Willkie an ‘Improbable’ political hero
In late 1939, Wendell Willkie was a registered Democrat and president of a massive utility company. Six months later he was the Republican presidential nominee running to block Franklin D. Roosevelt from winning a third term. Willkie lost that election, of course, and today he’s relegated to the ranks of presidential trivia questions, lacking the staying power of, say, William Jennings Bryan. But Willkie’s political career — though tragically fleeting — was remarkable and “improbable,” biographer David Levering Lewis maintains in “The Improbable Wendell Willkie.” Willkie was a national political figure for only six years, yet he was instrumental in building support for U.S. aid to allies in the early stages of World War II, championed civil rights, defended civil liberties and supported collective bargaining, among other notable stands. His presidential run was perhaps trumped by an even more remarkable and admirable post-election collaboration with the president who defeated him. Though their relationship was at times tense and underlaid by distrust, Willkie helped FDR counter the deep strain of isolationism that ran through the country — and especially the Republican Party — before Pearl Harbor. Willkie’s “politics proved captivating because they served his ideals more than in reverse,” Lewis writes. Though he was guilty of some equivocations and flipflops, Willkie on the whole stood firm on his principles and beliefs that were courageous for their time: Long before the civil rights movement, he battled and defeated the Ku Klux Klan in Akron, Ohio. He called out congressmen leveling antiSemitic attacks against Hollywood executives. Willkie’s story has been told in several biographies, including the superb “Dark Horse,” and Lewis doesn’t claim to break new ground in this book. But Lewis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, does provide deeper insights into Willkie’s promotion of racial equality. Sadly, Willkie played no role in shaping the postwar order. He died in 1944, before the war ended, at age 52. When a top aide to FDR made a derisive remark upon Willkie’s passing, FDR sharply rebuked him with a genuine tribute to his rival. “He was a godsend to this country when we needed him most.”