Willkie in Print

One day last week Publisher Roy Howard buzzed around Philadelphia in a green sports coat, green-striped flannels, green bow tie, green shirt, green pocketchief. Mr. Howard was happy, and for a reason. Said he, just before he snaked G. 0. P. Wendell Willkie away for a weekend on the Howard yacht Jamaroy: ". . . Willkie is a newspaper candidate instead of a radio candidate. That appeals to me. . . . It had been getting so that candidates were considering newspapers a secondary medium, using newspaper presentation as a sort of by-product of their radio speeches."

Many another newsman could pardonably indulge in similar pride. Many also indulged in a contest about "who saw him first?" So hot was the rivalry that Columnist Damon Runyon slyly led off a piece this week: "We are the fellow who did not discover Willkie!" The New York Times's Arthur Krock claimed credit for "the first serious mention" of Prospect Willkie. Basis for this little boast was a Krock column on Feb. 3, 1939 (". . . You can't wholly count out Willkie. But he'll have to go down as the darkest horse in the stable; 1940 will be a little early to bring out a utilities man. But . . . watch Willkie."). Columnist David Lawrence in May 1939 spotted Wendell Willkie as a dark, dark horse. Scripps-Howard's Hugh Johnson, introducing Mr. Willkie to a Manhattan bond club in November, observed that he ought to have the G. O. P. nomination but probably could not get it. The remark set off sparks; the press lightly quoted Candidate Willkie's answering crack: "... I may be looking shortly for some kind of a new job. General Johnson's offer is the best I have had thus far."

Whoever saw him first, a great many people had been aware of Wendell Willkie long before he became a candidate. His utilities battle with TVA was too sludgy to make consistent front-page news. But as long ago as 1935, his utterances on "Government and Public Utilities" appeared in Vital Speeches, were remembered by a retentive few. Between 1936 and 1939, pieces by and about him appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Review of Reviews, FORTUNE, Business Week, Nation's Business, Saturday Evening Post, North American Review, TIME. To a select segment of the U. S. public (including readers of the New York Herald Tribune's Sunday book pages, for which he reviewed Lord David Cecil's The Young Melbourne), Wendell Willkie was no stranger.

Yet, up to convention week, Wendell Willkie was not a front-page figure. Such distinguished organs as Colonel Frank Knox's Chicago Daily News, the Detroit Free Press, the Portland Oregonian found their library cupboards curiously bare of Willkie clippings: At San Antonio, Tex., after the nomination, Express editors were swamped with telephone calls asking: "Who is this man Willkie?" Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, who prides himself on keeping his New York Daily News close to the people, allowed it to surmise on June 21 that the Willkie boom existed principally in country clubs near Manhattan. To San Francisco newsreaders Wendell Willkie was all but unknown when he addressed their Commonwealth Club in March. Publisher Howard met Candidate Willkie in a San Francisco hotel, shared highballs with him, liked him immensely --but let Scripps-Howard papers go on for weeks variously ignoring, kidding, mildly featuring Wendell Willkie. And for the first time in the memory of living man, William Randolph Hearst had had nothing whatever to do with nominating a candidate. The Hearstpapers' handsome recognition of Wendell Willkie after nomination was only less prodigious than their delayed approval of Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. Exceptions notwithstanding, the fact was that the U. S. press as a whole had failed to detect, reflect, report a major U. S. political phenomenon while it was developing.

But certainly it was true that Wendell Willkie was no product of that terrifying little instrument--the radio. His one notable (and highly effective) national radio appearance was on Information Please (TIME, June 24). In 1939, and up to this week, he had made only ten chain broadcasts. Yet by convention time many thousands of voters had very definite impressions about him; he had been climbing in the Gallup polls since early May.

Home Stretch. In its April issue FORTUNE printed Wendell Willkie's platform ("We, the People"), pungently inquired why Willkie-for-President should be "considered politically naive." In the New Republic, Candidate Willkie presented himself as a liberal writing to other liberals (in behalf of civil liberties). And in that month, Wendell Willkie went out to the country, gave the press something to write about. Mass-circulation picture magazines (Look, LIFE) made his face familiar to millions. Such potent newspaper publishers, as John and Gardner Cowles (Des Moines Register and Tribune) met and liked him at their annual convention in Manhattan, went home to spread the Willkie word. Week before the G. 0. P. convention opened, Saturday Evening Post cracked out with a double shot: an article by articulate Wendell Willkie ("Five Minutes to Midnight"), another by Hugh Johnson ("I Am Not Nominating Him").

By convention week, many a pro-Willkie columnist had dropped iffy hesitations, began to clarion that the Party must take Willkie or take a beating. All this was very well for ex-Democrat Willkie; what bred-in-the-bone Republicans wanted was some assurance that he at last was of the true faith. They got their assurance, Wendell Willkie got his accolade from smart, dynamic Helen Reid, whose New York Herald Tribune is a Republican bible. On the convention's fourth day, the Herald Tribune front-paged: "... A man of the people, a Democrat for many years, a Republican by choice, he seems to us to be heaven's gift. . . ." The Philadelphia Public Ledger had just plumped for Willkie; since June 19, Roy Howard's 18 papers had been thunderously thumping. At mid-convention, his bellwether New York World-Telegram had three of its four featured columnists (Clapper, Johnson, Westbrook Pegler) firing for Willkie. To many a G. O. P. delegate--overwhelmed with Willkie wordage--it must have seemed last week that the press indeed had nominated Wendell Willkie.

"Thanks, Mitch." Evidence enough that Wendell Willkie lacked any real publicity organization was the casual, spotty, pre-convention coverage in most of the U. S. press. An exception (in the last weeks) was California: in that abnormal State, advertising aces in the J. Walter Thompson agency did as thorough a promotion job for Mr. Willkie as they had done in 1934 against Upton (EPIC) Sinclair.

Nearest thing to professional publicizing that Mr. Willkie had in the East was volunteered by FORTUNE'S onetime Managing Editor Russell Davenport (who resigned May 2 "to further the nomination of Wendell L. Willkie"). Last week, after the professional politicos had stopped laughing, "Mitch" Davenport received the following wire from Washington: "THANKS A MILLION, MITCH. YOU SAVED THE NEW DEAL, THE FOREIGN POLICY, AND THE THIRD TERM. TOM CORCORAN.

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