This week Eleanor Roosevelt curled her claws, wrote in My Day: "And so Mr. Wendell Willkie has been nominated. . . . I do not know Mr. Willkie, but the headline in one of the metropolitan papers yesterday said: 'Willkie aims at unity, defense and recovery.' ... In heaven's name, will anyone aim at anything else? Sometimes I wonder whether we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something. ..."
A master at saying indefinite things is Mrs. Roosevelt's husband. He was never in better form than last week. For his first press conference after Utilitarian Willkie was nominated, Mr. Roosevelt was 20 minutes late. Said he with a grin: the elevator (to his second-floor quarters) had stopped; somebody had turned the power off; he did hope that there was no connection with what had happened in Philadelphia. Correspondents saw the President glance at his secretary, Brigadier General Edwin M. ("Pa") Watson, heard Mr. Roosevelt stage-whisper to a companion: "He is grinning like a Cheshire cat." And well might Pa Watson have grinned: he won a $25 bet on Wendell Willkie's nomination.
Time to watch Franklin Roosevelt is when he is in just such a lightsome mood. Correspondents watched & listened when the Christian Science Monitor's Richard Strout put a grave question. Did the President plan to invite Wendell Willkie to the White House to fashion "a common front" on foreign affairs, take that momentous subject out of roiling campaign politics? Mr. Roosevelt said he had not thought about it, but would be very glad to see Mr. Willkie (who had said in Philadelphia that he would be delighted to see Mr. Roosevelt). The correspondents marked a Roosevelt-Willkie conference large in their future-books, remembered that President-elect Roosevelt in 1932 was similarly called in by Herbert Hoover.
What newsmen most wanted to know, and none dared ask, was what, if anything, the nomination of Wendell Willkie had done to Mr. Roosevelt's thoughts about Term III. Whatever the answer (the U. S. will have it after the Democrats convene July 15), G. 0. P.'s Willkie turned the last trace of Third Term opposition in the Democratic Party into a frantic demand that Mr. Roosevelt run. Even old Jack Garner, who seldom forgives and never forgets, sadly made up his mind that Franklin Roosevelt was the only Democrat who could beat this man Willkie. Janizaries like Tom Corcoran (see p. 53) trumpeted that Mr. Roosevelt now had no choice left; party hacks let it be known that his refusal to run now would be gross betrayal of the Party. Then came a pause, a susurrant scratching of New Deal heads. Until last week no one had stopped to think what Mr. Roosevelt might do if the G. 0. P. came up with a red-hot candidate who would also be a powerhouse as an administrator. All in all, Wendell Willkie got no greater tribute than the one thus implicitly paid him in Washingon last week.