Roosevelt, Churchill, and ... Willkie? Charles Peters on how a little-known utilities executive saved civilization.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing "We Want Willkie!" Convention of 1940 and How It Freed FDR to Save the Western World - Book Review

Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing "We Want Willkie!" Convention of 1940 and How It Freed FDR to Save the Western World By Charles Peters Public Affairs; $26.00

The big difference between Charles Peters, founding editor this magazine, and those of us who came to work for him over the years is this: He believes in idealism while we want to believe in idealism.

Peters is part of the celebrated Greatest Generation that lived through the Depression, World War II, and the New Frontier--a time when the American political process called forth leaders who inspired the public to service and sacrifice. We, on the other hand, members of the generations that followed, came of age in very different times--Vietnam, Watergate, the Carter and Reagan years, the Clinton wars--when something like the opposite spirit has been ascendant. We look back on the character of that earlier era with admiration and some envy. We wish the country could be like that again. We know that the immense challenges America faces today--rising oil prices, the war in Iraq, the coming fiscal train wreck--will be very difficult to overcome if Americans and their political leaders cannot rise above their self-interest for the greater good. But little in our experience of American politics makes us think this will occur or even allows us to imagine how it might occur.

Thankfully, Peters has written a book that vividly recreates how, once, it did happen--the American electoral process, amidst bitter partisan divisions and backroom manipulation, produced a stunningly wise, beneficent, and forward-looking result. Five Days in Philadelphia is about the 1940 Republican convention. Peters brings this largely forgotten event delightfully to life with details plucked from archives, his own memory of the times, and a persuasive, How-the-Irish-Saved-Civilization-style argument that the convention was a pivotal moment in world history.

In Philadelphia that July, an isolationist and conservative GOP, desperate to deny Franklin Delano Roosevelt a third term, chose as its candidate a liberal internationalist, Wendell Willkie. And though Willkie did not in the end defeat FDR, he did something almost as consequential: He gave the president the crucial political running room he needed to ask the voters to make sacrifices in preparation for war. "If we can understand how and why people rose to their best," Peters writes, with characteristic clarity about the point he's trying to make, "then maybe...