A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
MR. WENDELL WILLKIE has come and gone, having in the ten days he was here done an amazingly good job of work. His mere physical endurance is astonishing. On Tuesday, his last day here, he flew from Manchester to Ireland, spent an hour and a half alone with Mr. de Valera, lunched with him and his Cabinet, flew back to London, had three- quarters of an hour with the King and Queen, returned to his hotel to face about a hundred journalists for half an hour or so, and after dinner talked with the utmost freedom and without a sign of fatigue till within ten minutes of his final departure from London with a small but (apart from myself) distinguished company collected by the good offices of Mr Henry Andrews and his wife Rebecca West. The conversation was definitely " off the record," as Mr. Winkle puts it, and off the record it will remain, needless to say, so far as I am concerned. But the personal impression Mr. Willkie makes is eminently a matter for record. He is quiet, deliberate in speech, disposed to think before he answers, except when his ideas are already clear-cut, as they generally are, for he is a man who very definitely knows his own mind, sound and shrewd in his judgements of both men and things, and with a peculiarly attractive vein of dry humour. His advocacy of our cause in America will without question be forcible, reasoned and, it is hard not to believe, highly effective. Mr. Willkie, I gather by the way, does not take the view that America expects or desires anything in the way of a statement of war-aims beyond what could appropriately be indicated in a considered speech or two by the Prime Minister.
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