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Convention. But last week the preliminaries of the 22nd Republican National Convention were also under way (see p. 17). And the doings in Philadelphia were no matter of amateurs forming committees. In the North Garden of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel the 50-odd members of the Resolutions Committee met, a week early, to ponder the toughest problem faced by the Republican party in 24 years—the foreign policy plank of its platform. Lesser figures were already beginning to talk shop as they leaned over the big oval bar in the Hunt Room of the Bellevue.
Before the Hotel Walton a huge blue and white banner labeled Thomas Dewey swayed in the lazy Philadelphia air—and Candidate Dewey's managers, claiming 433 delegates on the first ballot (other estimates: around 300), had taken 78 hotel rooms for their cohorts. On two sides of the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, Candidate Gannett (48 rooms plus the Harvard Club) stretched banners bearing his picture and the terse contention that he could beat the New Deal. Winding up nine months of campaigning that had bagged him, it was generally agreed, some 275 votes on the first ballot. Candidate Taft had 102 rooms at the Warwick, the Ritz-Carlton, the Adelphia, the Bellevue.
There was no bunting for Candidate Willkie. He had a two-room suite at the Benjamin Franklin.
Speaking last week before Washington correspondents, assembled in the biggest meeting in National Press Club history, Willkie calculated that he would go into the convention with about 70 delegates, be nominated on the sixth ballot. The man who was to nominate him was progressive Representative Charles Halleck of Indiana, no amateur; seconding the nomination would be New York's Representative Bruce Barton.
What made people say that Willkie ought to be President was not that he was more publicly articulate than any other big businessman in the U. S. Nor was it that, by all the standards of a happier period, he lived up to the popular U. S. concept of success—a big (6 ft. 1), sprawling, good-natured, argument-loving individual who was born in a small town, married a small-town girl, raised a son, made good as a lawyer in Akron, Ohio, and moved on to Manhattan to become president, at $75,000 a year, of Commonwealth & Southern. And it was not just the other Willkie attributes—a forthright, independent air that was never explosive, an intangible, Indiana, shaggy quality. His carefully cut hair fell over his eyes when he began to argue, his well-tailored suit bunched around his shoulder when he gestured (a short, clipped, open-handed chop with both hands when making a speech, with one when arguing) and his bulk began to move around, with one leg over the arm of a chair, an arm over the back, as if the chair itself had become too small when he began to talk.
People who thought about Willkie for President recalled that he turned Congressional investigations of TVA into sounding boards for well-phrased defenses of business against New Deal theoreticians; that he held his own with Intellectuals John Kieran and Franklin P. Adams on radio's Information Please, that he was imaginative enough to contemplate leaving business to write a series of novels about the Civil War; that he was progressive enough to insist that many a New Deal reform was here to stay.