The Idealist

In 1942, in one of the stranger second acts in American political life, the failed Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie went on a 31,000-mile tour of thirteen countries, acting as an informal ambassador for the war policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, against whom he had so recently campaigned. The tour was a media sensation; Willkie's account of the trip, One World (1943), became a runaway best seller. Willkie's tour often features in histories of U.S. foreign relations as a minor set piece—as a moment in the prehistory of the United Nations, as evidence of a new U.S. interest in internationalism, as an expression of space-time compression in the age of the airplane. But in The Idealist Samuel Zipp has paused and zoomed in, providing us with our most detailed reconstruction and analysis of the One World moment. Using Willkie's global tour as his narrative structure, Zipp gives an illuminating account

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