To the World

(See Cover)

On the floor of the U.S. Senate last week, Texas' shaggy-maned Tom Connally, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, rose to speak. He had just come from the White House, and he was soon to leave for the World Security conference at San Francisco. With Southern emotion, Tom Connally assured his fellow Senators that he and his seven colleagues on the U.S. delegation would do their utmost to bring back a document which would help preserve peace after World War II.

"We shall not be able perhaps to secure all that we desire," Tom Connally said. "We shall not be able to bring back perfection." But Senator Connally wanted to emphasize two facts: 1) San Francisco will be nonpartisan, so far as the U.S. delegation is concerned; 2) Dumbarton Oaks will be liberalized. Moved by the solemnity of the occasion and of his own words, Tom Connally sat down in tears.

Up rose Michigan's erect and greying Arthur Vandenberg, the Senate's other San Francisco delegate. Arthur Vandenberg is an accomplished and resounding orator. His usual custom is to pile his desk high with green-bound copies of the Congressional Record, lay his carefully prepared manuscript on top, thus leaving his arms free for gestures. Sometimes he has a small lectern brought in. But this time Senator Vandenberg used neither lectern nor notes.

He complimented Tom Connally on his "sturdy statement" and added: "I have no illusions that the San Francisco conference can chart the millennium. Please do not expect it of us. ... But I have faith that we may perfect this charter of peace and justice so that reasonable men of good will shall find in it so much good and so much emancipation for human hopes that all lesser doubts and disagreements may be resolved in its favor. . . ."

The Senators rose in a body and cheered him, as they had Tom Connally. They crossed the aisles and put their arms around the broad shoulders of the two delegates, wishing them well. Majority Leader Alben Barkley, moved by the demonstration, hastily called for adjournment, observing that any other business would be an anticlimax.

The Power. Such was the temper of the U.S. Senate on the eve of the most momentous international gathering since Versailles. That temper breathed reasoned hope and optimism, as it had not done on the eve of Versailles, when rancor and dissension were the order of the day. Like its two delegates, the Senate--which must ratify any charter to come out of San Francisco--did not expect the millennium. But it seemed determined to help achieve some semblance of world order and U.S. adherence thereto, if it was at all possible. That determination was in good part due to a man from Michigan--Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg.

As the conference opened this week, Arthur Vandenberg was unquestionably the most important U.S. delegate present, and perhaps the single most important man. Molotov would loom large because of the power he wields by proxy from the Kremlin; Eden would command consideration as the spokesman and heir apparent of Churchill. But by & large the success of a world security organization would stand or fall on the question of U.S. adherence. And the answer to that question lay with Senator Vandenberg.

Had Franklin Roosevelt lived, he would doubtless have dominated San Francisco. With him on the scene, most foreign nations would have felt that, somehow or other, he would have persuaded or cajoled the U.S. Senate into line. Now that he was dead, the power lay more heavily than ever in Vandenberg's hands. The passing of Franklin Roosevelt had vastly increased the weight of Vandenberg's influence with the U.S. Senate.

That Arthur Vandenberg, once a rock-ribbed isolationist, should thus become a man whose actions and opinions could do so much to shape the peace of the world was a sizable fact. He could have become the Henry Cabot Lodge of 1945, but he did not. Like the U.S., he had learned the hard way: the deadly march of worldwide war had shown him what was wrong with isolationism. It had not been a sudden change: like the U.S., he had come a long, slow way since 1920.

The Speech. Ever since his famed Senate speech of last Jan. 10, Vandenberg had been the marked man of U.S. foreign relations. The most concrete thing he said in that speech was a recommendation that the U.S. and her major allies sign an immediate treaty to keep Germany disarmed by force. This was not a new idea. What gave it international impact was the fact that a leading member of the opposition said it, the earnest way he said it, and the effect of his words on his party and the U.S. at large.

"The reason I made that speech," Vandenberg says, "is that I felt that things were drifting. We were in a vacuum.

Somebody had to say something, and I felt it could be more effectively said by a member of the opposition. If Connally nad made the same speech, it would not have had the same impact. I have read and reread it, to see just what I said and why it had such an effect. I still don't know." But he, and the U.S. people, know that it changed history.

Franklin Roosevelt liked the speech. He knew it would strengthen his hand at Yalta (he took 50 copies along). At Yalta he also made Arthur Vandenberg a mem ber of the U.S. delegation to San Francisco.

In the interval between Yalta and San Francisco, Senator Vandenberg worked long & hard at another project: to liberal ize the provisions of Dumbarton Oaks.

His chief aims: 1) to insure a review of international decisions by the world security organization, especially those made under the stress of war; 2) to infuse into the cold, bureaucratic Dumbarton Oaks proposals a measure of justice, i.e., to add to Dumbarton Oaks a Bill of Rights for the world. He already has this satisfaction: his proposals have been accepted by the U.S. delegation and the State Department and will be offered to the convention.

Making of a Man. Arthur Vandenberg was born in 1884 in Grand Rapids, a town famed for its furniture and its Dutch-descended population. His grandfather helped nominate Lincoln in 1860. His father, Aaron Vandenberg, was a harness-maker who was cleaned out in the Cleveland panic of 1893. After that, Father Vandenberg gave his son the stern ad monition: "Always be a Republican." In the government club at Grand Rapids' Central High School, young "Van," who had a flair for oratory, was the "Senator from Michigan." Few doubted even then that he would like to have the title in fact. He did odd jobs to help out the family finances, tried one year at the University of Michigan, but working and studying were too much. "College is the only job I never finished," he says today.

He came back to Grand Rapids as a cub reporter on the Herald.

Hanging around City Hall, he got to know local politicians. One of his heroes was William Alden Smith, an old-fashioned politico with a sugar-scoop coat and flowing black bow tie, who was soon to become U.S. Senator. In 1907, Smith bought the Herald. The morning after his purchase he walked into the office and found young Arthur Vandenberg sitting in the editor's chair. "I'm here to stay," said Reporter Vandenberg. He stayed -- for 21 years.

Borrowing some money, Van bought Herald stock, prospered, married, bought a house, raised three children. His first wife died in 1916. Two years later he married a former college friend. Hazel Whitaker, a women's-page writer for the Chicago Tribune. The Vandenbergs became solid citizens of Grand Rapids. (In 1928, when the Herald was sold, Vandenberg's stock brought him $549,000.)

Making of an Editor. As an editor, Van paid little attention to the news and circulation departments, concentrated on editorials. Pictures of that era show him a young, round-faced man with heavy, horn-rimmed glasses, sitting by his desk and typewriter, where he pounded out editorials, single-spaced and with almost no margin. He was always smoking a cigar, and he threw the butts behind the radiator.

Editorializing was patently fun for Editor Vandenberg. He was already becoming known in Michigan political circles (his own listing in the 1920-21 Who's Who stated: "Widely known as a popular and political orator"). Politicos urged him to run for this office or that. Biding his time, Vandenberg stuck to his prose--which was oratorical, occasionally thunderous, and often adorned with archaic words. (He still writes with a dictionary on one side of his typewriter and a Bible on the other.)

In the main, he was neither ahead of nor behind current popular thought. He struck a blow for Prohibition, campaigned for capital punishment, denounced Elmer Gantry and the Bolsheviks ("Bolshevism is a sinking ship," he wrote in 1919), and upheld the Republican Party. "With Harding at the helm," wrote he, "we can sleep nights."

His reaction to World War I was typical of the average U.S. reaction of that day. Editorially, he plunged into it with all his fervor, calling it "the greatest revival the world has ever known since Christ came upon the earth." He won an Editor & Publisher award for a stirring editorial on Liberty Bonds, and received President Wilson's commendation for his patriotic stand.

Disillusion came to him, as to most Americans, and on March 4, 1920, he wrote of Woodrow Wilson: "He has toppled from his pedestal. His European interference has won him European hatreds and his American autocracy has cost him American friends. His erstwhile foreign wards stand appalled at his posture, and his erstwhile domestic followers wonder why they were so gullible twelve months ago. One year from today he will pass out of the White House and yield his misused authority to a successor. He must always be gratefully remembered for his magnificent spiritual leadership while we were in the throes of battle. He must also be remembered as the man who after winning the war all but lost the peace.. .."

Making of a Senator. From that time on, Editor Vandenberg became a politician. He got to know Warren Harding, who was also a Midwestern newspaper editor, and helped write the foreign relations sections of Harding's campaign speeches. He enthusiastically supported Henry Cabot Lodge, and is credited with changing William Howard Taft's original enthusiasms for the League of Nations by the sheer force of a searching interview with the ex-President.

Earlier, in his spare time, he had written fiction (mostly about crooked politicians), and also, under a nom de plume (A. V. Hendrick), the words for a song honoring Movie Queen Bebe Daniels (Bebe, Bebe, Bebe, Be Mine), whose father lived in Grand Rapids. Now he turned to sterner stuff. Alexander Hamilton had long been his hero; he wrote three books about him. (Lodge had also written a biography of Hamilton.) The books are largely forgotten, and Senator Vandenberg is glad they are. But the inscription in one is a characteristic example of how faithfully Vandenberg represented, as he still represents, the popular thought of the day. He wrote: "Nationalism--not internationalism--is the indispensable bulwark of American independence."

In March 1928 his chance at the Senate came. He was appointed to fill a vacancy and was elected the following autumn. In the traditionally Republican state of Michigan, Vandenberg has never had much trouble getting reelected, although in the New Deal landslide of 1934 he squeaked through largely because of a Democratic split. Except for California's ailing Hiram Johnson and Kansas' aging Arthur Capper, he is now the ranking Republican in the Senate.

Senator in Action. As a Senator, Arthur Vandenberg has been a Republican independent. One of his heroes in the upper house was the late, great maverick, Bill Borah; when Borah died, Vandenberg moved into his office. He strung along with the New Deal on Social Security, SEC and price control; opposed it on TVA, the Supreme Court packing bill, and consumer subsidies. Some newsmen in the capital began to call him the "Yes and No Man." He is proud of a letter from Democrat Leo Crowley, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., acknowledging Vandenberg as the father of that measure (which the New Deal has often claimed as its own).

Vandenberg's heaviest guns were trained on the Administration in the 1939 Neutrality Bill fight. At that time he said in the Senate debate: "I do not think this is our war, and I think we should stay all the way out. . . ." And one month after the Nazis marched into Poland, he observed: "This so-called war is nothing but about 25 people and propaganda. Get them and you'll have the whole thing. They want our money and men."

But Arthur Vandenberg changed his mind, as the people were changing theirs. The change was perceptible even before Pearl Harbor: Vandenberg never had the Chinese Wall mentality of a Wheeler or a Nye or a Bennett Clark or a Ham Fish. The change became marked at the Republican conference at Mackinac, where Vandenberg, once he was sure that G.O.P. internationalists had no intention of selling the U.S. down the river, found that actually he was not far away from their views. The change was sped by the private conferences which Vandenberg, as a member of a Foreign Relations subcommittee, had with Secretary of State Hull, and by the wholesale approval by the U.S. people of responsible internationalism. "What finally made me a fanatic," Vandenberg says, "was the robot bomb."

Senator at Home. Now that Senator Vandenberg has become a world figure, the Vandenbergs' social life in Washington has changed radically. They are rarely in their two-room apartment in the Wardman Park Hotel. Even in the reduced social season, invitations have come to them by the tens and twenties, and they have duly made the rounds of the embassies and the teas.

Despite these activities, the Senator is still an early riser, getting to his office at 8, whisking swiftly through documents and mail before the committee hearings begin at 10. In the Senate club, he is, by & large, a lone wolf. He is living proof that a man can be a successful politician and public servant without being a backslapper. He has his dignity. He is not athletic, likes starchy foods, smokes a box of Sano (denicotinized) cigars a week, and has almost no hobbies.

At night, when he is not going out, he and his wife go through nine newspapers (two New York, two Detroit, two Grand Rapids, three Washington), clip out all the stories about Senator Vandenberg, paste them in scrapbooks. When the books are completed, they are bound in green, shipped to Grand Rapids for deposit in a safe in the Vandenberg home. He intends to use them in writing his memoirs.

Getting ready for San Francisco, Senator Vandenberg followed diplomatic custom and bought himself a black Homburg. He flew out in 15 hours in an Army transport with Fellow Delegate Virginia Gildersleeve, Delegation Adviser John Foster Dulles, the State Department's Hamilton Fish Armstrong. His wife went by train. In San Francisco they have a two-room suite at the Fairmont Hotel, from which, over the rooftops of Chinatown, they can see the bay.

Senator-Statesman. Although Secretary of State Stettinius is head of the U.S. delegation, all eyes at San Francisco will be on the Michigan Senator. (A representative of a small nation, asked last week whom he regarded as the small nations' champion in conference free-for-alls, unhesitatingly replied: Vandenberg.)

This natural pre-eminence grows from something more than the fact that Arthur Vandenberg has become a world figure. It is also because he holds the unquestioned balance of power on foreign policy in the Senate. But with his new prestige, and despite the fact that all but four of his 17 Senate years have been spent as a member of the minority, he is neither exultant nor bitter nor disillusioned. He is the "loyal opposition" at its best.

Arthur Vandenberg by no means goes along with all of the Administration's foreign policy plans. He has deep reservations about Bretton Woods; he is supporting the Russian request for three Assembly votes with great misgivings. And, while he helped push through Lend-Lease extension a fortnight ago, he expressed a native and healthy nationalism when he cautioned the U.S. that it is not rich enough to "become permanent almoner to the whole earth." But so far as the general objectives of world security are concerned, he is not only helping out, he is actually carrying the ball.

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