Lewis E. Lehrman is a friendly acquaintance, whom I have admired since he almost spared the state of New York the cascade of relatively unsuccessful government that the Cuomo family has inflicted on it with his narrow loss to Mario Cuomo in the race for governor in 1982. His new book, Churchill, Roosevelt & Company, is a formidable digest of most of the memoirs and serious historical analyses and biographies about and around the 1940–1945 era of alliance between Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin. As such, it is up to date and contains a great many interesting asides that even the devotees of that great drama will find enlightening. The book is a very interesting read and, in many places, is perceptive.

It suffers, as much writing on this subject does, from the facts that Roosevelt kept almost no records, died abruptly, and never confided in anyone, and that Churchill wrote voluminously and somewhat self-servingly. It was a time when the stature of the British Empire declined relative to its allied rivals, and Churchill’s own position as the head of a coalition government that was swiftly cobbled together in an immense emergency became more vulnerable. And of course Churchill, after rendering magnificent service, was shamefully put out of office by his countrymen even before the defeat of Japan. The result is that Mr. Lehrman pretty well subscribes to the rather tired and moth-eaten British mythology that only they knew how to conduct a war in