(reflections on RONALD REAGAN AND MARGARET THATCHER: A POLITICAL MARRIAGE by Nicholas Wapshott, and CHURCHILL AND AMERICA by Martin Gilbert.)
A British Prime Minister takes the reins of Parliament in a time of deep crisis and immediately makes contact with the American President. The PM is exhaustingly energetic and unrelenting in pursuing the interests of the United Kingdom and the free world (in that order), prolix, optimistic but impatient, worried about the short term. The President is relaxed, self-confident, and sympathetic to the PM but content to go his own way as US politics and interests demand.
That was pretty much my pre-conceived notion of what I would find in two recent books about US - UK relations focused on Roosevelt - Churchill and Reagan - Thatcher, and these two books confirmed what I'd expected. Each fills in with details that are sometimes endearing, as world-shaping decisions worked through personal relationships. In both books, there are stretches when the British PM is dismayed and hurt to find the President cavalierly disregarding urgent personal requests, and the PMs both flatter the Presidents and cajole them to get what they want.
Gilbert's book starts with Churchill's American mother's background, and carries through every childhood essay and every visit to the states, before it hits those two years when the UK was standing up alone against the Axis. Wapshott's book lays groundwork for the eight years when Reagan and Thatcher worked together by giving us parallel biographies of Reagan and Thatcher, highlighting the sources of their strong convictions that freedom and markets are the only hope for humankind.
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