Win With Wilkie

The transcript of Zell Miller's speech is here.

My father's family -- his father was a small-time freelance electrician who once wired N.C. Wyeth's barn -- were dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, and I still have a box of "Wilkie" buttons in the attic, so maybe the part I like best was this tribute:

In the summer of 1940, I was an eight-year-old boy living in a remote little Appalachian valley. Our country was not yet at war but even we children knew that there were some crazy men across the ocean who would kill us if they could. President Roosevelt, in his speech that summer, told America "all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger."

In 1940 Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee. And there is no better example of someone repealing their "private plans" than this good man. He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the time. And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.

Shortly before Wilkie died he told a friend, that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between "here lies a president" or "here lies one who contributed to saving freedom," he would prefer the latter.

Where are such statesmen today?