Critical Collaboration

Twenty-two hours before the inauguration of President Roosevelt for the Third Term, Wendell Willkie arrived in Washington. The lobby of The Carlton was jammed with obliging celebrities and avid autograph hunters, but the defeated candidate had no time for either. In the seventh-floor suite of Secretary of State Cordell Hull he settled down for a two-hour conference with the old border statesman. Wendell Willkie was going to London to see the war for himself. President Roosevelt had asked Cordell Hull to make available to him information and assistance of the Department of State.

Wendell Willkie was preparing to leave in the midst of rumor--that he would broadcast from London with Harry Hopkins (denied), that he would become the Ambassador to the Court of St. James's (denied). He was going, by his own account, because he wanted to be able to speak with more authority in making clear to the U. S. the importance of the defense of Britain, and he was going at a moment when the professional politicians of the Republican Party were charging him with betrayal, and his party seemed more gravely the split, over the issue of isolation or effective aid to Britain, than at any time since 1933.

The crowd in the lobby set up a cheer when he came down. With the Secretary he rode the few blocks to the White House, past the stand where he might have taken the oath that President Roosevelt would soon be taking. In his oval study the President was putting the final touches on his inaugural address: "I won't be long," said Wendell Willkie. "I know what it is to be interrupted while laboring on a speech." The President and the man he defeated shook hands, and with a laugh Mr. Roosevelt said that he wished Wendell were going to be out on the cold inaugural stand instead of himself. Said Wendell Willkie: When he got to London, Mr. Roosevelt would want to change places with him again.

When he came out he had in his hand a note of introduction from Franklin Roosevelt to Winston Churchill, written in the bold Roosevelt scrawl, beginning "Dear Churchill" and introducing Willkie as one who had tried to keep politics out of U. S. defense and U. S. efforts to aid Britain. It was addressed "To a certain naval person, kindness of W. Willkie." Wendell Willkie was going to Britain with mighty U. S. encouragement. But he was going at a moment when the cleavage between himself and the isolationist Republicans--in the open before the Philadelphia Convention, under the surface during the campaign--had become an open fight.

Party. On the sixth ballot at Philadelphia, when the triumphant galleries still shouted "We want Willkie!," when Thomas Dewey had released his delegates and Wendell Willkie had won the Republican nomination, came one last, defiant Illinois Dewey vote. It was cast by Delegate Robert Rutherford McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, die-hard isolationist, the New Deal's bitterest journalistic enemy. Last week the bitter hate-filled Chicago Tribune read the Republican candidate out of the Republican Party: "Mr. Willkie entered the Republican Party as a mysterious stranger, suddenly and to the astonishment of thousands of the party members. . . .

"Millions of Republicans now see that they were duped and were, in effect, voting the Democratic ticket. . . . The party will take leave of its late standard bearer with the hope that it will never again see him or he it."

There was no doubt that Wendell Willkie had been read out of an isolationist position he had never held. He was damned for not winning isolationist Republican Congressmen to his view, for thinking of politics as a personal crusade and a fight for ideas. Stubborn as ever, he shook off journalistic and political assaults as he had plowed through the boos and egg-throwing of the campaign. At the annual luncheon of the Women's National Republican Club he said his say on the problem of the party:

"I am greatly concerned about the Republican Party--because in my judgment it is the only political organization in the United States today that can possibly ultimately bring back to the American people those principles . . . which transposed this country from a wilderness to the great industrial nation. . . .

"There has been a bill introduced in Congress to give the President quite extraordinary power to deal with the present crisis and . . . this bill must be modified in several respects and particularly in one --the extraordinary power granted must automatically come back to the people on a definite date. . . . But let me say to you that if the Republican Party in the year 1941 makes a blind opposition to this bill . . . it will never again gain control of the American Government. . .

"America will not stay out of the war merely by persons asserting bravely in speeches that she will not go into the war. We will however stay out of the war . . . if the men of Britain are supported to the utmost and immediately. This can only be done by the granting of enlarged powers to the President. . . ."

With a glance at his critics Willkie addressed his appeal, not to Republicans alone, but to "Republicans of 1941."

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