Wendell Willkie

And so kind of out of that effort, even though we've never been a governmental institution, there was this quiet discussion about what outside groups could do to help support that argument from the outside.

And our co-founders, Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's wife, obviously, and then Wendell Willkie, who interestingly had just run against FDR and lost the presidential election the year before, banded together to found Freedom House.

Our initial efforts were mostly as an advocacy organization, so prominent Americans, not all from politics, but also from business.

We had people from Hollywood on our initial board.

So it wasn't just a

metaphor? No, there's a plaque, I just

walked by yesterday, actually honoring Wendell Willkie that faces the old Freedom House, which has now been destroyed, unfortunately, and doesn't exist.

But in that building, many other nonprofits in their early phases were given space and allowed to kind of create and begin to do their work, including on U.S. democracy.

[orchestral music] Last February, two American organizations, the Willkie Memorial and the Common Council for American Unity, established an award consisting of a flight around the globe.

A flight intended to dramatize and perpetuate Wendell Willkie's concept of one world.

The first winner of the award, chosen on the basis of contributions already made to this ideal, was the CBS playwright and producer Norman Corwin.

Last June, Mr. Corwin, with Lee Bland of CBS and a magnetic wire recorder, set out on a globe-circling trip, in the course of which they preserved 100 hours of the voices and opinions of the people of 16 countries.

And there the concept of one world had the toughest going, among the helpless, the homeless, the underfed, the underpaid, the undereducated, the underprivileged.

And it seemed to me that not the least job to be done is to distribute hope or the reason to hope among those elements of great populations who today are hopeless and helpless.

If the confidence of a lawyer in Prague and a businessman in Bathurst could be shared with the fellahin of Egypt and the untouchable of India and with the widow of Lenuvio, then perhaps we'd be getting on toward the world of Wendell Willkie's dream.

But in the meantime, as I went around, the widow became to me a symbol of hopelessness.

It was a hero of the Italian anti-Nazi resistance fighters, Rodolfo Benvenuto Sanego, who, to me, best represented what that understanding was in Italy.

This man, who rose to be chief of the partisans through his valor and skill, had never heard of Wendell Willkie or the phrase one world.

Not much news or information got through to them in their mountain hideouts, but the idea of one world got through on its own.

And in Rome one night, Sonego told us about it.