REPUBLICANS: Willkie Makes a Manifesto

Willkie Makes a Manifesto

At 7:30 one morning last week, when downtown Manhattan was quiet as a bank vault, Wendell Willkie hurried into his skyscraper office, to start one of the biggest projects of his political life: to lead the Republican Party away from Isolation. He discovered that he had forgotten his key. While he waited for the janitor to let him in, he stamped up & down the hall outside, thinking over his problem and his opportunity, composing in his mind a manifesto.

Four days before, when the House passed the ship-arming bill (259-138), Willkie talked with three Republican Senators who shared his views on foreign policy—Vermont’s Austin, New Hampshire’s Bridges, South Dakota’s Gurney. These men knew that Administration strategy was first to repeal the ban on arming merchant ships, later to ask repeal of Sections 2 and 3, which prohibit U.S. ships from entering belligerent ports and crossing combat zones. They agreed to do what Administration supporters would not: move for repeal of the Neutrality Act in its entirety.

Now the Senators had done their part; for the first time since the war began, a group of Republicans had gone beyond the Administration in pushing an aggressive foreign policy. The reaction was astonishing. Soon after they moved for outright repeal, three ardent interventionist Democrats—Florida’s Pepper, Oklahoma’s Lee, Rhode Island’s Green—rushed in with a sweeping amendment of their own: to permit U.S. ships to enter belligerent ports, to cross combat zones. But that was not repeal. Moreover, since Pepper, Lee and Green had not consulted him.

Democratic Leader Alben Barkley was irritated. So was testy Tom Connally, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The two went into a huddle to work out still a third amendment which would prevent the Republicans and up start Democrats from getting credit for spurring repeal. Sounding like a W. C. Fields of the Senate, Senator Connally told reporters as he went into conference with Barkley: “We are going to mix the hellish broth tonight.”

The three Republican Senators had had an influence out of all proportion to Republican interventionist strength in the Senate. But for Wendell Willkie the problem was part of the whole dilemma of Isolationism and an effective opposition.

In his mind there was no end of opportunities for seizing leadership in foreign affairs, maintaining a critical independence on domestic issues: > The U.S. was not sending as much stuff to Britain as Britain needed, was still helping largely with words.

> Arming merchant ships, rather than repealing the Neutrality Act, was a timid and futile gesture that discouraged London and encouraged Berlin.

> In domestic affairs the lack of a clear-cut Administration labor policy hampered defense.

Willkie believed that Republican voters shared his views, that only the Republican Party—the network of officials, state and county chairmen, functionaries generally —was largely against him. Willkie believed that unless the Republican Party pushed ahead of the Administration, it was bound to die. Despite the opposition of Republican Congressmen (113 Republicans had voted against the bill), despite Isolationist Republican opposition to him (a gentle comment was that he had wrecked the Party), he was convinced that at least 140 of the 160 Republicans in Congress were far from satisfied in the position in which they found themselves, were not hidebound, and had drifted to their stand as a result of 20 years of Republican isolationism.

Willkie got into his office with his arguments down pat, began to scribble (on the back of an old letter from Indiana’s Congressman Charles Halleck) a sort of proclamation of Republican independence from Isolation: “The requirement of America today is for a forthright, direct international policy, designed to encompass the destruction of totalitarianism by whatever means necessary. This policy should be presented to us by our elected leader frankly and not by doses as though we were children.

“Equally important is a sane, just, firm and immediate solution of our labor-industrial relations to the end that the utmost of production can be brought about. . . .

“The desire of many in the Administration to rewrite our social and economic life under cover of the national effort must be ruled out. . . .

“Millions upon millions of Republicans are resolved that the ugly smudge of obstructive Isolationism shall be removed from the face of their Party. . . .

“Congress is now considering certain modifications to an act called the Neutrality Act. This act was not of Republican origin. . . . Whatever purpose [it] . . . may have served originally, it serves no useful purpose now … it in effect constitutes aid to Hitler . . . proclaims our neutrality in a struggle in which neither the people nor the Congress have shown themselves neutral . . . and … is preventing the fulfillment of a policy of aid to Britain and her allies which the American people overwhelmingly endorse. …” The Willkie statement went out to Republican Party functionaries throughout the U.S. By nightfall the ex-candidate had 100 signatures of endorsers, two refusals. Signers included six Republican Governors, eleven former Governors, 26 members of the Republican National Committee, Republican dignitaries from 40 States.

In Washington the Senate Foreign Relations Committee briefly held closed hearings, approved (by 13-to-10) the Connally-Barkley amendments to the Neutrality Act to permit U.S. ships to be armed, to enter belligerent ports, to cross combat zones. Senate debate began.

As a test of Republican sentiment, the list of signers to Willkie’s manifesto was inconclusive. As a move in the struggle to shift Republican policy away from Isolationism, it promised to be historic. Said Pundit Arthur Krock: “[Willkie] had been marching so long and obediently in the President’s foreign policy column . . . that those at the head no longer kept an eye on him. . . . What, therefore, was the surprise and embarrassment of the Generalissimo and his staff when the follower dashed in front of the leader with a following of his own. . . . Mr. Willkie struck at the President’s foreign policy in its weakest spot. He exposed how vulnerable is the ‘step-by-step’ strategy. By his own bold and unexpected move he forced that imitation which is the sincerest flattery.”