Jonathan Jordan, "Ike and Winston

How about their health during the time that you write?

During World War II, they were both under a great deal of stress.

Churchill had had heart problems.

He had strokes, and some of it during World War II is hard to document.

There are a couple of very good books out about Churchill's health.

But Churchill had the constitution of a Spanish bull, and he would always come back.

It was remarkable, both during the World War II years as well as the 1950s when Churchill was prime minister, how his body could sustain strokes and pneumonia, all kinds of things that brought him to the brink of death and still fight his way back.

With Eisenhower, his health problems were not as debilitating and were not as significant, but he'd had a number of problems as president.

He had a heart attack in 1955, some gastroenteritis, and he had some chronic problems that might put him in a hospital for a few days or keep in bed ridden for maybe a week or more, but not on the same grand scale that Churchill had.

I think Churchill's maladies were bigger, almost bigger than life, as well as to fit the personality of the man himself.

So what was Ike's biggest disappointment with Winston Churchill and what was Churchill's biggest disappointment with Ike?

That's a wonderful question.

I think Eisenhower's biggest disappointment, and we have to qualify this because they genuinely loved each other.

They had a friendship that was very fond.

It was a deep friendship.

And so they were willing to excuse each other's foibles and idiosyncrasies.

The foibles and idiosyncrasies Eisenhower felt he had to excuse were Churchill's penchant for getting so worked up about something and so emotionally involved in something that he wouldn't let go, even when the facts dictated otherwise.

And you see throughout World War II, Churchill's attachments to things like the Mediterranean strategy, or invading the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean, or later to a summit with Joseph Stalin's successors.

Those were the kinds of things Eisenhower felt were flaws in the man, but he loved the man notwithstanding.

Eisenhower accepted those and was willing to say no to Churchill, but he still carried that fondness for Churchill.

As for As for Churchill's disappointment with Eisenhower, the one that stands out more than anything else occurred in the 1950s.

Churchill, of course, was the famous war leader, the warlord, the war lover, his labor party opponents called him.

But two things happened in late 1952 and 53 that changed Churchill's mindset forever, made him do a 180 on the idea of war and turned him from a hard-nosed proponent of deterrence and brinkmanship to a give peace a chance person.

The first of those was the American explosion of a thermonuclear bomb in November 1952.

Now, it's hard to really imagine the difference between an atomic bomb, which destroyed Hiroshima, and a thermonuclear bomb.