Willkie appealed to many convention delegates as the Republican field's only interventionist: although the U.S. remained neutral prior to Pearl Harbor, he favored greater U.S. involvement in World War II to support Britain and other Allies.

After the election, Willkie made two wartime foreign trips as Roosevelt's informal envoy, and as nominal leader of the Republican Party gave the president his full support.

Willkie is remembered for giving Roosevelt vital political assistance in 1941, which helped the president to pass Lend-Lease to send supplies to the United Kingdom and other Allied nations.

[4] Herman Willkie, who had come from Prussia with his parents at age four, was intensely involved in progressive politics, and in 1896 took his sons to a torchlight procession for Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who had come to Elwood during his campaign.

[5] By the time Willkie reached age 14 and enrolled in Elwood High School, his parents were concerned about a lack of discipline and a slight stoop, and they sent him to Culver Military Academy for a summer in an attempt to correct both.

In 1909, aged 17, his journey took him from Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he rose from dishwasher to co-owner of a flophouse, to Yellowstone National Park, where he was fired after losing control of the horses drawing a tourist stagecoach.

Back in Elwood, Herman Willkie was representing striking workers at the local tin plate factory, and in August journeyed with Wendell to Chicago in an attempt to get liberal attorney Clarence Darrow to take over the representation.

[11] Willkie joined his parents' law firm, but volunteered for the United States Army on April 2, 1917, the day President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany.

She got her way, and in May 1919 Wendell Willkie successfully applied for a job with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio as head of the legal office that advised workers on wills and other personal matters.

He was a delegate to the 1924 Democratic National Convention, and supported New York Governor Al Smith through the record 103 ballots, when the nomination fell to former West Virginia congressman John W. Davis.

Willkie warned that New York capital might avoid Tennessee if the TVA experiment continued, and when Roosevelt gave a speech in praise of the agency, issued a statement rebutting him.

The meeting was outwardly cordial, but each man told his own version of what occurred: the president boasted of having outtalked Willkie, while the executive sent a soon-to-be-famous telegram to his wife: "CHARM OVERRATED ...

When the Senate narrowly passed a bill for the breakup, Willkie made a series of speeches asking the public to oppose the legislation, and a storm of letters to congressmen followed.

After the House of Representatives defeated the breakup clause, investigation proved that many of these communications were funded by the electric companies, signed with names taken from the telephone book, though Willkie was not implicated.

The three leading candidates for the 1940 Republican nomination were all isolationists to varying degrees: Senators Robert A. Taft of Ohio and Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, and Thomas E. Dewey, the young (only 38 years old), "gangbusting" Manhattan District Attorney in New York City.

[47] Willkie arrived by train in Philadelphia on June 22, two days before the convention, and immediately attracted attention by walking from 30th Street Station to his hotel, answering questions from reporters and anyone else who could get close enough to be heard.

When the head of the Committee on Arrangements, Ralph Williams (deemed likely to support Taft), died just before the convention, he was succeeded by the vice chairman, Sam Pryor, a firm Willkie backer.

[58] Willkie had offered the vice presidential nomination to Connecticut Governor Raymond Baldwin, a key supporter, but scuttled those plans after his advisors and Republican officials felt that a New York-Connecticut ticket would not give sufficient geographic balance.

[78] The endorsement of CIO head John L. Lewis probably gave Willkie Michigan, and he gained ground in the suburbs and rural areas, but Roosevelt consolidated his 1936 coalition of working-class Americans, ethnics, and white Southerners to take the election.

[99] According to Dunn, Willkie's mission was to be Roosevelt's personal representative, "demonstrating American unity, gathering information, and discussing with key heads of state plans for the postwar future".

In Jerusalem, Willkie met with Jews and Arabs, told the British rulers of Palestine that both peoples should be brought into the government, and he later wrote that the conflict there was so ancient, it was unrealistic to think that it could "be solved by good will and simple honesty".

The following April, he published One World, a book Van Doren edited, in which he recounted his travels and urged America to join a supernational global organization after the war was successfully concluded.

Willkie's call to put an end to "our imperialisms at home" in One World was the first time that many Americans had heard such a public figure cast doubt on US domestic policy around race.

[110] Willkie warned Republicans that only a full commitment to equal rights for minorities would woo African Americans back to the party, and he criticized Roosevelt for yielding to Southern racists among the Democrats.

He urged integration of the armed forces, and when a violent race riot broke out in Detroit in June 1943, he went on national radio in order to criticize both parties for ignoring racial issues.

"[114] In his argument Willkie quoted Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson by saying that the people could, if they deemed it necessary, remake the government, and he stated that Marx's view of revolution was mild by comparison.

Few Republican members of Congress were by then willing to support Willkie, and he dropped to second place behind General Douglas MacArthur in polls of likely voters in the party's 1944 presidential primaries.

Willkie attracted large crowds in most places, and he told them that the Republican party would fail unless it accepted the New Deal and recognized the need for the U.S. to remain active in the world after the war.

[131] The following night, after giving his speech in Omaha, Willkie addressed the crowd: I quite deliberately entered the Wisconsin primary to test whether the Republican voters of that state would support me ...

Wendell and Edith Willkie rest together in Rushville's East Hill Cemetery, the gravesite was marked by a cross, and a book was carved in stone, designed by sculptor Malvina Hoffman, and inscribed with quotations from One World.