Idealist

de Samuel Zipp

"In August of 1942, as fascism threatened to sweep the world, Wendell Willkie, a charismatic Republican businessman who had run for president two years earlier, boarded the Gulliver and set out with Roosevelt's blessing on a journey by air around the world. As he visited the battlefront in North Africa with General Montgomery, debated a frosty de Gaulle in Lebanon, met with wavering officials in Istanbul and Tehran, almost failed to deliver a letter from FDR to Stalin in Moscow, and was seduced by a shrewdly manipulative Chiang Kai-shek in China, Willkie was struck by the insistent demands for freedom sweeping the world. It was in these distant battlegrounds that he came to understand the true nature of the global war America had only recently joined. In One World, the runaway bestseller he published on his return, Willkie warned of the dangers of "narrow nationalism" and urged his fellow citizens to embrace "equality of opportunity for every race and every nation." Willkie's celebrity at the height of the age of broadcast news--he regularly drew over 30 million listeners--meant that he could take on America Firsters and reach Americans directly in their homes. His call for a more equitable and interconnected world had an electrifying impact on the nation, but his tragic death in 1944 silenced one of America's most effective globalists, a man FDR referred to as "Private Citizen Number One." At a time when "America First" has once again become a rallying cry, Willkie's message is at once chastening and inspiring"--