The Eleventh Hour

In late November 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his Joint Chiefs of Staff secretly boarded the battleship USS Iowa to attend a conference in Tehran with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin, where the Allies would come to an agreement on a war plan to defeat Germany. Although Roosevelt’s preparation at sea established the groundwork for the American position on D-Day, it was in the heated and electrifying debates that followed in Tehran—and only through those intense debates—that a deal was ultimately struck.

In The Eleventh Hour, critically acclaimed author L. Douglas Keeney explores FDR’s covert conferences on the battleship and provides stunning insight into the formerly secret, behind-the-scenes transcripts from the meetings in Tehran. Brilliantly chronicling the three days of aggressive debates between the heads-of-state, Keeney demonstrates that Tehran, although remembered as a diplomatic conference with a well-known outcome, was in reality chaotic, conflicted, and subject to numerous heated, closed-door sessions—with a petulant, irritable Churchill; a strikingly reserved, detached Roosevelt; and an assertive but unexpectedly diplomatic and even charming Stalin, winning over his guest, President Roosevelt, whose quarters were bugged by the Soviets.

Seamlessly stitching together the private papers, diaries, meeting notes, and letters home of those on board, The Eleventh Hour narrates declassified transcripts, exposes surprising secrets, and illuminates how the debates of three men would ultimately end WWII.