Dark horse: a biography of Wendell Wilkie.

Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie 

HE GREW

"ON A SWELTERING August afternoon in 1940, Wendell Lewis Willkie returned to his boyhood home of Elwood, in north central Indiana, and accepted the Republican presidential nomination. What was said to be the greatest crowd in political history-- nearly 200,000 persons--had converged on the small town for Willkie's day.' So begins Steve Neal's excellent and revealing biography. Neal is a journalist as well as an established biographer, and he has not written an academic sandbag but a taut and readable book. In one of the stirring moments of American political history, the charismatic Willkie had come roaring out of the West by way of Wall Street to seize, against every expectation, the 1940 Republican nomination from such established political figures as Taft, Dewey, Vandenberg, and Herbert Hoover. From the start, Willkie had had a populist-radical side. His strong mother "was unsentimental, had a quick mind, and [was] something of a non-conformist, [being] the first woman in Elwood to smoke cigarettes.'

Willkie went to the local high school, also Culver, and on to Indiana University, where he "challenged the faculty's rigid conservatism and contributed to a campus magazine called Bogus, which was iconoclastic.' Then a law degree, at the top of his class, from Indiana, and service in World War I: Wilsonian idealism and an "almost religious belief in the League of Nations.' His abilities as an attorney brought him to high corporate attention, and, moving to New York in 1929, he rose rapidly as a defender of private utilities against the hostility of the New Deal. By the age of 41, he was president of Commonwealth and Southern, and a powerful spokesman for American business. On the night of January 6, 1938, on the weekly radio show America's Town Meeting of the Air--which had a large and literate audience--he trounced Robert H. Jackson, a bright New Deal star. A little later, he successfully took on Felix Frankfurter at a debate at the Harvard Club. He was still nominally a Democrat, but powerful Eastern Republicans had appraised him with intense interest.

He was the first media candidate, print and radio. The Luce publications turned themselves into Willkie campaign pamphlets, as did the Cowles brothers' Look. The Herald Tribune and the Saturday Evening Post boomed his presidential candidacy, and thousands of Willkie clubs sprang up across the land. Influential columnists like Arthur Krock and David Lawrence came out for him.

The big political issue throughout 1940, and at the Republican Convention that summer in Philadelphia, was not a Left-Right issue in our present sense, but one of isolationism versus interventionism. Indeed, many of the Western populist isolationists were well to the left of Willkie backers like Luce and other Eastern corporate Republicans. Still, in the end, it was not really they who put Willkie over, but Adolf Hitler. One week before the convention, Hitler conquered France, and Willkie was the only Republican leader who was solidly behind aid to Britain, which he considered our first line of defense. The looming power of the Axis confirmed Willkie's statute as a foreign-policy prophet. (A joke of the day had it that Tom Dewey was the first American casualty of the Second World War.) On the first ballot, Willkie had 105 votes of the 501 necessary to win. Dewey had 360, Taft 189, and it was not until the sixth ballot that Willkie finally, amid pandemonium--"We Want Willkie!' --prevailed.

And he proved to be a formidable campaigner, striking fear into the New Deal chiefs and closing fast at the end. With his shock of black hair, bear-like energetic body, and gravelly voice, he was like a force of nature: "One-man rule always leads down the road to warrer.'

There is another aspect to Willkie, however, that Neal recounts but does not assess. Willkie, in New York, developed new friends. Though he remained married to his Indiana wife, he had a passionate love affair, extending over five years, with Herald Tribune book editor Irita Van Doren. (Though Willkie was practically living with her, FDR could not use it in the campaign, because he knew that the Republicans possessed damaging correspondence between the vice presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, and a mystical political guru named Nicholas Roerich.) Through Irita Van Doren, of the literary Van Dorens, Willkie met Carl Sandburg, Rebecca West, Stephen Vincent Benet, John Gunther, Joseph Barnes, Mark Van Doren, Vincent Sheean, William L. Shirer, and many others. "Irita opened enormous doors to Willkie,' observed one acquaintance, "and he loved it.'

As, indeed, who would not? But Willkie seems to have been thrown wide of common sense by the atmosphere he absorbed among the literati. After his defeat by FDR, Willkie manifested something approaching contempt for such other Republican politicians as Taft and Dewey. Not only had he ceased to be a lawyer or a businessman, he even ceased to be a politician in the recognizable sense and became a prophet of globalism: Some felt that he had moved to the left of FDR. Not surprisingly, his political career came to an end when he was crushed by Dewey in the 1944 Wisconsin Republican primary.

Interested in this evolution, I looked up his 1943 best-seller, One World, a vividly recounted narrative of this thirty-thousand-mile tour of the various battle fronts in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and his meetings with just about every leader among the Allies. It is an excellent work of reportage, but, also, weird. The Willkie who had seen so clearly the menace of Nazism finds nothing of the sort in the USSR. "Russia is an effective society. It works. It has survival value . . . We must work with Russia after the war.' (N.B.: It is we who must work with Russia, not the other way around.) And there is a marvelous, chilling meeting with Stalin --but Willkie has no sense of the chill in Stalin's roar of laughter. "Stalin, I should judge, is about five feet four or five . .. I was surprised to find how short he is, but his head, his mustache, and eyes are big . . . Strange as it may seem, Stalin dresses in light pastel shades. His well-known tunic is of finely woven material and is apt to be of a soft green or a delicate pink . . . Once I was telling him of the Soviet schools and libraries I had seen--how good they seemed to me. And I added, "But if you continue to educate the Russian people, Mr. Stalin, the first thing you know you'll educate yourself out of a job.'

"He threw back his head and laughed and laughed. Nothing I said to him, or heard anyone else say to him, seemed to amuse him as much.'

Willkie died during the summer of 1944, at age 52, after suffering multiple heart attacks. Some felt that the colossal expenditure of energy with which he had fought the 1940 campaign had permanently weakened his health.