"With All My Heart . . ."

"I have an engagement to keep in this town. It was made a long time ago with a young man I knew well.

"This young man was born and raised in Elwood. He attended the Elwood public schools. He worked in your factories and your stores. He started the practice of law in your courts. As I look back upon him, I realize that he had plenty of faults. But he also had three steadfast convictions. He was devoted to the ideal of individual liberty, He hated all special privileges and forms of oppression. And he knew without any doubt that the greatest country on earth was the United States of America.

"That boy was myself thirty or thirty-five years ago. I still adhere to those convictions. To him, to his generation, to his elders, and to the youth of today I pledge my word that I shall never let them down. ...

"I accept the nomination of the Republican Party for President of the United States.

"I accept it in the spirit in which it was given at our convention at Philadelphia -- the spirit of dedication. I herewith dedicate myself with all my heart, with all my mind, and with all my soul to make this nation strong."

-- Speech at Elwood, Ind., Aug. 17, 1940

This week Wendell Willkie died. The news came as an actual shock; if there had been a seismograph to measure such things, it would have recorded that the shock was felt by human beings clear around the world. All over the U.S. the people said the same things to each other: simple words of half-angry disbelief, of loss, of sorrow. That was a man, said the people.

Tribute. Wendell Willkie's sudden death, at 52, somehow made it suddenly apparent how valuable were the things he stood for: courage, integrity, deep belief in democracy, deep faith in humanity, a passionate dedication to the ideal of freedom. When the news of his death was flashed to the four quarters of the earth, the great men of the world sat down and began to construct tributes to him, the flowers for the dead that rarely go to the living. These verbal wreaths--some of them homemade with pain and care, some of them as professional as an undertaker's garland--heaped up to a catafalque of praise.

The telegrams poured in, thousands on thousands of them: a tribute from the Red Caps of New York's Pennsylvania Station; from President Roosevelt and from Governor Thomas E. Dewey; tributes from little people, many of them signed only "A Friend." In a London pub he had visited in 1941, his photograph was draped with crepe; one of the "regulars" drank a toast to him: "We're sorry he's gone. He was a proper gent--very easy to mix with."

In the embarrassment of death's presence few know what to say, but this time a tremendous number wished they knew. Those who could, did what they could; when Wendell Willkie's body was laid in state in the center aisle of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, they lined up, three-abreast and three blocks long, hour after hour, to pass by him and pay their last respects--as they had done only three days before, five blocks south, at Al Smith's bier.

Green Memory. But there was a big difference. Wendell Willkie was a main figure in the foreground of the national life. The death of Al Smith had come as a natural end, at the traditional three-score-&-ten; Willkie's death was a jolting reminder that some men die "before their time."

For the U.S., and many hopeful men all over the world, still expected great things of Wendell Willkie. The people had learned to listen when he spoke, and, in a world half-succumbed to counsels of expediency or despair, had been encouraged and renewed by his faith in freedom and plain dealing.

The historians of another generation will be the ones to measure how long the memory of Wendell Willkie is kept green. This week that memory was as green and alive as the Indiana countryside in springtime. Every American who was aware of the world in 1940 could recall as if it were yesterday the big, intense Indianan as he rolled through the country in the fabulous Willkie train, the most wonderful political caravan that has traveled the U.S. in this generation.

The Rudeness of Honesty. There in their minds he stands, the big, stubborn-faced Midlander, 6 ft. 1 in., 220 Ibs., his eyes twinkling or hawklike, a joshing look around his big firm mouth, or the long upper lip stiff with the stubbornness of debate; the dark brown hair beginning 'to tumble over his forehead; the rich, growling voice slurring over the words: "Fellow Amurricans!"

Or he is walking, with quick short steps, a big, clumsily built man, vigorous of mind and body; or sitting, sprawled, a leg hooked over a chair for ease in debate. He was strong: he ate hard, smoked three packs of Camels a day; he never drank much, he needed no stimulant.

He waded through books the way bees strip a garden of its honey, in swift voracious dives that suck out the juices and pass on. His conversation was packed with the Bible, Shakespeare, the law, and poetry; he could spill out figures, dates, technical data, historical parallels in dazzling profusion. But his habit of mind was to concentrate on principles he argued, not on the men he argued with; this habit of mind gave his blunt arguments a kind of roughhewn, noble rudeness that added up to honesty.

In the picture of him that the U.S. remembered last week, the early Willkie was less clear. But his fellow citizens remembered some things about him: that he was the grandson of Bavarian immigrants who stood with Carl Schurz against Prussian autocracy in the 1840s; that his father had been a circuit judge, and that his mother was Indiana's first woman attorney; that he was born in Elwood, Ind., in a three-story frame house, on Feb. 18, 1892; that as a boy he was a great reader in that book-filled house, and easily the loudest of the four sons and two daughters in reciting lusty passages from King Lear when the family read Shakespeare aloud in the evenings.

The Rebel. When he was 15, he entered Indiana University, at Bloomington--a rebel who wore red turtleneck sweaters, challenged the Bible, was devoted to socialism, and campaigned earnestly against the fraternity system. After learning to chew tobacco, and a lot of campus hell-raising, he grew civilized; hair slicked back, he joined Beta Theta Pi, abandoned socialism for Jeffersonian democracy, and got out of the university in less than the usual four years, with I three scholarship prizes and the laurels ' of senior-class orator.

The Rise. He enlisted the day after war was declared in 1917, served in France as a first lieutenant, and returned to his war bride, the former Edith Wilk of Rushville, Ind., early in 1919.

As a rubber company lawyer in Akron he rose rapidly. By November 1929 he reached Manhattan as a lawyer for Commonwealth & Southern Corp., the public utility company. Four years later he was president of the company, earning $75,000 a year. But the Willkies lived modestly, without even a car. He bought five farms back in Rushville, and paid them close attention, although he called himself only a "conversational farmer."

By 1934 Commonwealth & Southern was in head-on clash with the New Deal over the TVA's invasion of Tennessee. Then it was that Willkie began to become a public figure; he was known in Washington as the one businessman who could defend himself before the numerous congressional investigating committees.

He had left the Democratic Party because, he said, the defeat in the 1932 Democratic Convention of Candidate Newton D. Baker, who had fought a lone battle in the isolationist '20s for world cooperation, taught him that the Democratic Party was not a fit instrument in that struggle.

Willkie, 3%. Before April 1940 Willkie's name was only mentioned in intellectual circles as a possible Presidential candidate. Then Willkie published a platform for the U.S., called "We, The People," in FORTUNE (see box). In a few weeks Willkie's name was hot political tinder. No one thought he could really win; the Gallup poll, only a few weeks before the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, gave the candidates' standings as Dewey, 67%; Vandenberg, 14%; Taft, 12%; Willkie, 3%.

But the men who came to Philadelphia to nominate a candidate to run against Term III came there under a growing pressure of public opinion that moved like an irresistible flood. The professional politicians never fully realized what happened to them. Nothing in their lives, nothing in American political history could have prepared them for the almost religious passion that forced the Willkie candidacy over every barrier that political tricks could devise, overwhelming all precedents under the mighty chant of the galleries, a chant that echoed all over America, "We Want Willkie!"

Down went the Dewey candidacy, then the Taft candidacy, and suddenly Wendell Willkie, a man unknown to most of the leaders of his party, a man unlike any Presidential candidate in either party's history, who had never even trained as a dogcatcher for public service, was--dumbfoundingly--their candidate. But the pubic hailed him from the moment he stood on the Philadelphia platform, confetti on his shoulders, Mrs. Willkie at his side (see cut).

The Uncountables. The crowd that moved in on Elwood, Ind. from all the states and towns around to hear his acceptance speech on Aug. 17 was unquestionably the greatest crowd in U.S. political history. It was uncountable; no stadium could have held it; the estimates ranged as high as 500,000 and none less than 200,000.* To that crowd Wendell Willkie made a great, an eloquent--and an unpolitical--speech. It was poorly delivered; his word-slurring, Hoosier-twang delivery was a shock to citizens used to the sophisticated fluency of Mr. Roosevelt's radio voice. But that speech was the expression of a good American's will to freedom--the keystone of his character, and the root of his antipathy to the New Deal.

The Crusade. Then began the "crusade," when the big man roared over & over: "Only the strong can be free and only the productive can be strong." Wendell Willkie exhorted his fellow citizens as perhaps they have never been exhorted before. Standing up on a platform built on a touring car, arms spread wide in a gesture of appeal, his tangled hair awry, he drove through the streets of scores on scores of towns, past thousands of bars and grills, restaurants, department stores, through factory towns and farm towns, through the great cities and into the hamlets, appealing hoarsely to the people to understand, to help him in his crusade against the New Deal. For a long time he seemed hopelessly licked; the people came to see him, but down, down he went in the polls. Hoarsely and hopefully he fought on. On the very day he fell the lowest in the polls, when the. shrewdest possible politicking seemed necessary just to save him from landslide defeat, he stood in Detroit, after hecklers had thrown a melon and a wastebasket at him, and spoke not for votes, but made a plea to American mothers to "teach our children to believe in America."

The Loyal Opposition. This kind of nobility of purpose, overriding possible ridicule and probable defeat, finally began to affect the electorate: Willkie's stock rose steadily and swiftly; his final rush to victory was nipped off only when Franklin Roosevelt made a smashing series of attacks on the poor Republican Congressional record, leading off with the "Martin, Barton & Fish" speech. The margin of Willkie's defeat was much narrower than is even now generally realized.

Defeated as a Presidential candidate, Willkie became the leader of the "loyal opposition," and it was as such that he became world-famed as a man of good will. From his 1941 visit to blitzed Britain, where he played darts with the men in pubs, on through the invaluable support he gave Lend-Lease, through his 1942 visit to meet Stalin and Chiang Kaishek, his prestige as an American citizen rose as steadily as did the American people's interest in foreign affairs.

One World. He taught the U.S. about the world. His book, One World, became one of the greatest best-sellers on record (over 1,000,000 copies). But his political prestige within his own party sank; the

Republicans turned to Thomas E. Dewey as the man likeliest to beat Term IV. Last April, the results of the Wisconsin primaries reached Willkie in an Omaha hotel room; next night he withdrew from the race.

His work ended with a little book issued this week, An American Program (Simon & Schuster; $1), which he wrote in an effort to "arouse and make articulate a body of public opinion that would demand clear statements of purpose" from both parties on the two subjects of his deepest concern: "international obligations and our attitude on racial minorities."

The First Attack. As the book was put together, he suffered a heart attack, in Rushville. He got off the train in Manhattan, pale and ill. Soon after, he entered Manhattan's Lenox Hill hospital, on Sept. 6, for a physical checkup. His big heart was no longer strong; he had coronary thrombosis. But he made some progress; the doctors grew cautiously optimistic. Friends readied a house in Florida, where he could fly for a long rest.

Then suddenly, he caught a streptococcic throat infection; his fever soared to 104DEG. Big in the white cotton hospital gown, he stirred restlessly in his bed. He was feeling better. Penicillin injections had destroyed the germs and brought his temperature to 102, then down toward normal. In a few days, he hoped, he would go home.

It was 7 o'clock, and in the hospital the lights gleamed in the buff-colored corridors. A sign on the door said: "Positively No Visitors." But inside, the room was strewn with books, for the big man could never stop reading. Nurses moved in & out.

Messages were pouring in at his home; their tenor: "You can't do this to us." Then the sharp pain came back; fighting the infection had brought on the second heart attack of the day. But the heart he had pledged to the people was still strong enough. He weathered the crises, but lay back exhausted, his thick dark hair tangled on the pillow. At midnight he fell asleep, and the transparent folds of an oxygen tent were draped about his head to help his breathing.

The Last Attack. An hour later he awoke. The nurse came in, and the doctor. The nurse swabbed his raw throat. The doctor asked him how he felt.

"How can I talk," he joked, "with all this stuff in my mouth?"

"Maybe you'd like a Scotch and water -- for a stimulant," the doctor said. "You could use one."

"Okay, if you make it warm," the big man said. His voice, as always, was hoarse, and it had a far-away sound. He had a Scotch and water -- warm.

A short hour later, the third attack came and this time it was more than his heart could stand.

At 2:20 a.m. on a Sunday morning, Wendell Willkie died, a look of worry on his still-boyish face. His wife, standing at the bedside, wavered as she watched his life flicker out. The doctors rushed to support her. His former secretary, Lamoyne Jones, walked out of the room, tears in his eyes, to the newsmen waiting in the lobby below. An hour before, he had brought out words of hope. Now his hands were raised in a gesture of surrender. "It's all over," he said. "He went very fast."

* The greatest political crowds that could be counted were Roosevelt's 105,000 at Franklin Field in 1936; Tom Dewey's 90,000 in Hollywood Bowl in September of this year.

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