The Willkie What-If: F.D.R.’s Hybrid-Party Plot

A remarkable thing almost happened to the two-party system in the summer of ’44: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic President, about to be nominated for a fourth term, began a political flirtation with Wendell Willkie, the businessman Republican he’d defeated four years earlier, with the idea of forming a joint venture. No matter that, in 1940, Willkie had criticized the slowness of the economic recovery and, as Hitler’s Germany overran Europe, what he saw as American unreadiness. The two candidates had mostly agreed on big questions—above all, on sending military aid to Great Britain. Willkie’s sharpest criticism of F.D.R. focussed on his quest for a third term, a break with a two-term tradition that dated back to George Washington. “The doctrine of one man’s indispensability is a new doctrine for this country,” the Times editorial page noted, not approvingly, when the newspaper endorsed Willkie.