The news that media mogul and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s on again, off again consideration of an independent presidential bid is on again puts maverick businessman Donald Trump’s GOP primary candidacy in a slightly different perspective.
Charlie Cook, an astute political observer, recently noted that no presidential candidate without experience in political office has ever been elected president. This is true only if you classify the military careers of all the generals elected to the presidency as a form of “political experience.”
In 1992, computer mogul H. Ross Perot got 19 percent of the national vote running as an Independent. Unlike Michael Bloomberg, Perot had no prior experience running for or being elected to office.
The first—and so far only—big businessman to be nominated to run for president as the candidate of a major party was Wendell Willkie, nominated by the Republicans in 1940 to run against FDR’s successful third term bid.
Willkie presents some interesting comparisons and contrasts with Trump, and also Bloomberg. Born in Indiana into a family of German American abolitionists, Willkie was a college student radical before becoming a corporate lawyer representing Commonwealth and Southern (C&S), the giant public utility that opposed Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority. He moved to New York City in 1929. Even so, he remained a Democrat with a social conscience, not leaving the party until 1939 when Roosevelt’s decision to seek a third term convinced Willkie that he might get nominated and elected president as a Republican.
Not even entering primaries, Willkie ran as a dark horse candidate at the GOP’s Philadelphia Convention in June 1940, held just after Hitler conquered France. He beat New York City’s DA Thomas E. Dewey, whose Isolationist views contrasted with Willkie’s commitment to aiding the British short of war.
A short, powerfully-built man of extraordinary personal magnetism (his extramarital sexual appeal extended to Claire Booth Luce, the wife of Time publisher Henry Luce), Willkie wore rumpled suits, and a country haircut, and spoke with an Indiana twang that contributed to his image as “a man of the people.” No rube, he had a first-rate mind. While losing to FDR, Willkie provided him with vital cover for the Lend Lease Program to aid the Allies as well as the institution of a peacetime draft.
After losing, he emerged as a strong bipartisan voice for Internationalism, especially after Pearl Harbor. He still harbored ambitions to be renominated in 1944, but was rebuffed by Republicans who considered him too liberal and cozy with Democrats. He died tragically of a heart attack in 1944 at the age of 56. Willkie shared charismatic qualities and “maverick” businessman appeal with Donald Trump. Like Trump, he wasn’t easy to pigeon-hole ideologically, sometimes playing both sides of the partisan political aisle. He was not the egomaniac Trump is, but had certain demagogic tendencies of his own which, however, he generally kept under control.
There was no malice nor spite in Wendell Willkie. Were that also true of Donald Trump!
Willkie lacked Michael Bloomberg’s valuable experience as New York City Mayor, but like him was intelligent, wealthy, and independent-minded. In fact, there was speculation that—had he lived—Willkie might have joined Roosevelt New Dealers and Internationalists after the war in pushing for some kind of a center-left political realignment of the Democratic Party that might appeal to Independents and liberal Republicans.
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