The best outsider who never became a U.S. president

On May 8, 1940, 76 years ago this Sunday, a Gallup poll revealed that gang-busting prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey continued to dominate a long list of Republican candidates for president and appeared to have the nomination all but won. Not bad for a 38-year-old whose only election had been in 1935 when he became Manhattan district attorney and proceeded to prosecute a bunch of notable crooks.

That morning, two days before Hitler invaded France and the Low Countries, the poll had Dewey at 60 percent. More experienced candidates, such as Senators Robert Taft with 11 percent and Arthur Vandenberg at 16 percent, lagged far behind, while former President Herbert Hoover, 1936 Republican candidate Alf Landon and others were in single digits. 

And in last place, there was a new name. Three percent of the voters liked Wendell Willkie, the little-known president of a utility holding company who had first gained attention as a critic of the government’s Tennessee Valley Authority, a competitor of his.

But Willkie was also an internationalist who favored rebuilding the military and giving aid to Hitler’s enemies, sentiments shared by no other Republican candidate. And he had other problems too. A former Democrat, he had been a Roosevelt delegate at the 1932 Democratic convention, but had come to oppose some of the president’s domestic programs.

The public had become more aware of Willkie in April when he appeared on a popular radio quiz show called “Information Please.” Appearing with a panel of bright and better-known people, Willkie showed “erudition and wit,” wrote one critic. 

Among Willkie’s first supporters were Sam Pryor, a Pan American Airways executive and a Republican National Committeeman from Greenwich, and Raymond Baldwin, the governor Pryor helped elect in a revolt against the state party’s entrenched old guard in 1938. 

Other moderate Republicans, mostly from the northeast, pushed the Willkie effort by organizing local clubs and launching letter-writing campaigns. (It was a different time.) He quickly attracted others who feared the party’s isolationists would be a danger to the Republic. The growing Willkie movement won the highly coveted favor of Henry Luce, the publisher of Life, Time and Fortune, and the Reid family of the New York Herald Tribune, along with other New York business and media types who commuted from Fairfield County on the New Haven line.

Even the married Willkie’s mistress came from Connecticut. Irita Van Doren, the book editor of The Herald-Tribune, was a member of the illustrious Van Doren family of Cornwall. Everyone, from reporters to Roosevelt, knew about her, but nobody talked about personal matters. Willkie even held a press conference in Van Doren’s New York apartment without any fuss in the press.

Willkie’s support increased that spring as rapidly as Hitler moved across Europe, and delegates were recruited to go to him on the first ballot. Pryor, the chairman of the Philadelphia convention’s committee on arrangements, arranged to rig the convention for his man. He gave most of the gallery seats to Willkie supporters, who seemed to never stop shouting, “We Want Willkie.” 

Dewey was the first to fade after the need for foreign policy experience became more evident in that troubled summer. Then the strongly isolationist duo of Vandenberg and Taft lost ground until Willkie pulled ahead on the fifth ballot.

In the beginning, Governor Baldwin’s Connecticut delegation was the only one unanimously in favor of Willkie, and the candidate had told Baldwin he wanted him as his running mate. 

But the party’s defeated old guard quickly assumed control of the campaign and made Baldwin the first casualty. Another northeastern liberal would never do, and Baldwin was called to Willkie’s hotel rom at 5:30 in the morning before the VP voting. Here’s what Baldwin remembered in a 1974 documentary I did on his illustrious career:

“I went up to his room and he sat on a bed in his pajamas, with his hair all rumpled up, and he said, ‘Ray, I had hoped you might be my candidate for vice president, but I’ve talked with some of the leaders, (Joe) Martin from Massachusetts and others, and they are convinced we ought to have a candidate from out west.’” They chose outspoken Oregon Sen. Charles McNary, an angry isolationist whose first response was, “Hell, no, I wouldn’t run with Willlkie.” 

Willkie ran hard, criticizing Roosevelt on everything but foreign policy, and lost by 10 percentage points. The same qualities that made him the nominee over the isolationists didn’t help in the campaign, as Hitler’s victories convinced voters they needed the leader who had responded to the Depression running things in the war that was all but certain to come.

But, as Charles Peters wrote in his account of the convention, “Five Days in Philadelphia,” the outsider Willkie’s refusal to play the isolationist card kept issues like extending the draft and aiding the British out of the campaign and “freed FDR to save the Western World.” 

Read it and weep. 

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.