A Great American

It was Jan. 10,1945. A big, white-haired man with an owlish look rose at his desk in the U.S. Senate and began to read from the manuscript before him. His resonant voice rolled across the quiet chamber: "Each of us can only speak according to his little lights--and pray for a composite wisdom that shall lead us to high, safe ground." So Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg, of Michigan, swung into a 39-minute oration which galvanized the Senate.

U.S. security, he argued, could be won only by continuing to act in concert with other nations. "I do not believe that any nation hereafter can immunize itself by its own exclusive action," he said. "Our oceans have ceased to be moats." He wanted the U.S. to go forward into a new internationalism--the only road, as he saw it, to world peace.

The Luckiest Man. It was one of the dramatic moments of congressional history. For 20 years, Arthur Vandenberg had been a Hamiltonian nationalist (he had written three books on his hero). In the years before World War II, his nationalism had led him into isolationism. On that day in January, he stood at a crossroads. The speech in which he announced his change of mind transcended party politics, laid the groundwork for bipartisanship in foreign policy ("unpartisanship" he preferred to call it), and lifted Congressmen up to a new faith. Senator Vandenberg was not the single author of bipartisanship, but he was its acknowledged leader. As such, and as the man who knew precisely what measures would get Senate approval, and as a man who could drive those measures through, Arthur Vandenberg was the most important U.S. foreign policy leader in Congress for the crucial years 1945-49. In a contemplative moment, Arthur Vandenberg once said that he was "the luckiest man alive." In some respects, he was. His father, a harnessmaker, went bankrupt in the panic of 1893. But nine-year-old Arthur went to work, prospered in a line of schoolboy enterprises, quit the University of Michigan after a year, and got himself a job on the Grand Rapids Herald. There he admired and studied the flamboyant oratorical style of Michigan Congressman William Alden Smith, who later bought the Herald. Vandenberg looked up one day from his typewriter to confront Alden Smith himself, who had just been elected a U.S. Senator. Smith announced to his young assistant: "My boy, you are now editor and publisher of this newspaper." "Van" was 22. Ten years later he was chairman of the Republican state convention, and master of an oratorical style worthy of Smith. He was a power, though a small one, in the G.O.P. At 44, he announced himself a candidate for the U.S. Senate against an able Democrat, the incumbent Woodbridge N. Ferris. The able Democrat died. The governor appointed Vandenberg to fill out the term. He was subsequently elected in 1928, re-elected in 1934, 1940 and 1946.

The Nationalist. He was energetic, grandiloquent, an inveterate smoker of the denicotinized cigars which were to become almost a trademark. He was thoroughly aware of his senatorial position. His sharp-eyed critics in the press gallery dubbed him "the pouter pigeon with the kewpie smile." In domestic politics, he voted against the more radical measures of the New Deal, but voted for relief, Social Security, the New Deal housing program. He was the father of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act.

In foreign policy, in the years before World War II, he generally closed his own eyes and tried to close the eyes of the nation to any affairs overseas. Four weeks after Germany invaded Poland, he said: "This so-called war is nothing but about 25 people and propaganda." He voted against the draft act and its extension, against Lend-Lease, against the repeal of the Neutrality Act.

What brought about his conversion was no vision on the road to Damascus. It was simply the result of Vandenberg's slow, earnest reasoning. But on that day in January 1945, an ordinary man became an extraordinary man, applauded for his eloquence, admired for his courage. Arthur Vandenberg's "little light" became, indeed, a considerable beacon.

He spoke at a moment when the near-victorious alliance of the United Nations was beginning to show its first cracks. Vandenberg, like others at that moment, still failed to detect where the real stress lay. He interpreted Russia's hungry, reaching out for neighboring states as merely an effort to shield herself in the future from a sometime rearmed Germany and Japan. He misread, or failed to read, the axioms of Lenin. But in broadest terms, he was right.

Franklin Roosevelt, grateful for Van-denberg's Senate speech, appointed him a delegate to the United Nations founding convention in San Francisco. Vandenberg went to San Francisco with the firm intention of getting the need for an international bill of rights written into the U.N. Charter, and liberalizing the restrictive Dumbarton Oaks draft (particularly on the rights of neighboring nations to join in pacts of mutual defense). He won his points.

The True Nature. Vandenberg became a delegate to U.N. General Assemblies. He accompanied his old Senate friend, James Byrnes, then Secretary of State, to Europe. By then Vandenberg had begun to discover the true nature of Communism. In Paris, after sitting across from the Russians for 213 days, he persuaded himself and helped persuade Byrnes of the validity of a new policy of "patience and firmness." He was no Republican handmaiden of Administration policy. He was sharply critical of the Administration's vacillating China policy. Vandenberg went along with the Administration only on those proposals on which he had been consulted in advance and had had a chance to approve or modify.

It was in the Senate, his natural habitat, that he was most effective. When the Republicans captured Congress in 1946, Vandenberg became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. In the two years in which he guided it, his committee considered 31 bills and resolutions, passed every one unanimously. Among them were the Truman Doctrine, the "Rio Treaty," the European Recovery Program. It was largely through Vandenberg's skill as a legislator that the massive funds for ERP were successfully pushed through Congress.

The Reaffirmation. In those two years, the U.S. had taken some of the most momentous steps in its history. Vandenberg not only guided the steps with his eloquent, sometimes florid, always earnest, espousal of U.S. internationalism; he made them possible. At a time when no Democrat stepped forward to take leadership of the nation's foreign-policy program, Vandenberg assumed the burden. He rode herd on the balkiest members of his own party, hammered patchwork Administration proposals into workable legislation. He was talked about for the 1948 Republican presidential nomination, but would do nothing whatever to further his own chances. Sitting at night in his Wardman Park Hotel suite, he pecked out on his old typewriter the speeches that determined the course of many a foreign-policy debate. With the Vandenberg Resolution, he laid the basis for the structure which was to become, a few years later, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

But by then Vandenberg was a sick man, racked by intermittent headaches. In July 1949, he was to make the last important speech of his career. He appealed in the Senate for support of the North Atlantic

Treaty. It was the reaffirmation, once more, of Arthur Vandenberg's belief in the nation's new role in the world. "Once upon a time we were a comfortable, isolated land," he said. "Now we are unavoidably the leader and the reliance of free men throughout this free world. We cannot escape from our prestige nor from its hazard." Vandenberg prayed that the world would not misinterpret U.S. motives. The U.S., he said, only wanted peace--but it must be "peace with righteousness."

Return to Grand Rapids. The luck of the luckiest man in the world was running out. He had to go to the hospital and have a rib and half of one lung removed. After that he was able to return only occasionally to the Senate, and he had a presentiment that he would never really return to active duty. His wife was dying of cancer. Torn with his own pain, carrying the problems of the world on his bulky shoulders, he ministered to her and nursed her. In June 1950 he buried her, continued alone on interminable trips to the hospital for treatment.

In March 1950 he made his last senatorial gesture--a long letter addressed to Paul Hoffman, in which he pleaded for an end of Republican sniping at bipartisanship. On July 12, 1950, emaciated, sunken-eyed and doomed by cancer, he made his last appearance in the Senate chamber. He returned to Grand Rapids and his old home on Morris Avenue.

Last January his doctor reported that Vandenberg had rallied, could expect soon to return to Capitol Hill. But then he suffered another relapse. He was confined to his bedroom in the old family homestead in Grand Rapids, rarely knowing a conscious hour without pain, growing weaker day by day. There, last week, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, at 67, found his own peace with righteousness.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.