Absent Voice

A worn man, seriously ill, last week quietly injected himself into Washington's wild-swinging brawl over the State Department. Arthur Vandenberg, the Republicans' leading expert on foreign policy, had been absent from the Senate floor for six weeks. Slowly recuperating from a lung operation (TIME, Oct. 10), he was forced to spend long hours in bed every day. While he was out of action, and partly because of his absence, the nation's bipartisan foreign policy had gone to pot.

Some Republicans, determined to make Secretary of State Acheson a campaign issue, were ready to talk until election time. New Hampshire's Styles Bridges announced that a "whole group of Republicans," with himself as lead-off man, planned to "go after" Acheson. Ohio's Robert Taft said that he had encouraged Wisconsin's McCarthy to press his charges that there are Communists in the State Department, and told him "if one case didn't work out, to bring up another." Many responsible Republicans deplored McCarthy's antics privately, but most stayed publicly mum.

The Overriding Need. In this situation, Arthur Vandenberg sat down in his apartment and picked out a letter on his typewriter. The means he chose to make his influence felt were characteristically devised to offend his colleagues as little as possible. His letter made no reference to McCarthy or Acheson. He addressed it to Paul Hoffman; its subject was EGA, but it was obvious that Vandenberg was addressing many others.

"Our overriding need is to clearly understand the victories we have won in this cold war and how we won them," he wrote. Those victories, he went on, had been fashioned by almost-forgotten bipartisan cooperation. EGA itself was "launched as an unpartisan enterprise," established by a Republican Congress working with a Democratic executive. "This working unity typified our finest traditions and our greatest safety in the presence of external hazards to all Americans, regardless of party."

The Factual Spirit. There had been disappointments, Vandenberg conceded, and there was reason for legitimate and necessary criticism; the "impact of Communist aggression in the Far East" could not be ignored. "These are essential subjects for judicial congressional survey in that same factual spirit which must continue to strive to put our country first in our consideration."

In foreign policy, cooperation and the factual spirit had for some time been conspicuously lacking. The Democrats, if they wanted bipartisanship, would have to do more to include the Republicans, as Vandenberg once put it, in the "takeoffs as well as the crash landings" of foreign policy. And Republicans on their side had a duty to criticize, but they also had the duty to be responsible about it.

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