Willkie likely to adopt passive role
May limit talks to GOP platform
By Lyle C. Wilson
New York –
Wendell L. Willkie was reported today by his closest associates to believe that it is best for him to take no part in the selection of a Republican presidential nominee either before or during the party’s national convention in Chicago in June.
But he is determined to measure carefully the men, their records and the platform which emerge from that gathering. Prior to the convention, however, he probably will speak clearly on the type of platform he believes should be adopted.
To speak more freely
On the first weekend after his spectacular withdrawal from the presidential contest, associates described Mr. Willkie as feeling that he has recaptured his independence. Henceforth, he is expected to speak his mind even more freely than prior to last week’s Wisconsin primary which swamped his 1944 presidential aspirations.
Some weeks probably will pass before Mr. Willkie resumes discussion of political issues. His plans are understood to be to so a great deal of listening – especially to the men most prominently mentioned for the Republican nomination – and to undertake to measure them and their records against the issues of the day as he sees them.
Shuns ‘stop’ campaign
Mr. Willkie has told his friends that he does not intend to participate in any “stop” movements directed against any candidate nor to promote the candidacy of any man. but repeatedly in conversations with his friends, Willkie has said he intends to “say what I think.”
His friends were hopeful, but Mr. Willkie had few illusions during the latter weeks of his pre-convention campaign. Associates explained that Mr. Willkie had recognized for months that powerful forces in the Republican organization hoped to repudiate his candidacy.
Local organizations were generally uneasy over Willkie’s stand on post-war international affairs. But the Willkie camp feels that this doubt was stimulated to outright opposition by the organized effort of a group of powerful party leaders including Joseph N. Pew Jr. and Ernest T. Weir of Pennsylvania and the New York State and Illinois party organizations.
Dewey, Stassen backed
They say this opposition backed delegates pledged to New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey and delegates pledged to LtCdr. Harold Stassen, former Governor of Minnesota, particularly in those Wisconsin districts in which no Dewey delegates were entered.
Wisconsin returns were so overwhelmingly against Mr. Willkie’s candidacy that no single issue could be cited as the central factor. But the Madison, Wisconsin, speech of Senator Joseph H. Ball (R-MN) is counted by Willkie adherents among the hardest blows struck in that campaign.
Mr. Ball was Cdr. Stassen’s manager and chief campaigner. He is reported to have told a Madison audience that his man was committed to the post-war territorial integrity of Germany – that there should be no post-war political dismemberment of that country.