Beneath the Uproar

Western Europe watched last week's political hoedown with its heart in its mouth. But Europe's politicians were learning that they need not worry much about the tumult and shouting of the U.S. political campaign. If they had learned enough, they watched one man. That man was Michigan's Arthur Vandenberg.

As he had many times before, the Republicans' Vandenberg was leading the fight for the Administration's foreign policy. One day last week, clad in a gleaming white linen suit, Vandenberg took the Senate floor to present a resolution, which was the next great pillar in the slowly building structure of U.S. postwar foreign policy.

Against Aggression. The resolution, drafted with the full collaboration of the State Department, approved U.S. "association" with regional alliances for mutual defense under the U.N. Under it, the President would get tacit and prior approval to negotiate arrangements for mutual defense with Europe's Western Union. The Marshall Plan had offered the U.S.'s immense resources to assure Western Europe's economic security against Communist disruption. The Vandenberg resolution was its military corollary.

Under Vandenberg's patient prodding, the Senate approved overwhelmingly, 64 to 4. The resolution was not binding on the President or on the country. Another Congress was free to amend, or even to reverse it. But for the first time in U.S. history, the U.S. Senate had approved, in principle, a peacetime military agreement with democratic nations on the continent of Europe.

By Indirection. Earlier in the week, Vandenberg had rushed to the rescue of ECA itself. Appearing at his own request before the Senate Appropriations Committee, he sharply and eloquently denounced the House's $2 billion slash in funds for European recovery (TIME, June 14).

The cut, said Vandenberg, would brand U.S. policies as "capricious, unreliable and impotent." Its effect would be "to repeal by indirection" the whole intent of ECA. Said Vandenberg:

"Western Europe accepted our good faith and proceeded to prove their own. They did it at the hazard of serious reprisal. . . Any such cynical reversal would be a major policy decision which should not be made through the back door of an appropriation bill. Indeed, it should not be made at all."

Senator Vandenberg did not question the right of appropriations committees to weigh and to cut individual figures. But he scathingly denounced the House's "meat-ax technique" in arbitrarily stretching appropriations over 15 instead of twelve months.

Emphatic Approval. Others quickly chimed in. New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey issued a statement backing the full appropriation. So did California's Governor Earl Warren. Presidential candidate Harold Stassen rushed to Washington to plead with Congress not to "tarnish the national honor of our country." Secretary of State Acme Marshall declared that "the crux of the whole affair [is] confidence in the integrity of leadership of this country."

But the decisive voice had been Vandenberg's. If leaders of the House had deliberately planned the cuts, as some charged, to force Vandenberg's appearance as a champion of internationalism, the plot had badly misfired. Vandenberg's testimony might have proved unpopular in the old-guard baronies of the G.O.P. But it had met with the emphatic approval of the U.S. people, and it added to his already impressive stature. At week's end, the Appropriations Committee unanimously approved restoration of all but $245 million of ECA funds, largely by restoring the appropriation to a twelve-month basis. New York's John Taber bellowed his protests. But the House, with some minor exceptions, would accept the restored funds with as good grace as possible.

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