The Last of the Giants

New York: Macmillan, 1971. Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Bob Ziering (jacket drawing). 25 cm, xv, [3], 1063, [7] pages. Illustrations. Index. Top edge red. Red dot on the bottom edge. Cyrus Leo Sulzberger II (October 27, 1912 - September 20, 1993) was an American journalist, and non-fiction writer. He was The New York Times lead foreign correspondent during the 1940s and 1950s. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1934. Cy joined the family paper in 1939 and was soon covering stories oversea as Europe edged toward World War II. Among the reporters who worked for him during the war were Drew Middleton and James Reston. He served as a foreign affairs correspondent for 40 years and wrote two dozen books in his lifetime. Because of the circles he traveled in, he sometimes carried messages from one foreign leader to another; for U.S. President John F. Kennedy he conveyed a note to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1961. Of all the leaders he befriended, it is said that he was closest to President Charles de Gaulle of France. Sulzberger received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 1951 for his "exclusive interview" with imprisoned Archbishop of Zagreb Aloysius Stepinac. This is a dual biography of Charles De Gaulle and Winston Churchill. Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle (22 November 1890 - 9 November 1970) was a French general and statesman who led the French Resistance against Nazi Germany in World War II and chaired the Provisional Government of the French Republic from 1944 to 1946 in order to reestablish democracy in France. In 1958, he came out of retirement when appointed Prime Minister of France by President René Coty. He was asked to rewrite the Constitution of France and founded the Fifth Republic after approval by referendum. He was elected President of France later that year, a position he was reelected to in 1965 and held until his resignation in 1969. He was the dominant figure of France during the Cold War era, and his memory continues to influence French politics. Born in Lille, he graduated from Saint-Cyr in 1912. He was a decorated officer of the First World War, wounded several times, and later taken prisoner at Verdun. During the interwar period, he advocated mobile armored divisions. During the German invasion of May 1940, he led an armoured division which counterattacked the invaders; he was then appointed Undersecretary for War. Refusing to accept his government's armistice with Germany, De Gaulle exhorted the French population to resist occupation and to continue the fight in his Appeal of 18 June. He led a government in exile and the Free French Forces against the Axis. Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill,[a] (30 November 1874 - 24 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Ideologically an economic liberal and imperialist, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. Widely considered one of the 20th century's most significant figures, Churchill remains popular in the Anglosphere, where he is seen as a victorious wartime leader who played an important role in defending Europe's liberal democracy against the spread of fascism.