A Suggestion for Willkie

Last week Wendell Willkie was at Jupiter Island, Fla., sleeping, reading, basking, bicycling for exercise. He had not yet helped the Republican Party solve the problem of who would be its national chairman for the next four years. Whether he would try to keep Representative Joe Martin in the job or let the post pass to the hands of some willing party hack was a question still in suspense. Columnist David Lawrence, in his United States News, seized the moment to make a wholly unorthodox suggestion.

Traditionally, the chairman of the national committee is expected to do little between elections except raise money and hold the party together. State research bureaus grow moldy, contact between national and State party headquarters virtually ends, party headquarters settle down to the long, slow snores of their political hibernation. Worst of all, leadership of the party as a whole ceases to exist. Said David Lawrence: "It is not likely that the Republican Party will win a national election in our times unless it gives up the idea that it can do in three and a half months what an incumbent administration, possessed of the power of publicity and funds, can do in three and a half years. . . . Impressions and prejudices for or against parties and their candidates are deeply set long before a national convention picks a candidate. It is the work done between elections that accounts for enough votes to constitute the balance of power."

For these reasons David Lawrence picked his own candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee: no less a person than Wendell Willkie himself.

No candidate for President ever took such a job afterwards. But Columnist Lawrence pointed out its advantage to Willkie and the party: 1) he would have a powerful voice in party leadership; 2) he could acquire closer familiarity with national affairs, bring efficiency and planning to the national headquarters; 3) party leadership developed in conferences could be effective inside as well as outside Congress, could prevent contradictions like those that made the Republican record on defense and foreign policy a handicap in the 1940 campaign. As a salaried executive ("It ought to pay a man as much as does the Presidency"), Mr. Willkie could make speeches, stimulate party organization and "become the most constructive minority voice the country has ever known."

If unorthodox Campaigner Willkie should take the job proposed, the U. S. would see something new under the political sun. Last week he got off his bicycle and flew to Manhattan to speak at the National Interfraternity Conference, urge a higher standard of political debate, ask greater aid to Great Britain ("We must continue to help the fighting men of Britain to preserve that rim of freedom which is gradually shrinking and which, if we permit it to continue to shrink, will shrink to the edge of our own shores"). But at week's end he was still mum on the subject of the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee.

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