 Historian Hugh Ross argued that in gaining the nomination, Willkie "gave exceptional promise of being a winner. There were ample precedents from American political history in which a minority party, queasy over prospects for survival, bypassed professional leadership to entrust its political fortunes to a man without political experience. In most of the previous instances, the nomination had gone to a military man. In 1940, it went to a businessman." Richard Moe, in his book on the 1940 election, suggested that the nomination of Willkie left long-lasting scars on the Republican Party, with conservatives angered by the success of the Eastern Establishment wing of the party, "whatever else it did, Philadelphia gave birth to the bitter proprietary division within the Republican Party, one accentuated by ideology and geography, that would define the party for decades to come." Among those converted from isolationism by Willkie's oratory, and who worked intensely on the Willkie campaign in Michigan, was Gerald R. Ford, who wrote many years later in his memoirs, "I now realize that my participation did not make much difference at all to the political fate of Wendell Willkie. But it made a lot of difference to me."
