Willkie Testimony

In Connecticut last week, the New Deal candidate for governor made a desperate attempt to defeat popular Republican Governor Raymond E. Baldwin by accusing him of having "deserted" Willkie to become a "Hoover Republican." Governor Baldwin, who seconded Willkie's nomination in Philadelphia in 1940, and who had been a strongpoint in Willkie's strategy ever since, could not take this lying down. So Governor Baldwin told a little history. Said he:

"On the morning of the last day of the [Republican] convention, I called at Mr. Willkie's office in New York. ... I will never forget his words after he heard the actual news of Tom Dewey's nomination. ... It was a moment when a man speaks with candor and without restraint.

"And that was what Mr. Willkie did. He turned to me and said emphatically: 'Well, you can rely on one thing. I will not support the President in his campaign for a fourth term.' "

Wendell Willkie had been dead only 17 hours when New Deal Columnist Drew Pearson rushed to a microphone to say that Willkie, had he lived, would probably have voted for Candidate Franklin Roosevelt.

This brought immediate denial in a dignified statement by Massachusetts' Senator Sinclair Weeks, a close personal friend of Willkie's, who concluded that he "had good reason to believe that exactly the opposite" was true. The Weeks statement was supported by other even stronger statements that in any case Willkie would not have voted for Roosevelt. Said Brother Fred Willkie: "I think he eventually would have come out for Dewey." Last week, the most complete testimony was given by Carl M. Owen, Willkie's law partner. Said Partner Owen: "I can say most emphatically that under no conditions would he have supported the Roosevelt Administration." .

Thereafter the best New Dealers could do was to insist that Wendell Willkie had not made up his mind. No qualified person said he would have come out for Roosevelt.

Despite all the quotations, the best on-the-record evidence that Wendell Willkie would not have voted for Franklin Roosevelt was his Omaha speech last April in which he attacked, killed, dissected and then embalmed Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policy. The best evidence that he would not vote for Tom Dewey was his personal dislike for Dewey, whom he had rarely met.

The friends of Wendell Willkie were mostly of two kinds: those who were for him as second-best to Roosevelt, and those who worked with Willkie for his own election to the Presidency. Of the score of men beginning with Campaign Manager Ralph Cake who had done most work for and with Willkie in his 1944 campaign, only one, Albert D. Lasker, was last week in the Roosevelt camp. All the rest were working for Dewey. Senator Joe Ball (see below) had led the rival cam paign for Harold Stassen of Minnesota, whom Willkie disliked even more than he did Tom Dewey.

In Rushville, Ind., Edith Willkie, "distressed" by the political argument about her husband, asked that all speculation cease. Said Governor Baldwin: "I sympathize with her feelings and agree. ..."

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