Post-election Life
After the election, Willkie became a fervent internationalist and an unlikely ally of Roosevelt. To the chagrin of many Republicans, Willkie spoke out for controversial Roosevelt initiatives such as Lend-Lease, and campaigned against isolationism. In 1941, Willkie joined with Eleanor Roosevelt to found Freedom House. On July 23, 1941, he urged unlimited aid to Britain. As Roosevelt's personal representative, he traveled to Britain and the Middle East in late 1941, and to the Soviet Union and China in 1942.
In 1943, Willkie published One World, a book for popular audiences which recounted his world travels on the Gulliver and urged that America accept some form of "world government" after the war. One World was a best-seller that marked his transformation into a major spokesman for internationalism and made him a controversial figure within the Roosevelt administration and among his Republican colleagues, but it helped move public opinion from isolationism to internationalism. Its publication also extended Willkie's contacts with the world of literary critics and film executives.
Read more about this topic: Wendell Willkie
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.”
—Jacques Attali (b. 1943)