by Lynne Olson
Late in the campaign, the Democratic National Committee took aim at Willkie’s attempt to lure black voters away from Roosevelt. The DNC’s minorities division issued a statement alleging that Willkie’s Indiana hometown sported signs warning, “Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on you here.” It also quoted a supposed frequent quip of Willkie’s: “You can’t do this to me. I’m a white man.” Willkie, who had fought the Ku Klux Klan as a young lawyer and who in 1940 had won the endorsement of a number of black papers, angrily blasted the statement as “the most scurrilous and indecent” allegation of the entire political contest.
The attacks on Willkie were not merely verbal. According to Willkie biographer Steve Neal, the Republican “found himself the target of more violence than any presidential candidate in a generation.” At many big-city campaign stops, particularly those in working-class districts, Willkie was pelted with everything from rotten eggs, fruits, vegetables, rocks, and lightbulbs to an office chair and wastebasket (the latter two hurled from office windows and landing close to the candidate). At one event, Willkie’s wife was splattered by eggs. This rowdiness, which was usually accompanied by booing and heckling, occurred so frequently that The New York Times ran a daily box score of the number of items thrown and those that found their target.
Calling the attacks “reprehensible,” Roosevelt urged local authorities to press charges against Willkie’s assailants. But as it happened, much of the troublemaking had been orchestrated by big-city Democratic bosses, among them the same mayors and other local officials to whom the president had appealed for justice.
Enraged by such hooliganism, as well as by the Democrats’ questioning of his patriotism and dedication to racial tolerance, Willkie began to rethink his determination to keep the campaign civil. He was encouraged in that effort by GOP leaders, who, no matter how much they disliked him personally, were desperate for a Republican victory over Roosevelt. They pointed out to the nominee that his reasonableness had earned him no political points, that in fact he had slipped dramatically in the polls despite weeks of frenetic campaigning all over the country. At the beginning of September, he and Roosevelt had been locked in a virtual tie; by the end of the month, the president had pulled ahead by at least ten points.
To regain the momentum, the Republican politicians counseled, Willkie had to give up this silly bipartisanship and attack Roosevelt where he was most vulnerable—on the war. They said in effect that Willkie must renounce everything he had stood for just a few weeks before and mount a scare campaign against the president, making an argument to voters that peace was the best policy for America and that a vote for FDR was a vote for war.
Willkie finally agreed, his anger at the Democrats and desire to beat Roosevelt winning out over his principles and conscience. Suddenly, the interventionist candidate was sounding like an apostle of isolationism, charging that the president had caused “a drift toward war.” According to the political writer Richard Rovere, “By the time the campaign was over, Willkie was as much in opposition to the man he had been a few months earlier as he was to his opponent.”
In a nationwide radio broadcast, Willkie declared that Roosevelt “had encouraged the European conflagration” and implied that his opponent had made a secret agreement with Britain to enter the war. “We can have peace,” Willkie added, “but we must know how to preserve it. To begin with, we shall not undertake to fight anybody else’s war. Our boys shall stay out of Europe.” In another speech, he warned that under Roosevelt, young Americans were “already almost on the transports,” but if they put him in the White House, “I shall not send one American boy into the shambles of another war.”
Willkie’s sudden metamorphosis upset many of his most prominent supporters, including a number of journalists who had championed his candidacy. Raymond Clapper deplored his “expediency” and “narrow-minded appeals,” adding that such “bad judgment … had raised grave doubts, at least with me, about the kind of job he would do as president.” Henry Luce, who had written drafts of campaign speeches for Willkie and showered Russell Davenport with political advice, lamented the Republican’s handling of the war issue, later saying that he should have “told the truth and gone down [to defeat] with … honor.”
Walter Lippmann, another influential journalist who supported and occasionally advised Willkie, urged him not to divide the country on the war issue. In the spring and summer of 1940, Lippmann had been intensely critical of Roosevelt for what he perceived as the president’s timidity and lack of leadership and had applauded Willkie for his forthright advocacy of immediate, all-out aid to Britain. Now, appalled by Willkie’s change of heart, Lippmann severed his connections with him.
Still, for all the disappointment felt by some Willkie backers over his strident fanning of war fears, the tactics began having their desired effect. By the middle of October, the president’s comfortable lead in the polls had melted away; Willkie was leading FDR in most of the Midwest and showing signs of a surge in the Northeast.
Now it was the turn of Democratic politicians to panic. Phone calls and telegrams began pouring into the White House, urging the president to abandon his Olympian posture as commander in chief and get personally involved in the campaign. “The political leaders were learning in their own local districts that, as far as votes for a President are concerned, the American people just naturally refuse to be taken for granted,” Samuel Rosenman, Roosevelt’s principal speechwriter, noted. “They want to hear the campaign issues debated by the candidates. Fortunately for Roosevelt, the reports he was receiving made him realize this in time.”
But before the president could enter the fight, he and his aides were forced to deal with an issue that could have greatly imperiled his reelection. The White House discovered that a Republican newspaper publisher named Paul Block had acquired a cache of letters between Henry Wallace and his onetime guru, Nicholas Roerich, and was thinking of publishing them.
Harry Hopkins, who somehow acquired copies of the letters, informed FDR that they were extremely damaging. Their extravagantly mystical, coded language, including Wallace’s references to himself as “Galahad” and “Parsifal,” could easily be employed to cast doubt on the mental stability of a man who, if elected, would be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
The president and his men, however, had a potent weapon of their own in reserve: Willkie’s extramarital affair with the New York Herald Tribune’s Irita Van Doren—a relationship that he had done little to conceal. Before the campaign, the two had often been seen in public together, and Willkie had even held a press conference at Van Doren’s apartment, explaining to friends, “Everybody knows about us—all the newspapermen in New York.”
Willkie, as it turned out, was wrong: journalists may have known about the couple, but since they never wrote about the affair, the vast majority of Americans had no inkling of the candidate’s complicated personal life. During the campaign, Willkie’s wife dutifully accompanied him around the country, while he kept in touch with Van Doren through phone calls and telegrams.
At Roosevelt’s instigation, top members of his campaign staff made clear to their Republican counterparts that if the Wallace-Roerich letters were published, the news of Willkie’s affair would also be made public. “If people try to play dirty politics on me, I’m willing to try it on other people,” FDR declared to a White House aide. He explained what the aide should do to get word of the affair out. “You can’t have any of our principal speakers refer to it,” the president said, adding that “people down the line,” such as members of Congress and local officials, “can do it properly … so long as it’s none of us people at the top.”
Roosevelt’s threat worked. In the end, neither side unleashed its secret weapon—a striking exception in a campaign known for dirty tricks and intemperate rhetoric.
WITH JUST SIX WEEKS to go before the election, FDR finally took his place in the thick of the battle. “I am an old campaigner, and I love a good fight,” he proclaimed in h
is first political speech of the contest. Observing Roosevelt’s “grim smile and set jaw” as he said those words, Samuel Rosenman knew “he was not exaggerating.”
A new speechwriter—Robert Sherwood—had joined the president’s campaign team for the final push. An unflagging Roosevelt supporter, Sherwood had been lobbying FDR and Harry Hopkins for a job for months; early in 1940, he had written the president, “I wish with all my heart to offer my services, for whatever they’re worth, to you in this crucial year and to the cause which is yours, as surely as it was Lincoln’s.” From that point until Roosevelt’s death, his three main speechwriters would be Rosenman, Hopkins, and Sherwood.
The playwright’s appointment horrified his Republican family, particularly his mother, who “considered me a well-meaning but hopelessly befuddled renegade,” Sherwood told a friend. Not long before, she had listened to a political broadcast, realizing after a few moments that the speaker, who was lavishing praise on Roosevelt, was none other than her beloved Bobby. “My poor boy,” she moaned over and over, “my poor boy.”
While never mentioning Willkie by name, Roosevelt’s speeches followed Wallace’s lead by indirectly associating the president’s opponent with evil foreign and domestic influences. “There is something very ominous in this combination that has been forming within the Republican party between the extreme reactionary and extreme radical elements of this country,” FDR declared in a Brooklyn speech. In Cleveland, he denounced “certain forces within our own national community, composed of men who call themselves American but who would destroy America.” When New York governor Herbert Lehman, a Democrat, said that Hitler and Mussolini were working for Roosevelt’s defeat and hence, by implication, for Willkie’s election, the president said he agreed with that view.
All this mudslinging was going on at a time when hundreds of Britons were dying every night in Luftwaffe bombing raids and German submarines were choking off British supply lines. But Britain’s peril was not mentioned much by the two presidential candidates. The main issue on which they focused was the necessity of preserving the peace and security of America. Forced on the defensive by Willkie, Roosevelt tried to outdo him in making sweeping pledges of peace, declaring in Philadelphia, “We will not participate in any foreign wars.”
But the Republican was still gaining in the polls, and Democratic leaders pleaded for a stronger, more definitive statement from the president that he would not push the country into war. Just a few days before the election, Roosevelt gave it. In a speech in Boston, he assured American mothers and fathers: “I have said this before but I shall say it again and again and again—your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
Sherwood, who had come up with the catchphrase “again and again and again” and regretted it for the rest of his life, later called the speech “terrible.” In his view, FDR made a mistake “in yielding to the hysterical demands for sweeping reassurance; but, unfortunately for my own conscience, I happened … to be one of those who urged him to go the limit on this.”
At the time, a number of critics blasted both candidates for what they considered their reckless and irresponsible promises to the American people. Among them was Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, who argued that Roosevelt and Willkie both had sacrificed their integrity as a result of their lack of honesty. In a column that appeared just days before the election, she addressed herself to the candidates, telling them: “You should have refused to vie with your opponent in unqualifiedly promising peace. Instead you should have bravely warned the nation that war may be necessary.… You should have told the people plainly that this country is already inextricably engaged in the struggle against Hitlerism and that we shall not draw back from its uttermost consequences.”
Interestingly, despite Dorothy Thompson’s earlier chastising of Roosevelt for promising the American public “more security than it is wise for them to think they can have,” she did not ally herself now with Kirchwey and the nominees’ other detractors. As it happened, the impetuous Thompson was now in the president’s camp—so much so that the last speech he delivered in the 1940 campaign was largely taken from a draft she had written for him. Her transformation from ardent Willkie admirer to zealous Roosevelt partisan was nothing short of astonishing, even to those familiar with her mercurial nature.
Throughout Roosevelt’s presidency, Thompson, a conservative on domestic issues, had been an outspoken critic of the New Deal and of what she considered FDR’s lust for power, declaring at one point that he was on the verge of becoming a dictator. But her main focus in 1940, as it had been for several years, was on the need to stop Hitler. Having earlier vowed to support Willkie “to the hilt,” she had second thoughts when the Republican started spouting views that bordered on isolationism. The president, of course, was also espousing decidedly anti-interventionist beliefs, but Thompson decided that with his eight years of experience, he was the better bet. Her abrupt change of heart might also have had something to do with FDR’s determined wooing: he had invited Thompson to the White House for private meetings in May and October, in an attempt to persuade her “to get this silly business of Wendell Willkie out of her head.” Unlike her Herald Tribune colleague Walter Lippmann, who refused to endorse either candidate, Thompson, with her usual flair for the dramatic, announced to her readers in late October that she had transferred her allegiance to the president, adding that “Roosevelt must stay in office and see this thing through.”
With its early support of Willkie, the Herald Tribune had played a crucial role in helping him get the Republican nomination, and not surprisingly, its owners, Ogden and Helen Reid, were infuriated by what they considered Thompson’s betrayal. Helen Reid, who had been instrumental in hiring Thompson and who considered her a close friend, was particularly irate.
When Thompson wrote another column, declaring that a Willkie victory would cause “Nazi jubilation in Germany and popular depression in Great Britain,” the Reids ordered it suppressed. In its place, the Herald Tribune ran a sampling of the hundreds of negative letters it had received after Thompson’s endorsement of FDR, along with the paper’s formal disclaimer of her position.
The brouhaha over Thompson was a fitting coda to this extraordinarily bitter campaign. Sherwood, who later made clear how much he regretted his own role in adding to the vitriol, wrote that Roosevelt “despised” the 1940 contest, in large part because “it left a smear on his record which only the accomplishments of the next five years could remove.”
ON THE NIGHT OF the election, Roosevelt, in the midst of studying early returns, called Mike Reilly, the head of his Secret Service detail, into a small room off the dining room of his home in Hyde Park. Reilly noticed that the president was sweating heavily and wore a grim expression. “Mike,” Roosevelt told him, “I don’t want to see anybody in here.” Surprised by this unusual order from his normally gregarious boss, Reilly asked: “Including your family, Mr. President?” Roosevelt snapped back: “I said ‘anybody.’ ”
It was the first and only time that Reilly would ever see Roosevelt in a state of nervous agitation. Later he speculated that the president had noticed something in the returns that led him to believe he was going to lose. FDR “always ran scared” prior to an election, one reporter noted, but this one was clearly going to be the closest he had ever experienced. Polls taken in the campaign’s final days showed Willkie in the lead in six battleground states and closing the gap in several more.
Nonetheless, FDR did not remain sequestered for long that night. Later returns made clear he was on his way to an unprecedented third-term victory, and soon visitors were streaming into the room to congratulate the beaming president-elect. In the largest election turnout in American history, he had won by some five million votes—27.3 million cast for him, compared to 22.3 million for Willkie.
Roosevelt’s pleasure in his triumph, however, was somewhat tempered by the knowledge that the 1940 election was the closest presidential contest in almost twenty-five year
s. His margin of victory was considerably reduced from his lopsided totals of 1932 and 1936; indeed, his 1936 plurality had been slashed by more than half. Willkie had received more popular votes than any previous Republican candidate—or, for that matter, any presidential candidate, with the exception of FDR. And, according to polls conducted after the election, the Republican likely would have won if it hadn’t been for the war issue.
In Henry Luce’s view, “the menace of Hitler helped to nominate [Willkie], and the menace of Hitler certainly defeated him for the Presidency.” As much as many American voters apparently wanted a change in domestic policy, they were reluctant, with the world in flames, to take a chance on an untested novice. In the words of New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, they preferred “Roosevelt with his known faults to Willkie with his unknown virtues.”
Late on the night after the election, the doorbell rang at the Manhattan apartment of Russell Davenport, Willkie’s campaign manager. Exhausted and in a state of near shock from the turbulence of the previous five months, Davenport’s wife, Marcia, opened the door—and found an equally exhausted Harry Hopkins standing before her. Shuffling into the living room, Hopkins shook Russell Davenport’s hand and sat down.
For the Willkie camp, the president’s top aide had been a major villain, Marcia Davenport recalled, “a man on whom we had concentrated much mental and verbal opprobrium.… But his appearance at that moment was corroboration of the great crisis beyond domestic politics, which was the real concern of both Wendell Willkie and Franklin Roosevelt; of every man who … understood what our country was about to face.”
Over beer and sandwiches, Davenport and Hopkins talked until early the next morning. Less than a week later, Willkie made clear that the time for political smears and partisan attacks was over. In a radio broadcast, he declared: “We have elected Franklin Roosevelt president. He is your president. He is my president. We all of us owe him the respect due to his high office. We give him that respect. We will support him.”