"In August of 1942, as fascism threatened to sweep the world, Wendell Willkie, a charismatic Republican businessman who had run for president two years earlier, boarded the Gulliver and set out with Roosevelt's blessing on a journey by air around the world. As he visited the battlefront in North Africa with General Montgomery, debated a frosty de Gaulle in Lebanon, met with wavering officials in Istanbul and Tehran, almost failed to deliver a letter...