In the closed circle of the war cabinet, pounded by terrible report after terrible report, there had been uncertainty about whether he could fend off the drift to exploring a deal with Hitler. The determination of the larger group trumped the tentativeness of the smaller, and Churchill fulfilled his role as leader by disentangling himself from defeatism--one of his singular achievements at the end of May 1940.

New York: Random House. Affiliations
A contributing editor of The Washington Monthly Meacham is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University in 2005 and holds five other honorary doctorates.

He is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. He is a former editor-in-chief of Newsweek a contributing editor to Time Magazine editor-at-large of WNET and a commentator on politics history and religious faith in America.