Review: 'The Improbable Wendell Willkie,' by David Levering Lewis

In late 1939, Wendell Willkie was a registered Democrat and president of a massive utility company. Six months later he was the Republican presidential nominee running to block Franklin D. Roosevelt from winning a third term.

Willkie lost that election, of course, and today he's relegated to the ranks of presidential trivia questions, lacking the staying power of, say, William Jennings Bryan.

But Willkie's political career — though tragically fleeting — was remarkable and "improbable," biographer David Levering Lewis maintains in "The Improbable Wendell Willkie."

Willkie was a national political figure for only six years, yet he was instrumental in building support for U.S. aid to allies in the early stages of World War II, championed civil rights, defended civil liberties and supported collective bargaining, among other notable stands.

His presidential run was perhaps trumped by an even more remarkable and admirable post-election collaboration with the president who defeated him. Though their relationship was at times tense and underlaid by distrust, Willkie helped FDR counter the deep strain of isolationism that ran through the country — and especially the Republican Party — before Pearl Harbor.

Willkie's "politics proved captivating because they served his ideals more than in reverse," Lewis writes.

Though he was guilty of some equivocations and flip-flops, Willkie on the whole stood firm on his principles and beliefs that were courageous for their time: Long before the civil rights movement, he battled and defeated the Ku Klux Klan in Akron, Ohio. He called out congressmen leveling anti-Semitic attacks against Hollywood executives. And even as he was considering a second presidential run, Willkie stepped forward to defend William Schneiderman, a onetime Communist Party organizer in Minnesota who was facing deportation. Willkie successfully argued Schneiderman's case before the U.S. Supreme Court. To those who warned him of the political fallout from aiding a Communist, Willkie replied, "Of all the times when civil liberties should be defended, it is now."

Schneiderman wasn't the only Minnesotan to play a big role in Willkie's story. John Cowles Sr., whose Cowles Media Co. owned the newspapers that merged into the Star Tribune, was a prominent Willkie adviser and booster. And Harold Stassen, the young "boy governor" of Minnesota, led the convention floor team that secured Willkie the party's nomination.

Willkie's story has been told in several biographies, including the superb "Dark Horse," and Lewis doesn't claim to break new ground in this book. But Lewis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, does provide deeper insights into Willkie's promotion of racial equality.

Annoyingly, however, he takes a gratuitous swipe at an early biographer, and his grandiloquent, magniloquent, orotund writing style (see what I did there?) also comes with a large dollop of italicized verba Latina. A smattering of get-thee-to-a-dictionary words is educational; a surfeit is pretentious.

But none of that detracts from recounting the arc of Willkie's life, from modest Hoosier roots, to "barefoot" Wall Street lawyer, to utility executive, to presidential hopeful, to a voice for internationalism. In his 1943 book "One World," Willkie argued that the world was rapidly shrinking and that Americans' "thinking in the future must be worldwide." As Lewis writes, "Willkie foresaw the postwar promise and peril for the United States as a beacon of democracy in a world of decaying empires, rising expectations, vast oil deposits, and flammable Islam."

Sadly, Willkie played no role in shaping the postwar order. He died a year after publication of the book, at age 52. A lifetime of heavy smoking, a poor diet, too much scotch and not enough exercise ended with multiple heart attacks, the last fatal.

When a top aide to FDR made a derisive remark upon Willkie's passing, FDR sharply rebuked him with a genuine tribute to his rival. "You of all people ought to know that we might not have had Lend Lease or Selective Service or a lot of other things if it hadn't been for Wendell Willkie. He was a godsend to this country when we needed him most."

Dennis J. McGrath is an editor at the Star Tribune • 612-673-4293

The Improbable Wendell Willkie
By: David Levering Lewis.
Publisher: Liveright, 371 pages, $28.95.