Serving the National Interest

[question everything]

By Richard Aldous

On April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died suddenly in Warm Springs, Ga., leaving Harry Truman to assume office as 33rd president of the United States. Truman, who had been reluctant to serve as vice president, told a friend: “I feel like I have been struck by a bolt of lightning.” Many wondered whether he was up to the task of commander in chief.

Watching from the Senate, Republican Arthur Vandenberg wrote to the new president with words of encouragement. “Good luck and God bless you,” he said. “Let me help you whenever I can. America marches on.” In his diary, he was more pensive: “The gravest question-mark in every American heart is about Truman. Can he swing the job?” To which the optimistic answer came, “Despite his limited capacities, I believe he can.”

Those words seem extraordinary today. The Republicans had not won a national election since 1928... After 12 years of humiliation and defeat, FDR’s death could have provided Republicans with an opportunity to get on the front foot, to take advantage of an inexperienced and uncharismatic new president. And yet here was Vandenberg, one of the leading Republicans in the Senate, saying not only that he believed the man could overcome his limitations but also that he would do everything he could to help

Lawrence J. Haas’s “Harry & Arthur” is thus a story of bipartisanship at work. Mr. Haas makes an excellent case that Truman’s worldview could not have been implemented without the senator from Michigan. The two men shared a vision for America in the world and over the next six years, until the senator’s death from lung cancer in 1951, set about putting it place. Even a short list demonstrates the revolution in global strategy that would take place during the Truman years: the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, NATO, the U.N. Charter, not to mention the creation of the CIA, the Defense Department and the U.S. Air Force.

Much of the focus of this book is on process—how White House policy was realized through legislative action. That could have been dull, but Mr. Haas, a former communications director for Vice President Al Gore, writes with an admirable lightness of touch and a command of detail that is enhanced by his insider knowledge of how Congress and the White House operate. This is a first-class story, well told, of professional politicians working in tandem during a world crisis in the best interests of the republic. At a time when the public and even Washington itself seems to have lost confidence in the political process, the Truman-Vandenberg partnership is a timely reminder of what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they instituted the separation of powers in the first place.

(snip)

The senator was pivotal after the 1946 midterms, when the Republicans became the majority in both houses of Congress. He took over the chairmanship of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee... he introducing measures such as the “Vandenberg Resolution,” which in 1948 gave the president the latitude to negotiate the collective defense agreements that became NATO, something that infringed on the Senate’s traditional prerogative regarding declarations of war.

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http://www.wsj.com/articles/serving-the-national-interest-1460585027

[malthaussen]

1. Well, both parties broadly agreed on what constituted the national interest.

Rightly or wrongly, it was all about stopping Communism, and that was a "national emergency" pretty much everyone could agree on. Moreover, it was considered emergency enough that it was important for the nation to give a greater appearance of unity than might not, in fact, have been the case.

These conditions don't obtain now, hence there is no motivation for the parties to do anything but serve their own interests and augment their own power. Whether that is a correct assessment of conditions now or not, there is certainly no agreement on any universal external threat to our integrity or our hegemony.

-- Mal