Those Angry Days

by Lynne Olson

  † In the end, the two leaders compromised by dividing the bases into two groups. To appease Churchill, a few of the bases were given to the United States as a gift, while most of them were traded for the destroyers, which was what FDR wanted.

  CHAPTER 12

  “THE PEOPLE SAVED THE DAY”

  In May 1940, just weeks before Wendell Willkie was anointed by the Republicans, polls showed him with the support of less than 3 percent of his party’s membership. “I would crawl on my hands and knees from here to Washington if, by that act, I could bring about your nomination,” a prominent midwestern newspaper publisher wrote him. Unfortunately, the publisher added, the GOP would never bestow its candidacy on a man who was everything party regulars despised: a registered Democrat virtually all his adult life and an outspoken advocate of U.S. aid to Britain and France.

  Yet it was precisely Willkie’s interventionism that made possible the stunning political coup staged by his supporters at the 1940 Republican convention in Philadelphia. “It wasn’t the packing of the galleries or the flood of telegrams that nominated Willkie,” one of his key advisers later said. “Adolf Hitler nominated Willkie. With the fall of France and the Low Countries, American public opinion shifted overnight—and that was responsible for Willkie’s nomination.” As Life saw it, “The people saved the day. They proved that when they are really aroused, they can push through the bicker and dicker of party politics and make their representatives pick the man they want.”

  For months, the Republican front-runners for the nomination—New York City district attorney Thomas Dewey and Senator Robert Taft—had contended that the war in Europe was of no concern to the United States. Willkie, by contrast, had been insistently warning his countrymen about the dangers that a German-controlled Europe posed for America. He may have been a political amateur, but his passionate conviction appealed to a growing number of Americans, particularly those in his party who leaned toward liberalism and internationalism.

  Wendell Willkie.

  Before his meteoric rise in politics, Willkie had been president of one of the biggest power utilities in the country. But nothing in his appearance or manner suggested his close ties to big business. Tall, rumpled, and burly, he radiated warmth, magnetism, and an appealing homespun charm. He was, said novelist Booth Tarkington, a “man wholly natural in manner, with no pose and no condescension.” David Halberstam would later describe him as “a Republican who did not look like a Republican—the rarest of things in those days, a Republican with sex appeal.”

  A native of Indiana, the forty-eight-year-old Willkie still spoke with a Hoosier twang. He retained other traces of his rural Midwest upbringing: having grown up in a community where people never locked their front doors, he did the same at his Fifth Avenue apartment in New York—a source of constant astonishment to his wealthy, more security-conscious neighbors. Underneath Willkie’s unpretentiousness, however, was a tough, canny operator, who in 1933, at the age of forty-one, had become president of Commonwealth and Southern, a utility giant that held a monopoly on electric power generation in much of the South.

  Within a few months of joining the company, Willkie clashed with the nascent Roosevelt administration over its proposal to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority, a bold federal program to provide electric power, flood control, soil conservation, and other benefits for the country’s southeast region. Once completed, TVA would replace Commonwealth and Southern as the regional power monopoly—a prospect Willkie fought with vigor and tenacity.

  Adept at public relations, he was masterful in portraying his company, an industry behemoth, as a powerless David “locked in combat with the Goliath of an oppressive government.” To the bafflement of New Deal officials, Willkie’s campaign to depict Commonwealth and Southern—and himself—as helpless victims of relentless government persecution struck a chord with the press and much of the public. Whenever he testified before congressional committees, one New Dealer drily recalled, the press tables were packed, with “eight or ten photographers snapping the great man.” In his testimony, Willkie always positioned himself as “a plain American attacked by the ‘interests’—a little, average, everyday man who stood up for his rights.”

  In the end, he lost his crusade. After protracted negotiations with the TVA, in which some administration officials thought he got the better of the deal, he turned over Commonwealth and Southern’s facilities to the government for $78.6 million. Willkie himself emerged from the struggle as a winner. He had become a respected national figure, a voice for moderate, middle-class Americans, notably businessmen, who felt that the federal government had grown too big, too powerful, and too disdainful of private enterprise.

  Yet he was also critical of big business’s shortcomings and abuses, including those of his own industry. A registered Democrat until the fall of 1939, Willkie supported a number of the New Deal’s reforms, including the minimum wage, a limit on workers’ hours, Social Security, and collective bargaining—all of which were anathema to Republican conservatives. A strong champion of civil rights and liberties, he was noted for having led a successful fight, as a young lawyer practicing in Ohio, to break the influence of the Ku Klux Klan in local affairs.

  WHILE WILLKIE CAME FROM America’s heartland and had great appeal for those living there, his own attachment was to New York City and the urbane, sophisticated lifestyle he’d adopted. He was a frequent theatergoer and a member of several of the city’s most exclusive clubs, including the Century. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else!” he once exclaimed to a friend. “It is the most exciting, stimulating, satisfying spot in the world. I can’t get enough of it.”

  Part of New York’s allure had to do with his intimate relationship with a soft-spoken southerner named Irita Van Doren, with whom he fell in love and who, more than anyone else, was responsible for his becoming a major political force. The petite, curly-haired Van Doren was the book editor of the New York Herald Tribune and the former wife of the historian and critic Carl Van Doren. One of the country’s most influential literary figures, she had transformed the Herald Tribune’s book pages into a worthy rival of The New York Times’s esteemed book section. She also was doyenne of an eclectic literary salon that included some of the most noted writers of the period, from Carl Sandburg and Sinclair Lewis to Rebecca West and André Maurois.

  Shortly after they met, Van Doren and the married Willkie began an affair. She introduced him to her author friends and became his literary and intellectual mentor, singling out books and articles she thought he should read and helping him with his speeches and other writing. Under her tutelage, he began contributing articles and book reviews to such disparate publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Forbes, and The New York Times.

  With Van Doren’s encouragement, Willkie began thinking more and more about a political career. According to the journalist Joseph Barnes, a friend of the couple’s, she was largely responsible for his “acceptance of himself as a potential leader with original and important ideas.” That view of Willkie was also increasingly held by a number of other people in the high-level business and intellectual circles in which he and Van Doren moved. For the most part, these were moderate and liberal Republicans who had traveled frequently to Europe and had close financial and personal ties there. Some worked in Wall Street law firms and financial institutions, others in major media organizations.

  Among those attracted to Willkie and his political potential were the Herald Tribune’s publisher, Ogden Reid, and his wife, Helen, who became two of his earliest supporters. Because of her husband’s serious alcoholism, Helen Reid had emerged as the Herald Tribune’s driving force, playing an important role in its shift from rock-hard conservatism to a more progressive viewpoint. A stalwart feminist, Reid had promoted the career of Van Doren, who was a close friend and confidante.

  On March 3, 1939, the Herald Tribune published a letter to the editor urging the nomination of Wendell Willkie for pre
sident in 1940. Its writer was G. Vernor Rogers, the former general manager of one of the paper’s predecessors, the New York Tribune. He was also Helen Reid’s brother. Rogers’s letter was one of the first indications that some elements of the East Coast press might be looking for an alternative to the Republican candidates already in the presidential race.

  The front-runner at that time—and until the convention—was Thomas Dewey, who had won national fame for his crackdown on organized crime and his relentless prosecution of some of the country’s most notorious lawbreakers. By 1939, Dewey already had the makings of an impressive campaign staff—speechwriters, publicists, and two pollsters borrowed from George Gallup’s organization. What he didn’t have yet was his own opinions. Before he announced his positions on issues, his pollsters would take surveys to determine how popular such stands would be. If they got a negative response, changes were made. Not surprisingly, Dewey tilted toward isolationism.

  His closest competitor was Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the son of former president William Howard Taft. A former corporation lawyer, Taft was deeply conservative. After Hitler’s blitzkrieg in May 1940, he remarked: “There is a good deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circles in Washington than there ever will be from the activities of the … Nazis.” Taft was generally regarded as cold, aloof, and backward-looking. According to one English observer, he seemed to believe that “American life was at its best about 1910.”

  VERNOR ROGERS’S LETTER TOUTING Willkie was followed by a number of speculative pieces in other newspapers and magazines about the Indianan’s possible candidacy. But few people took the idea seriously: Willkie had almost no support or recognition and was not even a blip in the polls. Then, in the summer of 1939, he met Russell Davenport, the forty-year-old managing editor of Fortune magazine, and the tectonic plates of the political landscape began to shift.

  The embodiment of WASPdom, Davenport, who resembled the actor Gregory Peck, was from the Main Line of Philadelphia and had gone to Yale, which had been founded by an ancestor of his. A would-be novelist and poet, he had lived in the mid-1920s in Paris, where he rubbed shoulders with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, and other American literary expatriates. But he was unable to make a living as a writer and soon returned to America to join Henry Luce’s expanding publishing empire. In 1929, he helped start Fortune, and eight years later, he became its managing editor.

  Davenport and Willkie were kindred spirits, not only in their political outlook but in their attitude toward life. After their first encounter, Davenport came home and announced to his wife, Marcia, “I’ve met the man who ought to be the next President of the United States.” Henry Luce later described the Willkie-Davenport meeting as a “chemical reaction [that] produced political history.”

  From the beginning, Davenport was the central figure in Willkie’s improbable campaign, serving as his chief strategist, speechwriter, and confidant. Marcia Davenport, a novelist and former New Yorker writer, got involved, too. Through the fall of 1939 and winter of 1940, the Davenports hosted weekly dinners at their Manhattan apartment to introduce Willkie to a wide spectrum of prominent New Yorkers and other East Coast residents who might help him in his candidacy.

  But they were fast running out of time. The Republican convention was only a few months away, and Willkie still had not established himself with the American people as a viable presidential contender. In April 1940, Davenport sought to remedy that by running two articles in Fortune aimed at sparking public interest in his friend. The first—a piece written by Willkie (with editorial help from Davenport and Irita Van Doren)—attacked Roosevelt for trying to grab too much power but also flayed congressional isolationists for blocking the sale of weapons to the Allies. “We are opposed to war,” he wrote. “But we do not intend to relinquish our right to sell whatever we want to those defending themselves from aggression.”

  Accompanying Willkie’s piece was a two-page editorial written by Davenport that praised Willkie’s domestic and foreign policy views and implied that Americans should bypass the Republican party bosses and work to make him the presidential nominee. “The principles he stands for are American principles,” the editorial declared. “Whether they will prevail in terms of his political candidacy is a question that depends upon the political sophistication of the American people.”

  The Fortune articles opened the floodgates for Willkie. Oren Root Jr., a young Princeton graduate working as an associate at a prominent Wall Street law firm, was so inspired by them that he and a friend immediately printed more than eight hundred Willkie-for-President petitions and mailed them to recent alumni of Princeton, Harvard, and Yale. At the same time, the Herald Tribune ran an ad in its public notices column calling on readers to “help Oren Root Jr. organize the people’s demand for Willkie” and urging volunteers to get in touch with the twenty-eight-year-old Root at his law firm.

  Within days, the firm’s switchboard was so flooded with calls that its partners were unable to get an outside phone line. At the same time, large mail sacks bulging with petitions, letters, and contributions began to pile up in Root’s office and the firm’s lobby. After his exasperated superiors made it clear that this situation couldn’t continue, Root took a leave of absence to devote full time to his quixotic one-man Willkie campaign. Within three weeks, he had gathered more than two hundred thousand signatures and had begun organizing Willkie-for-President clubs throughout the country. By the time of the convention, there were 750 such clubs, some fifty thousand volunteers, and more than three million signatures supporting Willkie’s candidacy.

  Root had done all this without Willkie’s knowledge or support. In fact, he had never met him or Davenport. In a letter apologizing for not asking permission, Root told Willkie: “I have no illusions about your being nominated in Philadelphia.… [But] I am naïve enough to believe that even the Republican politicians may see the light if enough work of the right kind is done at once. I propose to contribute to that work with all the vigor and imagination at my command.”

  While Root reached out to Americans across the country, Davenport worked to enlist the support of influential columnists and editors in the East. To Raymond Clapper, who a few years before had been named America’s “most significant, fair, and reliable” political columnist by his fellow Washington correspondents, Davenport wrote: “The one man in America with the ability and intellectual and oratorical power to rally progressive Republican forces is Wendell Willkie. You will, however … point out that Mr. Willkie is not a political reality. Check. But why in the hell don’t we make him one?” The liberal Clapper, who once described himself as a “75 percent New Dealer,” responded with several pro-Willkie columns.

  Davenport’s most prized conquest, however, was his boss, Henry Luce, who had met Willkie at one of the Davenports’ dinners and was smitten by his charisma and interventionist views. The publisher was soon deeply committed to Willkie’s candidacy, as were his two most influential magazines, Time and Life. In fact, both publications had been running favorable stories about Willkie for months. But after Luce pointedly made his own support clear, they moved from analysis with at least a hint of balance to all-out advocacy, showering lavish praise on Willkie while consistently debunking his opponents.

  At about the same time, Willkie captured the backing of another publishing company, owned and run by two Harvard-educated brothers from the Midwest, John and Gardner Cowles. While smaller and less far-reaching than Luce’s empire, the Cowles organization, based in Minneapolis, would also prove vitally important to Willkie. Among its properties were two influential newspapers—the Minneapolis Star-Journal and the Des Moines Register—and Look, a popular photojournalism magazine that was a serious competitor to Life.

  But even more valuable than their publications’ support was the political entrée that the Cowles brothers gave Willkie in the Midwest. They accompanied him in a small private plane all over the region, introducing him to local GOP
leaders and arranging speeches before large crowds of Republican faithful. An “old-fashioned, hell-raising” speaker, as Marcia Davenport described him, Willkie wowed his audiences wherever he went. In St. Louis, he declared: “The curse of democracy today, in America as in Europe, is that everybody has been trying to please the public. Almost nobody ever gets up and says what he thinks.” At each stop, he proceeded to do just that, demanding that the Roosevelt administration send more aid to France and Britain and saying he “trembled for the safety of the country” at the thought that one of his isolationist opponents might become president.

  Until then, Americans had viewed Willkie through the filter of press stories and radio commentaries. Now, however, they were being given a chance to base their opinions on personal contact with him—and many liked what they saw. While old-line party regulars might reject his independence, ebullience, and fierce interventionism, a substantial number of moderate Republicans—small businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers, lawyers, and other professionals—found those qualities appealing. “For Republicans like my father, whose affection for Teddy Roosevelt had never dimmed and whose loyalty to the party had been sorely tested by Harding and Coolidge, Wendell Willkie appeared as a gleaming banner of hope,” the historian Richard Ketchum wrote. “On one hand, he represented business.… On the other, he was forward-looking on international issues.”

  In a poll taken in March 1940, Willkie had been the first choice of less than 1 percent of Republican voters. By the end of May, he had climbed to 17 percent, and in early June, he stood at 29 percent. During the week of the Republican convention, his face peered out from the covers of Time, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and Look, all of which gave him ringing endorsements. “Republicans can nominate somebody who looks good in ephemeral straw votes, or some plodding politician,” Raymond Clapper wrote in Life. “Or they can take a bold and audacious course, look at the job to be done, and select, regardless of tradition, the man best qualified to do it. They can leap over the ‘keep off the grass’ signs and nominate Wendell Willkie.”