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Kluger and Evans on the Atlantic Charter: Less Than Meets the Eye
Michael Kluger and Richard Evans, Roosevelt and Churchill: The Atlantic Charter; A Risky Meeting at Sea that Saved Democracy. Barnsley, S. Yorkshire: Frontline Books/Pen & Sword, 2020), 248 pages, Amazon $37.22, paperback $32.95.
Neither fish nor foul?
Sadly, political polarization and the so-called culture wars have spread to historians and journalists writing on the Second World War. Now many are compelled to choose between Roosevelt and Churchill as the wisest and most effective wartime leader. Fortunately, legitimate historians have tried to debate that history, rather than preach on about current (and legitimate) social issues, although the two cannot always be separated. As Carl Becker wisely pointed out, “everyman his own historian.” Sometimes the two directions bleed onto each other, but not in this series of essays misleadingly titled The Atlantic Charter.
No, this is not a source of more “Atlantic Crossing” docu-drama speculation along the “FDR as bon vivant” theme. Nor is it the kind of poly-sci policy wonkism (so called “applied history”) found in Partner of First Resort (2021), praised by General David Petraeus as a clarion call for a new Atlantic Charter.
This book lacks the solid scholarship of Theodore Wilson in his (not mentioned) The First Summit (1991). Rather, Kluger and Evans deal with that “first summit” in just 26 sketchy pages, graced with a single citation. (And that one is quite petty, as are all the very few footnotes.) The bibliography is quite absurd: A vague wave to a few historians, Martin Gilbert’s volumes on Churchill, despite the authors’ obvious hero-worship for Sir Winston.
Kluger and Evans in sum
Getting past those 26 pages, what do we have? There are four essays, essentially biographical sketches, two each on Roosevelt and Churchill. Those are followed by an odd collection of loosely linked essays, sometimes entertaining and not wrong, just chatty and superficial. Grouped under the rubric, “The Actors,” these stand-alone chapters focus on advisers like Harry Hopkins, Sumner Welles, Alexander Cadogan, and curiously “Freeman and Beaverbrook”; even Randolph Churchill, the essay I like best since I knew so little about him.
Kluger and Evans offer familiar mini-bios, with anecdotes added. They tell us very little about how these “actors” affected history. Pleasant reading? Yes, but nothing new amidst the occasional purple prose. (One example takes the prize: The phrase “Wilderness Years” is misleading, and should be defined “as a verdant, productive, and many coloured thing.” [109] Purple indeed.)
To give the book its due, the broad survey/biographical essays on both Churchill and Roosevelt are perfectly fine, although what brought them together—the war—gets short shrift—very short shrift. The history the two men and their countries were making cannot be followed in all its complexity and postwar consequences. Currently popular reinterpretations of Churchill, as well as the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship, are conspicuous by their absence. They’re neither acknowledged nor refuted. Their past failings are omitted (perhaps happily). Churchill and Roosevelt are both heroes. They are not depicted as leading or misleading each other by the nose.
Kluger and Evans have written a happy little book that will amuse Churchillians and .provide bio-background on some secondary players. They offer quite nice essays on the lives of Churchill and Roosevelt. But the Atlantic Charter was a powerful manifesto that hovered over peacemaking throughout the war. For an understanding of that, readers will have to go elsewhere.
The author
Warren F. Kimball, author of Forged in War, The Juggler, and books on the Morgenthau Plan and the origins of Lend-Lease, edited the three-volume collection of the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence (with commentaries). He has published over 50 essays on Churchill, Roosevelt and the Second World War. Robert Treat Professor (emeritus) at Rutgers University, he was Pitt Professor at the University of Cambridge, 1987-88; and Mark Clark Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at The Citadel, 2002-04. His institutional history, The United States Tennis Association: Raising the Game, was published in 2017. He was Jones Distinguished Professor at Wofford College (Spartanburg, SC) in spring 2019.
Further reading
Warren F. Kimball, “Churchill and the Presidents: Franklin Roosevelt” (2016)
Richard M. Langworth, “Researching the Atlantic Conference” (2019)