Luce had confronted earlier campaigns with relative indifference. He had cast a hopeful vote for Al Smith in 1928; and he had supported Hoover in 1932, only because he thought there was no difference between the two candidates and that continuity was preferable to change. He voted for Alf Landon in 1936, but with no enthusiasm, and he approached the 1940 political season without a strong preference. Through much of 1939 he spoke generally favorably of Robert Taft, the acknowledged front-runner for the Republican nomination. But by mid-1940 Taft’s continuing isolationism had turned Luce away not only from the candidate but from the party. “The remarks of Roosevelt … sound wonderful here,” he wrote from Europe in May. “I am practically prepared to become … a Third Termer unless the opposition offers some small degree of competition.” The only ray of hope for the Republicans, he predicted, was “Davenport’s man.”23
“Davenport’s man” was Wendell Willkie, a prominent utilities executive who had left his company early in 1939 after reaching a lucrative settlement with the government in a legal dispute with the Tennessee Valley Authority. Once a Democrat and a Roosevelt supporter, he turned against both the president and the party in the aftermath of his lawsuit, became a Republican, and began to emerge as a public figurethrough his frequent speeches and writings. In the summer of 1939 he agreed to participate in a Fortune round table, where he met Russell Davenport, the magazine’s managing editor. Davenport returned home that evening and reported to his family, “I’ve just met the man who ought to be President of the United States.” For the next several months the two men—soon close friends—met often, first at Davenport’s weekend home on Long Island, later in Davenport’s Manhattan apartment. (Willkie, too, lived in New York with his family in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, although by 1940 he was spending much of his time—onlymoderately discreetly—with Irita Van Doren, the book editor of the New York Herald Tribune.) Together Willkie and Davenport (with helpfrom Van Doren) produced a “manifesto,” published under Willkie’s name and titled “We the People.” It appeared in Fortune in April 1940 with an effusive preface by Davenport introducing Willkie: “The principles he stands for are American principles…. They are progressive, liberal and expansive. One cannot dare to doubt that they will eventually prevail…. For taking up this position … Mr. Willkie certainly deserves the respect and attention of his countrymen.” In the document that followed, Willkie lashed out at Roosevelt: “You have usurped our sovereign power by curtailing the Bill of Rights … and by placing in the hands of a few men in executive commissions all the powers requisite to tyranny…. You have muddled our foreign affairs with politics … with wild fears and inconsistent acts…. We do not want a New Deal any more. We want a New World.” But Willkie was actually less interested in attacking Roosevelt than in standing up against the isolationist right and steering the Republican Party toward a responsibly internationalist position on the war. When congressional Republicans tried to block proposed loans to threatened countries in Europe, he wrote: “There can be no question which is right and which is wrong…. We are opposed to war. But we do not intend to relinquish our right to sell whatever we want to those defending themselves from aggression.”24
Davenport was not the first person to imagine Willkie as a presidential candidate. Low-level speculation about his political future had begun early in 1939 and had continued through the year. By the beginning of 1940, however, he remained the darkest of dark horses, with so little support (or even recognition) in the polls that almost no one had yet taken him seriously. But the publication of “We the People” in Fortune intersected with a growing popular boom—launched by Oren Root, a young lawyer (and relative of former secretary of state Elihu Root). Root, almost alone, implausibly but effectively organized a grassroots mail and advertising campaign that produced a remarkable response. Hundreds of “Willkie Clubs” sprang up around the country, and more than three million people signed petitions supporting his candidacy. To Root and Davenport both, what made Willkie so attractive was that he did not appear to be a conventional politician. He seemed to them an honest, uncalculating “clear thinker” whose views were not his party’s or his handlers’ but his own. Both men were also ardent internationalists and admired Willkie’s opposition to the isolationist sentiments of many of their fellow Republicans. By early May the boom had grown so promising that Davenport resigned from Fortune to become one of Willkie’s campaign managers. “I believe,” he explained to Larsen, “that the principles that he has been expressing have a national, indeed an historical significance.”25
Prior to his return from Europe, Luce had only a relatively vague notion of who Willkie was and what he represented. But the combination of Davenport’s enthusiasm and Luce’s own strengthened commitment to a major American role in the war drew him quickly into Willkie’s orbit. Willkie and Luce began to meet frequently in Luce’s office in Rockefeller Center, talking and drinking with their feet up on Luce’s desk, sometimes until late into the night. A pragmatic friendship emerged, and with it Luce’s deepening commitment to Willkie’s candidacy. Indeed, for the first time in his life, Luce felt truly passionate about a political figure. For the next several months he seemed almost entirely to abandon any detachment from politics and became an open and unapologetic champion of (and frequent campaign adviser to) Willkie. “I know of no one in public life in our time who had greater magnetism than Wendell Willkie,” Nicholas Roosevelt, the president’s cousin, once wrote. Luce, consciously or not, seemed to have come to the same conclusion.26
Although Luce’s commitment to Willkie was rooted in an extraordinary personal attraction that he never explained and perhaps never fully understood, he was also drawn to Willkie because of two growing convictions: that Franklin Roosevelt was incapable of leading the nation through the world crisis, and that Willkie was a bulwark against a dangerous Right, which in the absence of credible leadership might so obstruct support for the Allies that the great crusade for democracy could be lost. The two impulses—the passion for Willkie and the growing despair about the alternatives—reinforced each other.
Luce’s intensifying hatred for Roosevelt was only partly a result of his frustration with the president’s halting course toward support for the Allies. He had, after all, actually supported the administration’s foreign policy only a few months before. He seemed more afraid of what he considered Roosevelt’s autocratic leadership and his apparent radicalism, and the likelihood that they would destabilize the nation. “Franklin Roosevelt has done more than any President in the history of our Republic to destroy and undermine the spirit of American enterprise” and “the spirit of cooperation between all the various groups of which our society is composed.” The administration, he charged, “has failed in its domestic objectives … and brought America to the verge of bankruptcy.” It has created “vast and corrupt political machines.” “If people want state socialism,” he wrote Willkie in October, “let them vote for it with their eyes open. Indeed let there be summoned a constitutional convention to scrap the present dear old Constitution.”27
But Luce was at least equally concerned about the Republican Right, and he saw in Willkie the only protection against what he saw as the bigotry and isolationism of much of the party. “I urge that Willkie make a speech specifically giving hell to the Tories and Reactionaries in his camp,” he wrote Davenport in the summer of 1940. “Willkie has disavowed anti-Semitism, he has shown himself to be a true economic and social liberal. But … he has not specially disavowed the stupid, idle-rich, backward-looking economic royalists—all the people whom I really hate worse than Roosevelt.” He was as persistent in pressing these concerns as he was in pressing any others. “Please reconsider desirability of repudiation of reactionaries, tories, snots, old dealers, and idle rich in your camp,” he wrote again after his earlier entreaties went unanswered. “Reaffirm true progressive liberalism in contrast and treat all old dealers as pitiful anachronisms.” The hatred of Roosevelt and the hatred of the Right combined to drive h
im to a third concern: an embrace of the rumored and already discredited notion—originally circulated by New Dealers themselves—that business leaders were planning a “capital strike” against the New Deal. His colleague C. D. Jackson warned that corporate leaders would “go on a much more dangerous sit-down strike than after the ’36 election…. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that within the next twelve months these people as a class may very well fall for some Fascistic putsch, simply for the sake of throwing a monkey-wrench into Roosevelt.” Luce agreed, and warned that the uprising might be “infinitely vaster than Wall Street or La Salle Street [the banking center of Chicago] or all such streets.” That was yet another reason, he insisted, for the importance of a Willkie victory.28
Time and Life had been touting Willkie even before Luce began to pressure his editors to do so. Life ran a glowing portrait of the candidate in mid-May 1940, while Luce was still in Europe, calling Willkie “by far the ablest man the Republicans could nominate for President at Philadelphia next month.” Time consistently debunked the other leading Republican candidates—Robert Taft, Thomas E. Dewey, Arthur Vandenberg—while noting every sign that Willkie, still a long shot, was gaining ground. “Up and coming Willkie,” the magazine wrote in early May, “upped himself several notches” in a speech to newspaper publishers, who went home “wondering if there was still time to convince his public that Mr. Willkie would make a top-notch Republican nominee.” Once Luce returned from Europe and began making his support for Willkie clear, the magazines increased their efforts on his behalf, and gradually crossed the line separating analysis from advocacy. His followers had “a hopeful gleam in their eyes,” Time noted in early June. His nomination, “which was believed impossible a few weeks ago, is decidedly within the realm of a possibility today.” By mid-June, with Willkie still trailing all his major opponents, Time was ebulliently describing him as “the most rambunctious dark horse, getting more rambunctious daily.” And little more than a week before the Republican convention convened, Time ran a cover piece (“The Story of Wendell Willkie”) that could only be described, given its timing, as a campaign document. It included a heroic account of the grassroots effort to build support for Willkie, a mocking description of the bloated campaign efforts of his opponents compared with Willkie’s humble simplicity, and a lengthy pro-Willkie statement by the columnist Raymond Clapper, unchallenged by any other voices. The only issue in the campaign, Clapper wrote, “is whether Mr. Roosevelt or a Republican could do a faster, better job of obtaining the industrial production for defense…. They must look ahead and offer a man who can make the country believe he would do a better job…. On that point Mr. Willkie is the only man the Republicans have who stands a chance of making an effective case.”29
By the time Willkie won the Republican nomination in dramatic fashion on the sixth ballot in Philadelphia, the Luce publications were in full cry. The convention, Life claimed, was the site of “a political drama unique in [the party’s] history.” The other candidates “looked and sounded pretty much as they had at any political convention in the last 20 or 40 years—except more confused and dispirited…. The familiar pattern was broken only in six small rooms on the top floor of the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, where delegates, reporters, and visitors were crowding in … to see and hear a new kind of leader.” “Dreary,” “dull,” “depressing,” “desperate,” “hopeless” were the adjectives describing Willkie’s opponents. But the nomination itself was “the happy and inspiring ending,” the result of “a tidal wave of popular demand” that “crumbled the opposition” and “swept the old bosses out.” Time described Willkie’s gallant supporters in Philadelphia: “Unbossed, unled … Willkiemen and Willkiewomen surged around Philadelphia … carrying the torches of their faith.” Willkie himself, Time insisted, was “not a leader in any sense that was politically recognizable.” In the end “the people had won…. For the first time since Teddy Roosevelt, the Republicans had a man they could yell for and mean it.”30
Willkie’s remarkable rise, and his stunning victory in Philadelphia, only deepened Luce’s commitment to his candidacy. In the four months between the convention and the election he worked ceaselessly and almost obsessively to promote Willkie’s election. The magazines continued to give Willkie warm treatment, but there remained some resistance from pro-Roosevelt editors, who complained bitterly about the bias in coverage and tried occasionally to balance it. Luce reacted with fury to this suggestion of evenhandedness. “I am deeply disappointed,” he wrote to his editors in September. “Here we come to a Presidential election which I think is vitally important. And Time evidently doesn’t think so…. Anyone who does not think this campaign is important should have nothing to do with the reporting and editing of the campaign—and should report to me accordingly now.” And what made the campaign so important? Luce listed the issues that he considered “critical to the nation’s future,” all of them favorable to Willkie: the third term, Roosevelt’s disgraceful record on foreign policy, the New Deal’s corrupt appointees. “If an Administration was a failure,” he asked his editors bitterly, “should it be excused its failure and given new power because the threat of War arises?” Most important was the bold alternative that Willkie provided and the growing endorsements he was receiving. “Last week a lot of people came out for Willkie,” Luce snapped. “You mentioned none of them.”31
But Luce could be critical of Willkie, too. The more emotionally committed he became, the more impatient he was with the campaign’s shortcomings. After the convention Willkie relocated to Indiana, his onetime home state, and spent several weeks sitting on the front porch of a rented house talking with reporters (a reference to an earlier, simpler era of presidential campaigns and an effort to emphasize his own small-town background). Luce was furious. Willkie should stop “this cracker-barrel dawdling,” he barked to Davenport. “Running for President might be fun for Mr. Willkie…. But it’s a God damn serious thing for 130,000,000 Americans and maybe for the world.” Willkie was “fast becoming just another Daily Columnist” at a moment when he needed “to begin to govern now.” But it was one thing for Luce to criticize Willkie privately; it was another for such concerns to become public. Luce was deeply pained when concerns about Willkie’s “lassitude” and disorganization started to appear in the press. Raymond Clapper wrote that “seldom has there been more chaos in a presidential campaign.” Criticism even appeared in Luce’s own magazines. Time reported in September that Republicans were beginning to believe that “the holy-rolling campaign of Wendell Willkie has gone sour,” that “Amateur Willkie” had lost control of his own organization. Luce was torn between fury with the reporters and despair that the charges were largely true.32
For the two months of the formal fall campaign, Luce veered from periods of elation at evidence of Willkie’s rising fortunes to something close to panic when his chances seemed to ebb. But whatever his mood, he never let up his effort to insert his views into the campaign and to persuade others of the importance of a Willkie victory. Almost every day, often several times a day, he deluged Davenport with letters, memos, telegrams, and telephone calls offering ideas and information, and frequently drafts of full speeches (a few of which Willkie actually gave). He agonized over the wording of what he believed Willkie should say, as if a turn of phrase might transform the race. “Let your indictment be completed before you turn to statement of positive principles. Or, if you like, group principles under negatives and positives … ‘I will not do this … I will do this.’” “Continue to be specific,” he wrote Willkie in late September. “Attack the New Deal, rather than Roosevelt.” The president “is somewhat akin to our flag,” but the New Deal as a concept is more vulnerable.33
In advising Willkie, Luce was also struggling to articulate his own rapidly changing views of the state of the nation and the world. He was searching for a philosophy that would shape his—and, he hoped, America’s—future course. More and more he focused that search on a definition of individua
l freedom. “The error of the New Deal is its effort to take all the responsibility for fixing everything. It has undermined individual responsibility.” Americans should extend their aid to “peoples who are striving … toward the attainment and fulfillment of the democratic and Christian ideals.” Willkie should emphasize “Democracy as a concept … the religion of democracy,” a “renewed commitment to human freedom.” And, repeatedly, “The campaign must be a Crusade for Free Men in a Free Land.” To others these phrases must have seemed purely rhetorical, even platitudinous. To Luce, however, they were filled with meanings, even if he could not yet fully articulate them.34
As time went on and Willkie’s poll numbers began to decline,* Luce became harsher and more partisan than ever. When Willkie spoke in or around New York, Luce was almost always in the audience (although he retained just enough awareness of his supposed impartiality as a journalist to decline invitations to sit on the podium with the candidate). Ten days before the election, Luce spewed out to Davenport a shorthand list of Roosevelt’s crimes: “communist influence,” “recession,” “Japanese aggression largely financed by the United States,” “partisan appointments to the Supreme Court,” “Munich,” “Scandal,” “All Members of the Roosevelt family continue to make money!” By then it was clear to him that Willkie would not use this kind of invective in his campaign. Luce was just venting his own frustration, but he was also looking ahead. As the end of the campaign approached and the inevitability of a Roosevelt victory began to become apparent, he mounted an effort—which extended well beyond election day—to create a case for the importance of Willkie’s candidacy despite his defeat. “If the story then is a story of repudiation, it is a story of one of the great repudiations of American history,” he implausibly claimed to his editors (having already called the 1940 contest “the most important election since 1860”), “and we should land on it with both feet.” In late October he wrote Manfred Gottfried (now managing editor of Time), “the day after Mr. Roosevelt’s election the psychological face of this country will be strange and not very happy.”
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