what a big part of what Ike and Winston is about. It's a friendship with the background of the collision of politics and military history.
So this book kind of feels like a destination of a long journey. You've written about Eisenhower before, alongside Patton and Bradley and your other book, Brothers, Rivals, and Victors, and you've also written about FDR's High Command and American Warlords. So you've kind of been circling the Eisenhower Churchill story for for a few years. So what made you finally sit down and and write it and tell it?
Yeah, ⁓ I think that Ike and Winston is a natural progression of the stories of Brothers Rivals Victors and American warlords. The common thread in all these stories is that they take people who are fundamentally different, people with different social backgrounds, different professional training, different political beliefs, but they manage to set aside those differences so they could serve the country when the country needed them.
And bridging differences has become a dying art among people, especially in the digital age. And the way these different characters, each extraordinarily talented in their own ways, did it, I think has a lot to teach us. And and to me that's a a a fascinating story. Just the idea that you can have brilliant people who have naturally large egos, but they can set those egos aside. That's that's really something that we can learn from.
So your book draws heavily on the words of the men themselves, without giving away the store. What kinds of sources did you live in to write this? And did the lawyer in you approach the evidence any differently than maybe a historian might?
Yeah, well Eisenhower and Churchill were both prolific writers. So the core of the book is the Churchill Papers, published ⁓ it's in published form by Hillsdale College, total of twenty three volumes, and each volume is two to three inches thick, though it's not entirely Churchill's ⁓ writings. These include things written by people who had met with or worked closely around Winston Churchill.
The Eisenhower Papers published by Johns Hopkins is 21 volumes, entirely Ike's own writings. So you add to this the many people who worked with them, who wrote their memoirs, and there are a lot of transcripts of interviews by Eisenhower's associates in the Eisenhower Presidential Library and at Columbia University. Churchill, of course, and Eisenhower both wrote books, a number of memoirs, particularly Churchill.
So each book, each memoir, each interview is like a piece of the mosaic. And when you step back, you see the complete picture of these two men. ⁓ the way I looked at it as a lawyer was you go through each piece of evidence and and what I do now as a judge is to assess credibility and you just say ask, is this story credible? Does this make sense? Does it fit with the other pieces of evidence? And that's how I assembled this this ⁓ big mosaic that
Turned into the book.
So let then let's let's talk about the book. Let's meet our two protagonists. On paper, they could hardly be more different. ⁓ one is an aristocratic Englishman born at Blenheim Palace, who, you know, served in various aspects of the British Empire and British government, and the other is a modest middle American from Kansas, so who paint us a picture of each man as they were before the war kind of threw them together.
Well, they first met in the Rose Room of the White House three weeks after Pearl Harbor, on Christmas Eve Day, nineteen forty one. So that's that's where they first come together, thrown together by the war. Eisenhower at that time was a brilliant and respected but largely unknown staff officer. He was basically a brigadier with no brigade. His role in that first meeting was to act as basically the Wikipedia page for the
Philippines defenses. Kirchhoff wanted to talk to Secretary of War Henry Stimson about the defense of the Philippines. And Eisenhower had worked for Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines for many years in the mid 30s, and he knew the defensive picture there probably better than anyone else stateside. So he was basically just the guy holding maps and answering detailed questions. Kirchhoff didn't know who Eisenhower was, but
Like Ike and like everyone else, they all knew who Winston Churchill was. Churchill had been world famous before anyone had heard of Mussolini or Hitler or Stalin. He had fought as a cavalryman for Queen Victoria in several skirmishes in India and in Africa. He was world famous as an author and correspondent. He was like the Ernest Hemingway of the early twentieth century.
And he had served in Parliament since 1904, over 30 years before he would give his famous fight on the beaches and finest hour speeches. When he met Dwight Eisenhower, of course, he was head of the British Empire, which was technically a Commonwealth at the time, but really acted as an empire. And so during this first meeting, because they're two different roles and statuses, Ike was really ⁓ the little guy, very forgettable.
And Churchill promptly forgot that he had met Eisenhower. In his memoirs, he said later that he had first met Ike in in ⁓ the middle of 1942, in June. ⁓ but of course, Churchill was meeting a lot of people then. You can't expect him to remember every general he runs across. And he had actually forgotten that he had met in 1917 a young assistant secretary of the Navy named Franklin Roosevelt.
Until ⁓ they awkwardly met later on.
And so and and Eisenhower and and and ⁓ FDR couldn't be more different. ⁓ you know, that it's easy to to put all the Americans in the same bucket, but they were substantially different men, different backgrounds. I mean, and I'm getting off track, so let me get to the question here.
No, but you've but you're you're
right. You're right. Churchill had a very fond friendship with FDR, and he had a fond friendship with Eisenhower, and they were both famous friendships, and I think I'd argue that his friendship with with Eisenhower was more pivotal to world history and the path the 20th century took than even his famous friendship with Franklin Roosevelt. Because without Frank without Winston Churchill.
There would still be a Franklin Roosevelt. ⁓ America would still have gotten into the war. But without Churchill's patronage, there is no ⁓ there is no Eisenhower. There's there's Eisenhower, the brigadier or major general who works in the Pentagon and is respected as a planner, but there's no supreme commander of D Day. There's no ⁓ President Eisenhower, there's no NATO commander, he's he's done a household name without Winston Churchill's backing.
So in in and Churchill was a full generation older than Eisenhower, ⁓ and had been like you said, had been a national figure for decades before Ike was even a household name. So how did that age gap and that gap in fame and rank shape the early dynamic between them? Was Eisenhower not impressed by Churchill's fame or was was Churchill impressed by his lack of fame?
Yeah, you know, one of Eisenhower's great strengths, one of these these phenomenal soft skills he had, was that he could work with famous and powerful people without being overawed or overwhelmed by them. He had enormous respect for Churchill as well as Roosevelt, General George Marshall, and the rest, but he was very good at compartmentalizing things in his mind between military matters on which he was the expert.
And non-military matters such as politics or economics. And Ike didn't get too worked up or jealous of power outside his jurisdiction. And he was confident in his judgment about things within his expertise. So he could talk very confidently and he could he could be very direct with Roosevelt and Churchill about when they could invade Africa or Italy, or when he felt they would ⁓ run the Germans out of North Africa.
Africa, or what forces we'd need to take Berlin and things like that. So Ike was never really competitive or threatened by Churchill on non-military matters. ⁓ those were just not part of his job. And Churchill, of course, was never threatened or overawed by anybody except possibly King George VI, ⁓ as a matter of Churchill's reverence for the monarchy.
So ⁓ your book opens with a part titled Forge and Fire, and the your prologue carries the haunting title Forty Thousand Dead Frenchmen, which ⁓ is one of the most kind of ⁓ it's one of the least talked about subjects of World War Two, the the British scuttling the French fleet. So without spoiling it, what's the world these two men are walking into as the story begins?
This was a new and terrifying world for anyone who had the values of the United Kingdom and the United States, those those liberal Western democratic values. In December 1941, Hitler dominated Europe from the liter almost literally the gates of Moscow to the Pyrenees Mountains. Japan was rapidly swallowing up Southeast Asia and the resource-rich Dutch East Indies ⁓ islands.
no one had ever faced two great empires like this, and certainly no one had ever tried to take on two empires of those sizes and powers at opposite ends of the world at the same time. And so it was a it was a frightening experience, but and there was no blueprint for it, not even the first world war.
So you mentioned, sorry, this isn't on my list of questions, but you mentioned you mentioned that so, you know, Churchill is has war experience. He fought in the various Imperial Adventures, he fought in World War One, and he was at the decision table for a large part of World War One. So he has significant military and and and and even that on the ground soldier experience.
Eisenhower, on the other hand, w because I have a knowledge gap here. So what was Eisenhower's military background? Because like you said, he was in the Philippines. a lot of people don't know that that was basically an American colony for many, many years since the French ⁓ since the Spanish American War. So what did that look like? Because the the the British were very battle hardened even going into World War II, despite the the in the interwar years of of no conflict.
What what about someone like Eisenhower? Did he have real like battle hardened experience that was useful or is he more the logistics guy?
He had ne I had never heard a shot fired in anger ⁓ up until the time he met Churchill and and ⁓ only from at most the distance throughout World War II. He had tried to get into the First World War, but because of his ex his his youthful experience playing football and being sort of a cheerleader and assist an assistant football coach, the Army found him ⁓ most useful as a trainer.
So he trained tank units to go off and fight the Kaiser in World War I. As a result, he missed the First World War and felt that that would basically doom his career, not realizing that the lessons of the First World War did not all translate over to the second. In nineteen forty three, there's a there was a meeting of Churchill with his entourage in Algiers to meet Eisenhower and talk about whether they should invade North or should invade the Italian mainland.
And there's a famous picture of Churchill sitting on the porch at Ike's Villa. And he's at a table surround with maps, surrounded by Eisenhower and George Marshall and the British Imperial General staff behind him. ⁓ he's he's with Anthony Eden, the foreign minister, ⁓ and every one of these men, including Anthony Eden, the foreign minister, who was wounded at the who was who had fought at the Somme and had been.
Had fought bravely in the First World War, they all had more battle experience than Eisenhower, who was the supreme commander of the Mediterranean theater. But fortunately for the Allied cause, the job of supreme commander did not involve someone who knew a lot about individual combat. And in his ⁓ diary, one time, General George Patton equipped that.
no officer above the rank of colonel should know anything about tactics. Because if generals knew less about tactics, they would interfere less. And Ike was exactly the guy not to interfere with the operational stuff. he didn't stick his nose in where it didn't belong, and he kept a tight grip over things like politics, logistics, civil affairs, ⁓ interallied relations, ⁓ and and
large scale strategy, which is exactly what he was suited for.
So then you mentioned Churchill not remembering h having met him. So when they did officially meet meet, what did these men initially make of each other? Were there doubts, misjudgments, or friction before any kind of friendship took hold?
Sure, sure. Well at first ⁓ Ike was just the American over there, ⁓ over in London. And he he came over to London in ⁓ June of nineteen forty two to head up the American buildup. before long they had tapped ⁓ Ike to be the showrunner of the North African campaign. And ⁓ and so yeah, they had ⁓ they had some doubts at the beginning. ⁓ one of the issues was that the Americans were very distrustful of Winston Churchill.
And you have to remember that Eisenhower was the the planner who wrote the playbook for an invasion of France before he left the War Department in Washington to come to Europe. he was a big believer in the let's go to Germany, attack them through north ⁓ northern northern ⁓ Europe, northern France first. And they the there was a lot of distrust there between the British approach, which was going through the Mediterranean.
what Churchill called the peripheral approach. And there, let's just go straight for the jugular approach. So there was some mistrust there. But between Ike and Churchill at a personal level, ⁓ at first Eisenhower was just another powerful, important American Churchill needed to get to know. But throughout the summer, they developed a warmer relationship. And then that relationship would become positively affectionate and friendly.
starting from certainly by by early nineteen forty four on.
So their friendship above all is forged in the Second World War. ⁓ as I Eisenhower rises to supreme Allied commander, he's suddenly an American general directing British forces and answering in part to Churchill, how did that extraordinary command relationship actually work day to day?
Well, in the middle part of nineteen forty-two, and certainly in nineteen forty-four when Eisenhower was preparing for the D-Day invasion, ⁓ Ike and Winston had lunch together at least weekly. ⁓ they frequently met several other times a week during the day or over dinners, or ⁓ at British Chiefs of Staff meetings or meetings of the war cabinets. Sometimes they'd gibbots before that. Sometimes Eisenhower would come over for an overnight visit.
To Checkers, which is the prime minister's ⁓ country residence, and he'd stay overnight. ⁓ you know, during this time, Churchill liked to expound on strategy, but most of what they worked on together were practical problems, like shipping backlogs in the English ports or social problems, like you know, the Americans' drivers had a habit of driving too fast on those small English ⁓ roads. ⁓
British landlords sometimes had problems ⁓ overcharging American officers for the flats they were renting. ⁓ so there were there were some some friction here or there. You see in like Band of Brothers where they, you know, they during some training exercise, they, you know, they hurt they destroy some farmer's fence. Those kinds of things came up and Ike and Winston sometimes had to interact like they were ⁓ city councilmen working to solve little problems.
sometimes the problems were bigger. ⁓ allocations of engineers to the Mulberry harbors, blackouts of diplomatic communications, things like that were were things that that Ike and Winston had to find a way to finesse just so they could get get through the the invasion. And then of course they spent a good bit of time together, ⁓ traveling around, inspecting troops, and they did that around especially around late March of nineteen forty-four. So they spent lots of time together.
And exchanged plenty of ⁓ memos and letters and had phone calls.
Churchill was famously hands-on, full of ideas, late-night phone calls, strong opinions about strategy. How did Eisenhower manage a prime minister who wanted to be more deeply involved in the fighting than he actually was?
Well, you know, at some point there is a ⁓ y you're gonna have to ⁓ come up with ⁓ a way to handle a prime minister who's sticking his nose where it doesn't belong. Ike's driver, Kay Summersby, noted in her memoirs that because Churchill was a prime minister, when Churchill came up with an idea and and told Ike about it, Ike couldn't just say it was stupid. He had to have his staff make a precise study.
He had to go back and show Churchill step by step why it wouldn't work and tell him the the due diligence he had done in going to his subordinates to find out what the experts said. ⁓ now by mid-1944, and certainly by August 1, when Patton's third army was activated, the American preponderance of forces in Europe meant that Ike's American bosses, that was the that would be the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, had
mostly the final say on military strategy. And the American Joint Chiefs had a lot of confidence in General Eisenhower. And so I like to say that in military matters, not political ones, that he could always say no because he was the boss. But of course that was an oversimplification. ⁓ usually the problems Churchill raised that that they remembered after the war were the big strategic ones.
like whether to cancel the Anvil invasion of southern France or whether to invade the Greek islands of the Aegean or things like that.
And so and and that's a good point 'cause they didn't always agree. There were real strategic clashes, Mediterranean versus cross channel and so on. So where did Ike and Winston most seriously differ during the war and how did they resolve those without breaking the alliance? Was it was it Ike coming to him with all these strategies and studies saying this we shouldn't do this?
You know, the the most insoluble ones now no Churchill was hardwired for war and he understood the the military side of things. you know, with with Churchill, the the biggest problems were those fundamental things that that Churchill did not feel he could back off on. so they had a lot of intense, sometimes emotional arguments. Probably the biggest one was over the Anvil landings.
That was the Allied landing in southern France along the French Riviera. ⁓ Churchill's ⁓ Churchill had a number of concerns, but the biggest one, the fundamental one, was that an invasion of southern France would take away strength from the Italian campaign, which was a campaign led by senior British generals. And it was ⁓ it was their British theater. It was the place where Churchill saw Britain being able to show it was as powerful as the Americans were in France.
And they argued about that until a week before the invasion. Churchill would do whatever it took. He would use humor, he would argue, he would threaten to resign, he would cry, he would, I mean, he he did anything he could. And extraordinarily he would he would misrepresent what Eisenhower had told him. In ⁓ in August 1944, ⁓ Churchill sent Roosevelt a cable referring to some.
discussion over here about shifting the Anvil landings to the western coast of France, the Brittany Peninsula, Brest and that area. ⁓ and then he he wired to Harold Alexander, the commander, Army Group commander in Italy, ⁓ he wired wired to Montgomery and others,
A warning note saying we may be on the verge of shifting all of our troops from the Anvil landing over to Brittany, and you're not going to need as many people for that landing, so you can keep more of them in Italy. And he wired Eisenhower and said, ⁓ I I've I've sent Washington a note about your brilliant idea of moving things over to Brittany. And Eisenhower was horrified. And he immediately, Eisenhower immediately wired General Marshall.
Say, I have no idea where Churchill got this. ⁓ Churchill was starting a ball rolling to sift the landings from Anvil, which the Americans were had insisted on, to Brittany. And the British Chiefs of Staff went to their American counterparts and said, We understand Eisenhower's behind this. And the the Americans said, Well, that's news to me. are you sure? And ⁓ they went back and they ⁓ one of them
concluded in his diary that it appears the Prime Minister has either knowingly or unknowingly misrepresented what Eisenhower has said and w and they had to go back to the Americans and say, well, we understand Ike really isn't in support of this. So we're wrong and and we'll go ahead with Anvil. ⁓ so that was the kind of thing that that Churchill would do when he really dug his heels in. ⁓ the other big fight of course was over Berlin.
Which really meant whether the Americans and British should capture Berlin and then also presumably Prague and Vienna to keep them out of the hands of the Red Army. Even at that stage in in early 1945, Churchill saw an iron curtain falling across Central Europe, while Eisenhower only saw it as the military mission. And Ike's goal was to avoid friendly fire incidents when the Allies ⁓ encountered the Red Army.
And Eisenhower did not want to expend American and Canadian and British lives capturing a city that he knew that the political bigwigs would give back to the Soviets when the war ended. And so to Eisenhower, that was a political decision. He wasn't gonna he was only going to look at military factors. To Churchill, though, the West having such powerful forces that close to Berlin and to Prague gave the West an opportunity that.
Churchill was bitter about not wanting to see squandered. And so he he had another strategic clash over with Eisenhower and did everything he could to get Ike to take Berlin and wrote to Roosevelt. But in the end, Roosevelt ⁓ supported Ike because they had confidence in their man on the scene and and Churchill had to give way.
So you have a chapter called Are We Beasts, which points out the moral weight that these men carried. How did the sheer human cost of the decisions they made together affect them and and their bond together?
It it affected each of them a little bit differently on the outside. ⁓ Eisenhower was willing to face the mathematics of war, the brutality. And Eisenhower had seen it firsthand a good bit. ⁓ After the ⁓ the breakout ⁓ and and after the the ⁓ capture of what was was then called the Falaise Gap. he had seen a lot of a lot of dead Germans, a lot of dead Americans.
He would he felt it. he he certainly felt ⁓ he it to him he was he was full of stress and the book goes through a lot of those episodes. but he was also a bridge player, a card player who knew how to assess the odds. And he would not spend lives carelessly, but he would spend them. And so he was willing to spend ⁓ American and British and Canadian lives to capture the rural region of Germany, its industrial heart.
He would not spend them to capture Berlin. Churchill, on the other hand, was a romantic. He had to think about things like whether bombing the French railways, which he was told might kill as many as forty thousand French civilians, was too brutal a cost to pay just to slow down Hitler's reinforcements coming to the Normandy beaches. Churchill, remember, he he was a writer. He'd written a novel.
⁓ he he was a creative writer, he was an artist, a painter, a bricklayer. ⁓ he loved animals, he had a very soft spot in his heart for children. I he was very much a human and ⁓ he didn't look at things in the purely military lens that that Ike looked at and and so they they looked at these human costs differently.
I have not seen it yet. I saw the clips when it came out and and I I love that scene. ⁓ I I love ⁓ I I and I for this book I read a lot about ⁓ w the way they had looked at the two storm fronts that were coming across. ⁓ but I haven't seen it yet. I just haven't had a chance to get out in my movies lately. I've not even not even to see Devil Wears Prada too, which my wife keeps insisting we need to go see.
Well, both are out on streaming, so you can see both now. well then we won't talk about pressure. All all I'll say is that ⁓ it's a fantastic film. ⁓ Churchill's not in it, ⁓ but Ike is, and Brendan Frasier is phenomenal as as Eisenhower. And I always thought that when the trailers came out, I thought they were scraping the barrel of World War II movie ideas that they're gonna do it about the weather. But actually it was so interesting, actually learned a bit about how weather is forecasted and
good.
how you should forecast weather, but also the decisions that they had to wrestle with were real and there's a lot of human drama there that I never realized. So I highly recommend the film. ⁓ so
I'll I'll check it out because I love those ⁓ those episodes where, you know, at l at least in the the the source materials where Eisenhower has to play a guessing game. Okay, in three days, should we go do we go or not go based on you know where where the ⁓ fronts are above Ireland and and Greenland and Iceland today? ⁓ you know, I I thought it was just the way they handled the the weather
⁓ parameters was was brilliant for the operation, so I do need to see the movie.
So by the end of the war, ⁓ what had what had that shared ordeal built between these two men? What kind of friendship came out on the other side of nineteen forty five?
I mean, by the time they're in June of nineteen forty-five, and I picked that month because that's probably the peak of this unbreakable bond, they had forged a bond that would live out to the rest of their days. It was ⁓ mutual admiration based on shared sacrifice, the the pressure cooker of war, having to make those critical decisions where people's lives hung in the balance. And ⁓ that brought out
For some reason, the very best of Churchill in Eisenhower's eyes, and the best of Eisenhower in Churchill's eyes, and they knew that they each had foibles and and weaknesses. ⁓ Churchill felt Eisenhower was looking at things as a soldier too often and not thinking of the broader picture. ⁓ Churchill saw or Eisenhower saw Churchill as a guy who would have impractical ideas. ⁓ but
But he saw Churchill as such a great, tremendous symbol to the Allies cause that ⁓ that nobody else could come close to him and certainly no one could ever replace him. But that that bond held to the rest of their lives.
So then after the war, the ground shifts beneath both of these men. ⁓ Churchill is famously voted out of office in nineteen forty five, even before they've finished in in Asia. So even before f final victory. So and then he returns as prime minister five or so years later. And Eisenhower goes from general to NATO commander to eventually president. So how did those dramatic swings in fortune change the balance between these two men?
You know, at a personal level, it never changed. There there were two levels of their relationship. On the personal side, nothing changed. I never recorded his thoughts about the British public voting in a Labour government in July nineteen forty-five. But he wrote to Churchill saying that if I live to be a hundred, I'll always think of you as prime minister. And they kept up a friendly correspondence throughout the years.
Eisenhower hosted Churchill at the Pentagon in early nineteen forty six, just before Churchill gave his famous Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri. And the two of them stayed in touch as Churchill worked through the opposition benches in Parliament. Eisenhower became U.S. Army Chief of Staff, he was president of Columbia University, and then Supreme Commander of NATO in ear in early 1951. Now Churchill, of course, knew that.
Ike was being courted by both the Democratic and Republican parties to run for president. And when Eisenhower did not run in 1948, Kurchill wrote a private note to Eisenhower telling him he thought Ike did the right thing by staying out of the race, because if he had run as a Democrat, it would have looked like a party that was in bad need of help, and he was coming to the rescue of it, ⁓ even though their ideas were getting stale.
And if he'd run as a Republican, that would have been ⁓ very hurtful to a lot of the people who had supported Eisenhower, like Harry Truman and Harry Hopkins and other people.
So there's a real role reversal at at the heart of this later story, isn't there? In in the war, Churchill was the senior statesman and Ike was the rising general. By the nineteen fifties, Eisenhower, when he's elected president, he's now the most powerful man in the world. Churchill is leading a very diminished Britain, which is still on rationing. How did each of them handle that reversal?
Well, Eisenhower had a philosophy about how countries relate to each other. ⁓ he he said that with countries like America and Britain, they they have a shared ⁓ tongue, a shared history, shared values, and they should always agree on the fundamental things, the fundamental Western values, ⁓ things like you know, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, political freedom, economic freedom, and so on. But that in in public,
Each country should respect each other country as a sovereign in its own right. And they should always ⁓ they they should they should always ⁓ treat each other ⁓ fairly. There should be no ganging up, especially you know, in in these countries that were emerging from the colonial yoke at that time. So America and Britain had fundamental agreements. ⁓ both Ike and Winston knew this.
But they saw differences that began emerging over these nations like Korea or Iran or Egypt. and Eisenhower, as a matter of preventing the Soviet Union from exploiting what they would paint as colonialism, said we should never gang up with with small or large countries. Churchill, of course, felt that ganging up was exactly what the great powers should be doing.
to keep the peace. He felt that if the Western powers, ⁓ America, Britain, France, even the S and and the Soviet Union possibly, had ganged up against Germany in nineteen thirty-eight, around the time of the Munich Conference, there might be no World War II. So ⁓ they they they have this these two different ways of looking at things. And and and remember that even though Britain was still under wartime rationing, its Lind Lease had been cut off,
It many dur during the labor government, many of the big jewels of the British Empire had broken away, India, Pakistan most significantly. Britain controlled an awful lot of territory, and about a quarter of the world's trade was conducted in pounds sterling. And it had one of the world's greatest ⁓ most advanced jet fighter production industries. It had it was still very powerful in its own right, but
America of course had the atomic bomb by the time Eisenhower came into power, it had the hydrogen bomb. And ⁓ and so they each had to navigate a a a power dynamic shift.
Well that's and that on that point, this is where the British Empire is visibly giving way to American power. ⁓ your final part of your book is called Waterloo Sunset. how conscious were these two friends that they were presiding over that handover from one world order to the next?
You know, I think, Jonathan, that from D-Day on, both of them knew that America would carry the preponderance of forces in Europe. And we always had the biggest force in the Pacific. And Churchill wanted American forces to remain in Europe as long as possible. ⁓ in nineteen forty-five, Britain was still a tremendous ⁓ imperial power. ⁓ you know, and so and and the places that they were hanging on to, like Kenya and Malaya, places like that, they were in revolt.
⁓ but I think that they I I think that they they really saw this as a time where they would continue to work together. ⁓ Eisenhower felt like ⁓ like like there would be something different. ⁓ but you know, Churchill saw sort of saw the big picture. Churchill saw everything really through his arch of history lens. he was picking up writing his history of the English speaking peoples at the time.
⁓ he ⁓ you know, I think he he looked at it as just we're handy passing the torch, but we're still part of a unified ⁓ store character arc. Whereas I took things ⁓ when he became president as kind of a let's look at each each job individually, one after the other. Here's a problem, let's solve it, and let's be very practical. And when Eisenhower was thinking about running for president in nineteen fifty-two, of course.
He began to look at the big picture more than he did when he was purely in uniform. And he was thinking about things in the wider context of how the West could deal with the threat of communism. But ⁓ but but they they understood that there was were differences and they they were just trying to navigate them through through from two different directions, I think.
So ⁓ let's fast forward a few years. Eisenhower's now president, Churchill's back in office in his final term as prime minister. ⁓ these two men, they've they've both beaten Hitler together. Now they have to face Stalin and Khrushchev and the terrifying new reality of nuclear weapons. So how did the bomb change the nature of their friendship and their disagreements?
Yeah, there there were two post war events that fundamentally changed Winston Churchill. ⁓ from and and he he went from being the war hawk, the the war leader that we all think about with the Derby and the Tommy Gun and the cigar and walking through the rubble in London, ⁓ fight on the beaches. He went from that very rapidly over a period of just a few years to become the the big peace proponent, the guy who said
We need to have a a detente with the Soviet Union. The guy who coined the phrase a meeting at the summit, which we still use that phrase today. ⁓ and these two post war events that fundamentally changed him were the explosion of the Soviet atomic bomb in nineteen forty-nine, which happened a few years at least before we thought the Soviets would get the bomb, and the explosion of the American hydrogen bomb in November nineteen fifty-two.
Now it's important to remember that our first hydrogen bomb exploded right around the time Ike was elected president. Was it was our first effort in a thermonuclear weapon. A thermonuclear weapon takes that one took two atomic bombs going off to create the heat that was sufficient to fuse these deuterium atoms and create a thermonuclear explosion. So our IV mic test, our first.
Thermonuclear bomb test was the equivalent of 700 Hiroshima bombs going off all at once. 700 bombs. And it's it's sort of hard to imagine when we we see the pictures of the destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 700 of those going off at the same time. And that was just our first test. Churchill would say after the atom after the hydrogen bomb, we are now as far from the age of the hydrogen, we're now as far from the age of the atomic bomb.
As the atomic bomb was from the bow and arrow. Churchill had a vivid imagination as a as a painter, a historian, a novelist. He could see big trends into the future. ⁓ one of his best friends, Violet Bonham Carter, who's the grandmother of actress Helena Bonham Carter, said demons seemed to whisper to him. And those demons were whispering to him.
in in the nineteen fifties that mankind could incinerate itself with these new thermonuclear weapons. England, as Churchill saw it, was on the front lines of any new nuclear war, because Soviet missiles could not reach America yet, but but Soviet bombers could reach England. And America had nuclear capable bombers sitting on runways in East Anglia. So when Stalin died in March of nineteen fifty three,
Kirchhoff saw an opening for a peace summit with the Soviet Union, and it was driven by those those atomic and thermonuclear explosions of nineteen forty nine and nineteen fifty th two.
So ⁓ there's real strain in their relationship in their later years. Friendships at this altitude can get tested by duty and national interest. So where did Ike and Winston come closest to genuine rupture? Was it this this seeking detente with the Soviets or was it beyond that?
Well, you know, I think it was really the the fact that Eisenhower was unwilling to commit to a ⁓ to a Soviet ⁓ summit. And and it really came down to a couple of things. It was the the way they looked at governments and the way they looked at history. Hurchill subscribed to the great man theory of history. great men make history, in his view. And he had done it himself in talks with Stalin.
Moscow and Tehran and Yalta and Potsdam. Eisenhower was an organization man. he felt that the machine did what the machine did. ⁓ it's like a car engine. Car engine blows a carburetor, you replace the carburetor, it'll still run as a car. It won't turn into an airplane. And when Stalin died and Malenkov and and a r a committee really took power in the Soviet Union, that's the way I saw the Soviet government.
They are still out to get us. And Eisenhower had this wasn't knee jerk McCarthyism of the fifties. Eisenhower had read about the various ⁓ Soviet international conferences. He'd read about the theories of international communism. ⁓ and he and John Foster Dulles, his Secretary of State, were uninterested in a summit really until after Churchill's resignation in April nineteen fifty-five. Interestingly, Anthony Eden
Churchill's foreign minister and successor wasn't really keen on a summit with Moscow either while Churchill was in office. But when Churchill left and Anthony was the new prime minister, Eden was the new prime minister, he was keen to get into a a summit meeting. ⁓ But that did create a a real strain. Churchill in his in his early retirement years would say that he felt that Eisenhower was had become muddleheaded
He was too wrapped up by Dulles and the other hawks in the Republican government. And he just wasn't really looking at the possibilities if the two great men got together. He felt that, you know, in his talks with Stalin, he could do more in in ⁓ two days than ten thousand diplomats could do writing ten thousand memos. And and he really I think Eisenhower went down in Churchill's eyes.
А because of that shortcoming
So beyond the strategy and the statecraft, this is a deeply human story. So what are the maybe small personal moments between these giant giants, the humor, the affection, the private gestures that kind of surprised you most as you research this book?
Yeah, they they both had a sense of fun, despite the and you had to to you you had to be able to laugh at things as a tension release. and there are many instances through the war and the post war period of personal kindness. ⁓ Churchill went out of his way to ease Ike's burdens during World War Two. He welcomed ⁓ Ike's son John Eisenhower, when ⁓ Eisenhower ⁓ John Eisenhower, who graduated from West Point on D-Day nineteen forty-four.
was sent to Europe. when Churchill was voted out of office in 1945, Ike made an army villa near Lake Como available for Winston to spend time recovering from the shock of the election. ⁓ and they they also shared a sort of a ⁓ quaint sense of humor. I'll give you an example. ⁓ the first big summit between Churchill and Eisenhower when Eisenhower was president was in December 1953.
at ⁓ Bermuda. And the two men had gotten together. ⁓ they had tried to decide whether they could come up with ⁓ a a Soviet ⁓ summit meeting and they really couldn't get anywhere and Eisenhower had to fly off at the very end to go to ⁓ New York to give a speech before the United Nations. Well Bermuda was an Amer was a British colony and or British
British ⁓ territory. And so Churchill had hosted them with the with an honor guard of the Welsh Guards. ⁓ and and one of the famous things about the Welsh Guards was they had a big ⁓ beautiful Kashmir goat named Willem or or Billy Goat as their mascot. And so they did a an honor guard review before Eisenhower had left.
where he walked past the the Welsh guards and nodded to them and they saluted him and all that. Well when Eisenhower got to the goat, he looked at the goat standing there, basically at attention, and he asked the goat, Do you want a cigarette? And the goat ignored him. Well Eisenhower flew to New York, his plane landed there, and an aide handed him a message from the British delegation. And I'll I'll read it from from my book because I don't want it ⁓ I don't want to get it wrong. ⁓ there was a
A message from the Prime Minister that said in explanation to the goat's refusal to accept the cigarette you offered him this morning, I think I ought to point out that he was aware that smoking on parade is strictly forbidden. Eisenhower wrote back The Goat's soldierly deportment puts me to shame. You would suppose that after some forty years in the army I would not have embarrassed him so sadly. So
You know, later on they would visit each other. Ike would host ⁓ Churchill in nineteen fifty nine at the White House, but they they always had this repartee that they could have, ⁓ even in the midst of their disagreements.
So one thing peop many people don't know, well, a lot of people know that Churchill was a painter, ⁓ and but most people don't know that Eisenhower was also a painter. So can you tell us a little bo about that? Did did Churchill's painting inspire Eisenhower or was he already a painter?
You know, ⁓ Eisenhower tried during ⁓ during the Second World War to do some sketches, and he needed some way to release the stress on his heart. His blood pressure was ridiculously high. He smoked four packs of cigarettes a day during the war. He was he he would didn't get enough sleep, he had too much stress, and ⁓ he needed some outlets. And so he tried doing that. He really didn't get very far, but he always saw how.
men like Harold Alexander, ⁓ Marshall Tet Marsh Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, and particularly Winston Churchill, how much pleasure they took from painting. So Eisenhower took it up when he was ⁓ Army Chief of Staff, and they both he he found he really enjoyed it. And so they wrote letters talking about painting. They both discussed paintings when they were together.
they needed a way to relax and and this mutual interest in painting was a bond they shared. And ⁓ interestingly, it wasn't just a personal thing to Ike. After the rupture between the US and Britain over the Suez crisis in 1956, I talk more about that in the book, but there was this great ⁓ schism between America and Britain. And Ike wanted to leverage America's love affair with Winston Churchill.
By promoting a traveling exhibition of Churchill's paintings at ⁓ art galleries across the United States. And so Eisenhower wrote the foreword for the program and tried to get different art galleries to show Churchill's paintings, ⁓ partly because Churchill was a friend, but but also because this was another way of introducing the American people to a side of Winston Churchill that Eisenhower truly loved and appreciated.
Do you have any plans to go see the exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London?
You know, if I can get over there, I certainly want to. ⁓ we'll we'll with ⁓ with my court schedule, it just kind of depends on how soon I can get over it. But I would just love to. I've I've seen some of his paintings ⁓ at places like the British Ambassador's residence in BC, but ⁓ a whole exhibition would be terrific.
Yeah, I'm I'm gonna see it in August, so I can't I can't wait. I remember probably like fifteen, sixteen years ago, ⁓ there was an exhibition of his paintings in Atlanta. ⁓ and I went to it. It was yeah.
that that's that's something that I I I probably missed because I was trying to practice law and write books without my bosses finding out.
Yeah, it was it was interesting 'cause they had some of Eisenhower's paintings as well. ⁓ I need to find the catalog, it's somewhere. ⁓ it was really interesting. It w Go ahead.
the painting the painting Ike was proudest of was his portrait of Winston Churchill. He did it as a copy of another portrait. And there's a picture of Eisenhower and Churchill in 1959 in John Foster Dulles' hospital room. Dulles would only have a few weeks left to ⁓ live. He was dying of cancer. And they're ⁓ in and on ⁓ Dulles' wall.
⁓ there was a picture Ike's picture of of Churchill was was hanging. And it's ironic because the two of them were bitter opponents over ⁓ everything from Vietnam and Korea and Red China to a summit with the Soviets. But ⁓ but they both took that they took down the picture and and looked at it and and Eisenhower was willing to do portraits, which Churchill really wasn't. He would just do landscapes and and and so forth.
So what do you think that Ike and Winston's friendship can sort of teach us today about alliances, about leadership, and about the role that personal relationships can play at the very top of world affairs?
Well, the first thing is that it is so important for us to separate policy differences from personal friendship. And and I think that's become more and more critical as we go into echo chambers and internet bubbles and ⁓ we we and and we have less personal interaction. ⁓ neither of those two men held grudges if they could avoid it. When Winston Churchill died.
⁓ Clement Attlee, his successor, and the man who had inflicted the very worst political defeat, political humiliation of Churchill's life, was one of Churchill's pallbearers, and Churchill had approved that. He he had dinner with Attlee from time to time. He didn't he didn't let those grudges turn into personal matters. Eisenhower rarely held personal grudges himself. ⁓ you have some exceptions, like Senator Joseph McCarthy.
A few of those people he genuinely detested. But ⁓ I think the most fundamental thing to we can learn from these people is don't let differences over politics or policy ⁓ get in the way of what could be a good personal friendship.
Yeah, that is definitely absent from the current political discourse. The the less we say on that the better. So and finally for my last question, after living with these two men for so long and across so many books in Eisenhower's case, how do you feel about them now? W who were they really when you set the research aside?
You know, when you when you take that step back from the pieces of the mosaic, ⁓ the two two things you get, ⁓ well, you you see them differently than than I than I did before I began read researching the book. John Eisenhower said that his father was 50% kindly grandfather and 50% cold-blooded calculator. And then he thought about it a moment. He said, We'll make that 75% cold-blooded calculator.
Eisenhower would not let policy differences affect his personal views, but the other side of that coin was he would never let his personal indebtedness, his personal feelings affect his ⁓ how he would conduct foreign policy. And if he had to step on a friend, whether that friend was George Patton, whom he fired, whether that friend was the ⁓ the the the remnants of the British Empire, which he humiliated in the Suez crisis in nineteen fifty six.
He was the realist, and he had a friendship with you, and he had a ⁓ business side with you, and he was he would never mix the two ⁓ when he couldn't, when it when he could avoid it. Churchill was the romantic. Churchill saw the human side of great events, and he he felt that ⁓ it was really the human touch that would move things more than an organization or political strength or military strength.
So each man was brilliant in their own way, and the fact that these two brilliant characters were able to work together and set aside the differences they had and remain committed friends until Churchill's death in nineteen sixty five, I think speaks volumes for the the connection that they had that was forged in war.
Jonathan, this has been a fascinating conversation. You've brought these two towering figures down off the monument into the room with us, which is exactly what the best of history does. So thank you so much for joining us on the Anglotopia podcast. The book is Ike and Winston, World War, Cold War, and the Extraordinary Friendship, and I can't recommend it highly enough. We'll put the links to it in the show notes and to your other work as well. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, or comment and tell us which wartime friendship or whatever will you most like.
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