Tilting at Windmills.

• Author: PETERS, CHARLES
• Position: Briefs

A Dirty Tricks Primer * The Summer of 1940 * When Conventions Counted Five Star Toilets * The Hitoku Department * Camelot's Outsider * Milwaukee's Finest

"WHERE IS THE NEAREST PUBLIC toilet?" is a question that every tourist has to ask sooner or later and sometimes with embarrassing urgency. I'm happy to report that help is at hand. A woman named Mary Ann Racin has established a Web site called thebathroomdiaries.com that will give you the skinny on where to find tourist-friendly toilets, whether you're going to Paris, Venice, Bangkok, or Chicago.

My wife, Beth, is also a serious student of toilets, although her field of concentration is somewhat narrower than Ms. Racin's. Beth's specialty is ritzy hotels. She long ago learned that, as the wife of an impecunious editor, she is unlikely to enter these establishments as a paying customer. But she discovered that she can use the facilities for free and afterwards soak up the privileged atmosphere as she saunters through the lobby. So before you take your next trip, give Beth a call, and she'll make sure that, if you have to go, you'll go in style.

THE CONVENTIONS THIS YEAR were, except for a few good speeches, boring to almost everyone but relatives of people on the podium. They made me yearn for the time when conventions meant something. The last close race was between Reagan and Ford in 1976. Before that you had to go back to the Kennedy-Kefauver contest for the vice-presidency in 1956, and Taft and Eisenhower in 1952. There was a close vote between Harry Truman and Henry Wallace for the vice-presidential nomination in 1944. If Sam Rayburn hadn't arbitrarily adjourned the convention (against a chorus of "no's" from the delegates) after the first ballot, Wallace would probably have won, which just proves that Mr. Sam knew when to be arbitrary, because Henry Wallace would have been a disaster as president.

But the most exciting convention in my lifetime was held by the Republicans in 1940 in Philadelphia. Taft and Dewey were the main candidates and Arthur Vandenberg was the other candidate of party regulars. Wendell Willkie was the only clear internationalist in the field. The other three were at that time relatively isolationist. This was important because the crucial issue that summer was aid to Britain. Prance had fallen just before the convention began. Britain stood alone against Hitler. Roosevelt wanted to help England, but since America was just beginning to emerge from a long period in which isolationism was definitely dominant, any pro-British steps he took were politically dangerous, particularly since this was an election year.

So everyone, including me at age 13, who felt that the future of the world hung on our getting help to Britain, was desperately rooting for Willkie. There were enough of us to pack the galleries at the Philadelphia Convention Hall, chanting "We Want Willkie, We Want Willkie!" I was back home listening to the radio and rooting as intensely as I did for my favorite baseball team. On the first ballot Dewey, Taft, and Vandenberg got 625 votes to Willkie's 105. But he began to climb steadily until he was finally nominated on the fourth or fifth ballot. It was not only hugely exciting but k changed history. Roosevelt was able to risk sending guns to help rearm the soldiers who left theirs behind on the beaches of Dunkirk but more important he was able to send the British 50 destroyers desperately needed if the Royal Navy was to repel a Nazi invasion. Just a couple of weeks after the first of those destroyers sailed, Hitler decided to postpone the invasion indefinitely.

SOMETHING ELSE FDR did that summer of 1940 that it is hard to imagine his doing without Willkie was to propose a military draft. This country had never had conscription when it was not at war. Here again the fact that 1940 was an election year magnified the political risk.

The good guys of this period have to include the media mogul Henry Luce. His publications, Time and Life, were at the height of their power, and Luce used that power to help mobilize support for the draft, aid to Britain, and for Wendell Willkie. Luce, a complex and difficult man, was far from being always right, but that summer he was absolutely right on the issues that counted most.

FOR ME THAT SUMMER OF 1940 compares to no other period in my life except...