REPUBLICANS: Story of a Train

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Last week one of the strangest journeys in U. S. history neared its finish. Through 30 States, for 17,300 miles, for seven long weeks, the Willkie train had rolled. Endlessly the U. S. flowed past. Now the mountains had gone by, the people standing, still and lonely-looking, in the thin, chill air; the prairies had fled by the windows, people waving from the little houses on the flat plains. Through the fruitlands of California, north through the forests to Portland, Seattle, east through the mountains of Montana. Oil lands, cattle lands, deserts and mountains.

Through the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska, east to Wisconsin, on to New York, rolling, rolling; the landscape still brilliant with autumn, but the greens no longer fresh, the reds beginning to fade.

There had never been such a train. Over rusty freight spurs that had never carried a passenger train, deep into industrial Roosevelt areas, north to Detroit, south to Toledo; Pittsburgh, New Jersey, New York again; out to Chicago, St. Louis, crisscrossing the big electoral-vote States —seven times through Illinois—back to New York, out again, south to the border States, back to New York, always rolling, almost always late. In the dark green, twelve-car special train sat men who had lived there since Sept. 13. They bore the air of those who had now experienced everything and couldn't believe it. One of these veterans said last week: "I haven't had a bath since Sept. 22 at Portland, Ore.—over a month. I don't dare."

Cause of this strange journey, and principal passenger, was a bull-thewed man named Wendell Willkie. Up & down its rocking corridors, talking in torrents, gesturing in giant swipes, he strode. He lived and worked in the last car, the Pioneer, the mahogany-paneled private car in which Franklin Roosevelt once traveled. Just ahead of the rear platform was a glass-walled observation lounge, the candidate's living room, heavily carpeted, with a deep sofa, four club chairs—all chintz-covered—lamps, a radio, smoking stands. Beyond it were bedrooms for the candidate and his slight, pleasant wife; one for huge, lumbering Brother Ed; a section fitted as a dining room; a kitchen; compartment for maids, secretaries, aides and two New York City detectives, Stephen Buckley and Rudolph McLaughlin —both on the Manhattan payroll of Third Termite Fiorello LaGuardia.

In the car just ahead was the "squirrel cage"—the staff of experts and writers whose job was to dig up facts, rough out drafts for Willkie speeches. Head of the squirrel cage was dark, intense Russell ("Mitch") Davenport, onetime FORTUNE managing editor, whom Willkie affectionately calls "The Zealot." Others: Pierce Butler, dry-witted, sunken-cheeked Minneapolis lawyer, son of the late famed conservative Supreme Court Justice; "Bart" Crum. smart young San Francisco lawyer; Raymond Leslie Buell, jug-eared foreign affairs expert; blond, sharp-eyed young Elliott V. Bell, former New York Times financial expert. Their routine was agonizing and invariable. One would be given a speech to write. When he had sweated his brains out over it, two or three colleagues rewrote it completely.