Harry in England. Chapter Seven: Willkie in London not for long. But too long.
Wendell Willkie's brief visit to war-torn England reminded all the authorities of why Americans were so overbearing. But not the common folk. They loved him. Going home he nearly got a wife.
This Chapter: Wendell Wilkie’s visit to England was like an extension of his presidential campaign without all the mistakes he had made in losing to Roosevelt. The result was a rowdy circus that the British common folk loved but the leadership simply failed to understand. He gave every moment a glancing blow from his outsized presence and personality, even to a hasty flirt with the Queen of the British Empire. George VI was not amused.
Contents of “Harry in England”:
Queen Wilhelmina and Edward R. Murrow
Meeting The VIPs
With Winston
“Even to the end.”
“A little touch of Harry in the night.”
The Good Grind of Hard Work
Willkie comes to London. Not for long, but too long.
Hopkins Reports Details of British Needs
“Lord Root of the Matter.”
Chapter Seven: Willkie in London not for long. But too long.
Reading time: Twelve minutes
Wendell Willkie considered himself, for some good reasons, a singular man of his time, if not for all time. In the first place, he was one of fewer than thirty Americans to have run second in the race for the presidency. Among those, he received more votes — 22,304,755 — than any of them, more votes in fact than any of the elected, other than Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt got slightly fewer votes in 1940 than he had in 1936, and Willkie’s total was nearly six million more than the Republican candidate, Alf Landon, got in 1936. As Willkie saw it, he drew six million more Americans to the polls in 1940 than had shown up in 1936 and they all voted for him. More, it was the only time his name had ever appeared on a ballot.
Not two months before he was nominated, a mere two percent of Americans even knew who he was. Having risen from obscurity he was now determined not to return, not to be consigned to the musty pages of history, like Lewis Cass and Benjamin Gratz Brown and other losers. He would be relevant in the national, even the global, conversation for all his days to come. He would accomplish that by being the Wendell Willkie who electrified the convention delegates with the powers of big personality and big ideas, and not the Willkie who had gone down to defeat carrying the chains of a Republican Party that had lost touch with America and her great aspirational strength.
Buried in the data was another truth, and its meaning eluded him. He was nominated by one thousand people and defeated by fifty million. He was a room-filling presence, a big man with a common touch, but national elections were driven by radio, not by bear hugs, and Roosevelt destroyed him in that arena. Willkie read his speeches. Franklin Roosevelt delivered his.
Willkie’s PanAm Clipper took the straight route to Europe. The weather and the winds were benign, and at stops in Bermuda, the Azores, and Lisbon he enchanted all he encountered, shrugging off his schedule to wade into crowds with back-slapping love. “If I felt any better, I would be dangerous!” he told the press and the people who trailed him. It was a warmup for his performance in England.
As his land-based plane made its approach to Bristol, he was so exuberant he paraded in the aisle and fell flat on his face. He wore a tie with his name woven in diagonal stripes on the slim chance he wouldn’t be recognized. He didn’t just appear before the big gang of reporters. He entered them, embraced them, and asked their names.
“Glad to meet you boys,” he said. “I feel fine. As a matter of fact, I never felt better in my life. A presidential campaign plus England in the space of twelve months is a lot in a man’s life. I feel mine is as rich as any man alive. I am very glad to be in England for whose cause I have the utmost sympathy.”
He flew from Bristol to London on Churchill’s Flamingo and set up headquarters in three ground-floor rooms of the Dorchester Hotel, thought to be the safest in the city for its solid construction. He hugged his chambermaid, stood with a policeman as he directed traffic, commandeered a bicycle, autographed whatever was pressed upon him, and buttonholed soldiers bearing evidence of war wounds to ask about their health. He marched three blocks to the Ministry of Information for a press conference, waving at the people who leaned from their windows and cheered him. The press met him with cheers of their own. He strode to the podium and said, “Shoot me your questions and shoot them fast!”
He had meetings, of course, with Churchill, Eden, Beaverbrook, and others, but on his way he stopped in pubs for a pint, a flirt with the ladies, and a game of darts. Eden was not impressed, but kept his opinion to his diary where he wrote, “The man has none of the charm of Hopkins, who is quiet with a subtle humor, and speaks with the added appeal of a man who appears not to want to. Willkie is overbearing and talks with the healthy pleasure of a man who likes to hear his own voice.” Willkie reciprocated and not to himself, telling his aide within earshot of a British officer who passed it on, “These people must find somebody better than that to succeed Churchill. You open the front door and find yourself in the alley.”
Everywhere Willkie went, and he went everywhere, he enchanted the people and annoyed the authorities. From a bunker in Dover as a German fleet of bombers flew over on their way to inland targets, he was treated to a close look at the anti-aircraft defense. He found it lacking and told the officer in command, “You need to teach your boys to lead the approaching aircraft better. Get some on the job who have shot birds on the wing.” He visited the shelters during attacks and drank their coffee and kissed their babies. He sat in the gallery at a House of Commons debate. When an alarm sounded, the debate went on as if it was nothing. Willkie stood and applauded their courage.
Beaverbrook treated Willkie to a Fleet Street dinner where he was regaled. The Times columnist wrote, “Surely no two men were ever less alike than Willkie and Hopkins. Willkie is big, human, generous, and reassuring. Temperamentally and physically he is the kind of man you would like to have as a mountain guide or as a companion in the rough quarters of a seaside port. One feels he could punch with the force of a heavyweight or be strangely gentle with a child. If that reads like an excursion into sentimentality I cannot help it. Mr. Willkie is a romantic figure.”
The Canadian High Commissioner didn’t think so. He attended a Willkie cocktail party at the Dorchester and said, “His visit here seems like an extension of his election campaign. His sitting room was like a campaign committee room with henchmen and secretaries running around while the great man shook hands with everyone. I tried to make conversation but he shook my hand while looking over my shoulder at the others. Harry Hopkins, by contrast, is such a quiet, unassuming, shrewd, and sensitive man.”
Churchill invited the great man to Chequers for the weekend, and included Harry but he preferred to give Willkie his space. He spent that weekend with Beaverbrook at his estate, Cherkley, which was about the size of Ditchley. Willkie said he could only make it to Chequers for Saturday, and he left early Sunday for Manchester, Birmingham, and the docks of Liverpool.
*
Beaverbrook and Harry took walks, ate well, and talked for two days. He said, “Winston is the most important man in the world at the moment, though your president may soon surpass him if your trip and its result produce the weight that is necessary to crush Hitler. Winston has a vision of what is to come and what to do about it that staggers me. And I’m not easily staggered. He understands the simple principle that war ends only in death. Yours or his.
“He insisted that fighter aircraft would, might, defeat the air attack that he expected. Spitfires and Hurricanes, he said. Lots of them and quickly. Do it, he said. Stop at nothing. And I delivered. Yes, I said ‘I’. I seized our factories and when I saw their size as easy targets I broke them into smaller component factories so the bombers couldn’t find them so easily. I savaged downed aircraft, theirs and ours, for spare parts, and I worked people until they collapsed. I succeeded. We won that battle by driving them out of the daylight. Our fighters hurt them so much they gave up daylight assaults. The bombing now is hell, but it’s blind hell. It’s killing people but not our capacity to produce.
“While it was going on, Winston saw what was happening and what would come and he said bombers had to come next. Build bombers that can carry heavy loads to Berlin. As if that’s just a turn of a screw to do. He said he wanted ‘an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.’ Let me show you what I have given him.”
They took a short flight to an airfield where Beaverbrook — he was “Max” by now to Harry — showed him a new Lancaster bomber. It was powered by four Rolls Royce Merlin engines and could carry six tons of bombs to Berlin and get back home.
“We have slipped over the months in our bombing attacks, only about half as many bombs dropped now as last summer, but this bomber will change that. Except we can’t afford to build them, enough of them, and fast enough. But we will. I will, by God, find the way. Do you know how I will?”
“No. Tell me.”
“Because I have taken everything else off the plate of my concerns. No worries about women and no worries about my newspapers. Those issues, which for so long took so much of my time, are no longer of my interest. And I am a hard man when I turn to a task. Do you know what I say a hundred times a day?”
“Yes. I know. You say, ‘What’s next?’ ”
*
Harry wasn’t so unassuming that he ignored Churchill’s concern that Willkie was insisting on a short trip to Ireland “to talk sense into that DeValera fellow.” Willkie was concerned that avoiding Ireland would make him seem captive to England and risk his support among Irish Americans, which was, though he didn’t know it, negligible. Winston didn’t want to forbid the excursion, and wasn’t even sure he could, but he had no appetite for chewing on the Irish bone at that moment. Harry cabled the problem to Roosevelt who asked Majority Leader Alben Barkley to set an early date for Willkie’s Senate testimony and cable him with the news. To make the appearance, which Barkley set for Tuesday, the 11th of February, Willkie announced that he would have to cut five days off his trip and depart on Friday, the 7th. The Congressional testimony was, after all, the crowning moment of the full experience.
Harry met with Willkie that Monday, the 3rd. He asked him if he would have a report for the president, and Willkie said he had none. “I’m here on behalf of the people of Britain and the people of America. They are my constituents.” He said he had nothing in writing. “I’m not a note taking guy. I have measured morale and it is strong.” He said his new departure date didn’t affect his determination to see DeValera before he left.
Harry phoned the White House from the Embassy and passed the news to Missy LeHand who called Juan Trippe of PanAm to ask if he could come up with a good reason, like headwinds and bad weather, that would force Willkie to get out of town sooner than Friday. Trippe said he would use “west winds aloft since it also has the virtue of being true.” Willkie would have to depart for Lisbon late Tuesday to make the connection to Bolama, Recife, Trinidad, and Puerto Rico, or risk missing the main event.
Missy said that seemed like a transparent lie. “The winds from Bolama to Recife will also be westerly, won’t they?”
Trippe said, “No, not at the equator, and not then.”
Missy said, “Really? Juan, here’s the rule on baloney we use at the White House. Don’t let it get in the way of deniability.”
Trippe said, “Missy, are you challenging my meteorological bona fides?”
She gave him the point, but the baloney, or the truth if that’s what it was, wasn’t enough to interfere with the international intentions of Wendell Willkie. On Tuesday morning, Willkie flew to Dublin and spent an argumentative hour with the intransigent DeValera, whose contempt for Winston Churchill was rivaled only by that of Adolf Hitler. He was holding Ireland in a neutral status and denying the British access to ports, and his position was intractable. Willkie came away from the meeting saying, “I talked straight talk to the man. I was pretty rude.” He might as well have shouted into a pillow. Whitehall shrugged. At least he was going home.
His afternoon, the last before leaving, was spent with the King and Queen for tea. Willkie asked for scotch instead. The Queen said he must be tired and Willkie said, “Well, never too tired,” which the lady’s husband took to be a suggestive wisecrack.
And he was gone.
In Bolama, he told the tribal chieftain he had seen his daughter bathing in the river and admired her beauty. The chieftain took that, as custom had it, as asking for her to become one of his wives. Willkie had an actual wife, Edith, back home in Indiana, and a steady squeeze, Irita Van Doren, in New York, so he declined. The chief was offended, and not easily discouraged. He sent a canoe expedition, with the daughter prettily presented on a platform, to the Clipper as the great man boarded, and narrowly escaped.