Improbable Wendell Willkie

In the wake of one of the most tumultuous Republican conventions ever, the party of Lincoln nominated in 1940 a prominentbusinessman and former Democratwhocould have saved America's scleroticpolitical system. Although Wendell LewisWillkiewould lose to FDR,acclaimed biographer David Levering Lewis demonstratesthat the corporate chairman-turned-presidential candidatemust be regarded asone of the most exciting, intellectually able, and authentically transformational figures to stride the twentieth-century American political landscape. Born in Elwood, Indiana, in 1892, Willkie was certainly one ofthe mostunexpected, if not unlikely, candidates for the presidency,only somewhat less unlikely than Barack Hussein Obama. Although previously marginalized by journalistslike Theodore H. White andDavid Halberstam as a political invention ofrich newspaperpublishers, theWillkie who emerges hereisaman governed by principles who seldom allowed rigidcategories to stand in his way. Even as a young man, hequickly distinguished himself asa reform-minded lawyer, whose farm-boy haircut, hayseed manners, and sartorial indifference bespoke common-man straightforwardness but concealedanambition that propelled him atfortyto chairman of Commonwealth and Southern, thecountry'sthird-largest private utility holding company. It was Willkie's vehement opposition to government regulation of the free-market economy and his success in wrenching a fabulous monetary settlement from the Tennessee Valley Authority thatattracted the attention of Republican leaders, who, likeWillkie, felt that FDRwas turning the office into an imperial presidency. Successful at outwitting the isolationistwing of his own party, Willkie took onRoosevelt during one of the nation's darkest periods, creating an unlikelyalliance of supporters, including anti-big-governmentbusiness leaders and black voters, who rightly feltexcluded from New Deal benefits. Despite receiving the largest percentage of Republican votes in a generation, Willkie lost but, in the process, proposedsweeping civil rights reform a full generation before the civil rights eraandaprogressive "newconception of the world" thatremainsinspirational at a time whenour own national belief systemhas become alarminglyimmoral andrudderless. Rather than continue a political battle that could have weakened the nation during its darkest hour,adefeatedWillkiereconciled with thepresident and embraced the war effort, while writingOne World,a visionary credo thathoped to instigate an international movement for the betterment of the world's people. In rejectingAmerica's penchant forexceptionalism, Willkie championed thisinternationalism morepassionatelythan any American politician before him, creatinga sovereign philosophyofliberalism that balanced free enterprise with social responsibility. Hisuntimely death at fifty-two in1944left this prophetic vision tragically stillborn.