The Gentleman From Michigan

by HERBERT ELLISTON

A MAN may be known by his heroes. Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg had two heroes: - Alexander Hamilton, about whom he wrote a couple of immature books, and St. Paul, about whom he planned a studied work. The two starts in his life testify to the robustness both of his politics and of his Christianity. If there was a common denominator for Hamilton and St. Paul, it was their vehemence. What they believed, they believed with spirit and gusto, and were unwearying in trying to bring men around to their convictions — whether by Report or by Epistle. Vandenberg made his own journey to Damascus. Whether he saw a great light on the road, as the editors of his Private Papers relate, is problematical.

The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg (Houghton Mifflin, $5.00), edited by his son, Arthur H. Vandenberg, Jr., is a labor of love, for young Vandenberg was an uncommonly loyal son and sacrificed his own career from his youth to serve his father. The Senator, indeed, was very fortunate in his family. His wife cared for him devotedly, and when she fell by the wayside of a cancer, the heart of the Capital went out to him. Before she died the Senator in his turn fell ill. One of Washington’s tragedies was the knowledge that the Senator and his wife were dying together. Vandenberg’s nephew, General Hoyt Vandenberg, now Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, was almost in the role of son, and one of the revelations of the book is Arthur Jr.’s description of the influence of Hoyt upon his uncle.

Arthur Jr. inherited a mass of papers and diaries collected or written by the indefatigable Senator. He enlisted Joe Alex Morris to help him put the material together and to shape it into book form, and they had assistance from John L. Steele. Morris and Steele are competent newspapermen, and they seem to have done much of the writing of the connective tissue between the diary entries.

Vandenberg’s conversion from isolationism to internationalism was marked by a speech in the Senate on January 10, 1945. An old newspaperman, He used to try out his speeches on his journalistic friends in Washington. One was the New York Times’s James B. Reston, and on this occasion Senator Vandenberg read over his notes to Mr. Reston and asked for his opinion. The speech in this first draft was a denunciation of Soviet policy, elicited by Soviet treatment, of Poland, for whose interests he had a ballot-box affiliation. The eloquent Vandenberg in this initial draft expressed the anger and indignation of millions of hyphenated Poles.

Reston, however, suggested that it was not enough in that crucial period of our history to denounce and inveigh. Why didn’t the Senator, from his distinguished position, cap his inveighing and his denouncing with a constructive solution?

Impressed by opportunity and having a sense of the savior role, Vandenberg took counsel of himself, and the second draft contained a constructive solution in the shape of the offer of a four-power alliance. The result was sensational. The warning against foreign entanglements had become GOP scripture, gripping the Old Guard Republicans in a rigid intellectuality. There had been rebels, of course, like Warren R. Austin, but Vandenberg’s was the first break with the Harding, or neo-Hamiltonian, tradition. Hamilton, being a highly original mind nourished on its environment, would certainly have approved, as the bulk of the country did.

Indeed, the reaction to the famous Vandenberg address was electric. Overnight Vandenberg became a towering figure in political America, and from all parts of the country the mail flowed in, approving and even ecstatic. You would almost have thought it was the speech of the century. The occasion had found the man in Arthur Vandenberg.

Vandenberg is often thought of as a modern Henry Clay; and certainly he was, as Congressional staff members called him, “a great legislative engineer.” The Michigander dominated the Senate after 1945. There was in his oratory a Boom! Boom! technique, but it commanded attention. His periods were rounded, even flamboyant, and he loved his own words and phrases — for instance, “ insulationist” for “isolationist,” “unpartisan for “ bipartisan.” But they read even better than they sounded. He is said to have strutted as he sat, and he struts as he writes, particularly in his diary. But the mannerism was incidental. Where he sat, there was the head of the table, whether he was presiding over the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, taking part in a committee hearing with his colleagues or at some international gathering, or handling the gavel over the Senate.

In my experience in the Capital I have never known a man who was more missed by his colleagues than Vandenberg. His papers show why. Vandenberg gave an elevated tone to the Senate which disappeared when he died. He bestowed a leadership to the Congressional handling of foreign affairs which has never been recovered. He was always on hand to keep the Administration from going off the deep end in matters pertaining to relations with Soviet Russia or the United Nations. If there was any bipartisanship, it was his doing, and it lapsed with his departure. He virtually alone in the legislature eschewed part isanship in crisis.

Vandenberg had almost a Rotarian liking for his follow men. His co-workers became “great guys” in his eyes on the very heels of association. That F.D.R. didn’t like him and that Vandenberg didn’t like F.D.R. was unique but understandable. Prima donnas are seldom friends. Yet Vandenberg did more than any other man to try to achieve F.D.R.’s aims in world affairs. He played the leading part in the San Francisco charter-making for the United Nations. He shouldered a good deal of negotiation there as if he were the treaty-making power himself. No wonder he had a great liking for Secretary Stettinius. Vandenberg was mentor to the pliant but unknowledgeable Ed, and was furious when Stettinius was dropped, imagining that a constitutional arm’s-length relation would govern the LegislativeExecutive liaison which had been built up to rule the peace-making.

This did not occur. On the contrary, there was no setback as long as he lived to the ExecutiveLegislative liaison, and the peace-making, or cold war-making, was politically harmonious. This was America’s good fortune, and the extent of that good fortune was shown in the area where partnership did not prevail — the Far East. Not enough is as yet known about the extent of bipartisanship over China. At the beginning there is evidence of it, but the professional politicians of the GOP, egged on by the China lobby, saw much political capital in the tragedy of China and came to use Chiang Kaishek and Formosa as a club to beat the Truman Administration. Vandenberg never stooped to the tactics of his partisan colleagues. But he went along with the attack, though he could not swallow either the excesses of the GOP or the disingenuousness of the Administration. As evidence of the latter there is a significant notation of his disbelief in the sedulously circulated myth that General Marshall was not responsible for his mandate for the China mission. Marshall, in Vandenberg’s opinion, “would not have undertaken a mission” for which the terms of reference were written for him by State Department underlings.

To the last the United Nations was Vnndenberg’s “baby,” and when the Administration sought to bypass it, as it did on the application of the Truman Doctrine to Greece and Turkey, Vandenberg was an avenging angel. We miss him for his worldmindedness. The Administration is nowadays in one of its cold spells toward the United Nations, thus playing into the hands of the Soviet. Vandenberg was always smart enough to realize this. His passion for the United Nations may cause him in some eyes to seem idealistic. He was an idealist, but a severely practical idealist. He recognized there are such things as a world opinion and a world conscience, and that no statesman professing the entire world as his province can neglect either. For this reason he did more than any other man to endow the Charter with criteria of international conduct.

However, he saw the deviousness and the aggressiveness of the Slav long before his fellows. Even in San Francisco he based his charter-making upon Realpolitik as well as his dreams. I say this because he was the author of Articles 52-54, which put world authority back of the North Atlantic Alliance and gave the powers Charter authority to rely Upon regional agreements to keep the peace. As Vandenberg used to say, “it is prudent in more senses than one 1o have a local fire brigade as well as a metropolitan fire brigade.”

Articles 52-54 are an extension of Article 51, which endows the principle of self-defense with Charter authority. In pushing these clauses at San Francisco, Vandenberg’s chief difficulty was with a universalism in the State Department as it existed at the time. In due course he had to resist the opposite tendency in the State Department — that is to say, a provocative reliance on these clauses when the cold war was warming up. There was, for instance, his denunciation of the State Department’s insistence on a blank check for financing and arming any nation that the Department might think lay under potential aggression.

Altogether the Senator represents to me the archetype of the Representative American as this country turns into the now World Era. In life he seemed shallow and opportunist. Examined, his life and work were rich and fruitful, and his instincts were always on the side of humanity. The Private Papers is not his monument, for his frailties came through the candid camera, and his epitaph awaits a historian who can put Vandenberg in the critical context of his times.