9. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Spencer Churchill
Franklin Roosevelt was the greatest president and social reformer who believed in government intervention in society; the creator of the New Deal, Social Security, government subsidies for farmers, and civil rights for all members of society. Churchill was an imperialist, a lifelong proponent of the British Empire and what Rudyard Kipling described as the White Man’s Burden. Together they became the bulwark which protected the West from Hitler’s Nazism, and the Japanese adventurism in the Pacific, though their motives were somewhat different.
Above all else, Churchill strove to defend, protect, and preserve the British Empire which had been the focal point of his entire life. Roosevelt was determined to prevent Nazism and Communism from infiltrating the Americas, as well as ensuring the defeat of Japanese Imperialism. Their odd-couple relationship defeated the Nazis and Japanese, but led to the end of the British Empire and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower in the aftermath of the Second World War. Churchill and FDR were very much an odd couple, and over the course of their relationship the British Empire faded away, supplanted as the world’s policeman by the United States of America.
