No one remembers Wendell Willkie. If you don’t believe me, mention him as a man worth looking up at your next cocktail hour. Then watch as even well-informed acquaintances wonder when, exactly, you started taking an interest in adult-entertainment performers or bothered to locate the inspiration for Arrested Development’s hit ‘Mr Wendal’. Even the learned (and let’s throw in friends who subscribe to the New Yorker to even things out), will struggle to recall that Willkie was not only referred to as ‘Private Citizen Number One’ by FDR. He was also a founder of liberal globalism — or a refounder, given how badly Woodrow Wilson’s first attempt had gone.
In August 1942, with the United States deep into World War Two, Roosevelt assigned Willkie an unofficial but well-publicized mission to support Allied war recruitment, promote America’s image among its allies and lay the ground for the day when its enemies, having been brought to their knees, could be restored to the family of nations on American terms. As Willkie’s four-engine Consolidated C-87 — appropriately named Gulliver — hopped between countries, he met everyone from Stalin in Moscow and de Gaulle in Beirut to the Shah in Tehran and the Chinese nationalist Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing. The Idealist is Samuel Zipp’s idealizing and less than ideal account of how Willkie briefly captivated the American imagination.
Willkie already subscribed to the internationalist vision he would refer to in a bestselling manifesto-memoir as ‘One World’. This son of Indiana, his conscience already troubled by domestic failures of government in matters racial, left home with his antennae sensitized to the ill effects of colonialism. His globe-spanning trip — 31,000 miles, seven weeks, 13 countries, five continents — intensified his belief in an interdependent future. Willkie, who never quite recovered from the failure of the League of Nations, became increasingly convinced that America must lead a new world, safe from isolationism, nationalism and imperialism — excepting, of course, the liberal American kind.
Born in 1892 in Elwood, Indiana into a family of lawyers (his mother was one of the first female attorneys in the state), Willkie joined the family business. His brilliance as a trial attorney representing public utility concerns landed him a prestigious Wall Street job with Commonwealth & Southern. He eventually became president and CEO and received national recognition for his performances in the Tennessee Valley Authority hearings of 1938. As the Republican presidential nominee, he lost to FDR in 1940; he would run again for the Republican nomination in 1944, but lose.