Since Roosevelt left no lasting record of his life and thoughts following his untimely death in Warm Springs, Ga., in April 1945 at age 63, Hamilton relies on those left by others, including insightful diaries by Mackenzie King, the Zelig-like Canadian prime minister who always seemed to be on hand at key moments, and Henry L. “I deeply admired” Churchill, he informs readers, noting without elaboration that as a college student he “proudly stayed for a weekend at Chartwell, his home in Kent, before he died.” But, Hamilton adds, “I do not think it unfair to his memory, 65 years later, to correct the record regarding his version.” After all, Churchill famously said, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” Hamilton seems intent on rewriting it.

In Hamilton’s view, his three volumes are a long-overdue correction to the mythmaking in Churchill’s own six-volume account of the war. “Whitewashed by generations of subsequent historians, this was the great tragedy of the war in late 1943,” Hamilton writes. “Time and again,” he writes, “Churchill had been infamously wrong on strategy.” The wrongheaded Churchill obsessively continued pressing for military action in the Mediterranean and Balkans while resisting the cross-channel D-Day invasion that even the Nazis foresaw would decide the fate of the war. In “War and Peace,” as in the first two books, Hamilton condemns “Winston’s erratic course,” his “sheer amateurishness,” his “new madness,” his “autocratic and often wild behavior” and his “homicidal meddling” in military matters. Unlike more sentimental accounts of the relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill, like Jon Meacham’s engaging best seller “Franklin and Winston,” Hamilton’s trilogy presents the American as more exasperated than enamored when it came to his London partner, leery of the prime minister’s latest schemes and intrigues and constantly maneuvering to keep the war heading in the right direction. Hamilton’s disdain for Churchill will surprise no one who has read the first two installments. He set out to write a single stand-alone book on Roosevelt, only to have it evolve into a decade-long project that required three titles to complete, with the goal, as he put it, “to set the record of this man’s contribution to the history of humanity straight.” Hamilton, a British-born historian and naturalized American at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is known for a well-regarded multivolume biography of Bernard Montgomery, the British field marshal during World War II, as well as more controversial books on Bill Clinton’s presidency and John F. But if not restrained by Roosevelt, Churchill, in Hamilton’s view, might easily have lost World War II for the Allies. Churchill is depicted as a military dunderhead who let ego and imperial ambition get in the way of sensible strategy. In “War and Peace,” his latest book on the American wartime leader, Hamilton presents a farsighted Roosevelt riding to the rescue of freedom, then setting the stage for a new world order to come. While the United States remained on the sidelines and the Soviet Union embraced its devil’s-bargain alliance with Nazi Germany, Churchill virtually single-handedly defied the Third Reich in the face of existential threat: He was personally at risk, along with his countrymen, amid the cascade of bombs raining down on London during the Blitz.īut count Nigel Hamilton in Roosevelt’s camp - not just in his camp but perhaps his most passionate and eloquent champion.

He rallied Britain against Hitler’s hordes when the rest of Europe had fallen. In the annals of the 20th century, who was the greater, more significant historical figure: Franklin D. But for years in many households, it provoked endless dinnertime debate. WAR AND PEACE FDR’s Final Odyssey, D-Day to Yalta, 1943-1945 By Nigel HamiltonĪdmittedly, it is a pretty geeky parlor game, maybe one that has faded with time.

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