willkie stayed until after midnight. fdr's secretary later said that from the sounds of laughter that she heard coming from the study, she could tell that the two men really enjoyed being together. fdr and willkie became a team and continued to work together during the war until willkie died suddenly in october of 1944. a few weeks before that november election. by then the g.o.p. wanted nothing do with their former candidate and they wouldn't even let willkie speak at the 19 e -- 1944 party convention. roosevelt's speech writer wrote that fdr admired willkie and was profoundly eternally grateful for his support in the battle against isolationism and fascism. once sherwood overheard fdr's closest aid harry hopkins make critical remarking about willkie to the president, sherwood wrote that roosevelt angrily slapped hopkins down and said don't ever say anything like that around here again. don't even think it. you, of all people, ought to know that we night not have had selective service or a lot of other things if it hadn

wendell willkie like roosevelt was an internationalist, believed that the allies should be helped. by taking that position, took that out of the campaign. which was a great help. and other issues out of the campaign and have a hard time finding something to run on and that is why the campaign got personal and nasty by the end. when the result was elected, he could move forward more boldly. what he proceeded to do was step-by-step increase american aid to the allies, increase the buildup of american armaments and in every way possible find out what's that would increase the finances available for all of this because this was going to be an unprecedented set of expenditure, revolutionized during the war. the way it was revolutionize is a way that might surprise you. it was not a case of soaking the rich. it was more occasions of moving the exemption down farther and farther until millions of people who never had to pay taxes did have to pay taxes. not just the middle but the lower middle and even below now found themselves having to pay taxes and that never went away. that is where y

or i'll tell you the story about will -- willkie james. he went to florida to start a plantation where he would pay black laborers and create a kind of new brook farm that didn't really work out because of great backlash against the free black in the south. and so i wanted to tell these kinds of stories also partly because i believe that history is embodied and is up embodied -- is often embodied in people at this particular time who are, as i said, confident, confrontational, eccentric, sometimes fanatic, often fanatic and who may or may not compromise -- that's one of the book's subtitles -- and who intent on redefining the american nation and also doing that i wanted to cleanse myself as much as possible of perceived wisdom. lots of things we do know about. but there are numbers of things that we think we know about, particularly me who always feels that she's been miseducated and in that case one such example would be the person thaddeus stephens who you may have met most recently in the spielberg "lincoln" movie where he was played by