WHO'S WHO IN THE GOP: VANDENBERG

Before the Philadelphia convention next June, a major job of the nation's voters will be to absorb, weigh, and compare the records in the Republican Who's Who of presidential candidates. Herewith, in the last* of a series, TIME publishes the condensed biography and political record of Michigan's Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg.

Vital Statistics. Age: 64 (born March 22, 1884, in a modest frame house in Grand Rapids). Ancestry: His father, Aaron Vandenberg, was of Dutch descent; his mother, Alpha Hendrick, of English. His father, a native of New York, moved to Michigan in 1878, where he went into the harness-making business. His elder half-brother Collins is the father of General Hoyt Vandenberg, new Air Force chief of staff. Educated: Grand Rapids grade and high schools, one year at the University of Michigan (1901-02). Married: in 1907 to Elizabeth Watson of Grand Rapids, who died in 1916; in 1918 to Hazel H. Whitaker, a Fort Wayne schoolteacher, social worker and newspaperwoman. Children (by his first wife): Arthur H. Vandenberg Jr., 40, a bachelor and his father's longtime secretary; Mrs. John Bailey, 38, of Battle Creek, Mich.; Mrs. Edward Pfeiffer, 36, of Huntington, N.Y. Church: Congregational. Nicknames: Van (to his friends), Pops (to his wife).

Personal Traits. He is big (6 ft. 1 in., 200 Ibs.) and barrel-chested, black-browed and bespectacled, with thinning grey hair brushed carefully across a high-domed head. He dresses meticulously, wears custom-made blue or grey suits (his wife chooses the cloth), recently adopted a diplomat's Homburg. No backslapper, he is well-liked but something of a lone wolf in the Senate cloakrooms. In private he is amiable, with a quick, irreverent wit. When speaking he uses a sweeping sidearm gesture like a baseball pitcher's, rolls out his rounded, often eloquent periods in full, organlike tones.

Career. A former newspaper editor and publisher, he has been elected to only one public office: U.S. Senator. He was appointed early in 1928 to fill an unexpired term, elected in November 1928, re-elected in 1934, 1940, 1946. Except for Kansas' aging Arthur Capper, he is the ranking Republican in the Senate, has been president pro tem since January 1947.

Private Life. He and his wife have lived in Washington's Wardman Park Hotel for the last 18 years. After a day at the Capitol, he gets into a pair of old grey slacks, settles down to skim official reports, read history, or clip newspapers for his scrapbooks, tries to be in bed by 9 o'clock. He limits his drinking to one whiskey & soda before dinner, smokes only denicotinized cigars. In 1932, he was bothered by shortness of breath and pounding of his heart under exertion. Doctors diagnosed it as a "slow heart," but nothing organically wrong. They prescribed digitalis (which he has taken ever since). The ailment has never recurred. For recreation, he likes to play gin rummy or backgammon with his wife, swims (sidestroke) twice a week in the Senate pool. Back home in Grand Rapids, he lives in a biggish brick & stucco house, works at an old-fashioned rolltop desk in his book-lined den.

Early Years. His father's business failed in the 1893 panic, and his mother was forced to take in boarders. Young Van worked before & after school, on weekends and vacations. In high school he led the debating club, broke his nose twice playing football and baseball. After trying for one year to work his way through the University of Michigan he dropped out, became a cub reporter on the Grand Rapids Herald.

He got to know a string-tied politician named William Alden Smith. When Smith bought the Herald in 1907, Vandenberg, at 22, became editor and publisher. In his 21 years at the Herald, he concentrated on writing Republican editorials, gave little heed to the news columns, paid grudging salaries, strode through the city room (say reporters) "like a Roman senator." He wrote three books on his earliest hero, Alexander Hamilton--all now out of print ("Thank God," says Vandenberg). After World War I he attacked the League of Nations, helped write Warren Harding's foreign-policy speeches. When he was appointed to the Senate in 1928, he sold his Herald stock for $549,000.

Public Record. As a Senator, he quickly won a reputation as a brash freshman, a hard worker with a reporter's instinct for digging up facts. Early in the New Deal, he realized that "like it or not, [social responsibility on the part of government] is the new and irresistible psychology . .. We dare not be a party of shut minds." He abandoned frontal attacks, developed a technique of probing for flaws in New Deal measures, working out amendments to cure them. His formula: "Social responsibility without socialism." He voted for relief, SEC, social security, the New Deal housing program, authored the Federal Deposit Insurance Act. He voted against NRA, TVA, AAA, the Wagner Act, the Wages & Hours Act. For this record some called him a "yes & no" man; he called himself a "coalitionist."

On domestic affairs he has kept to this middle-of-the-road position. He believes that "definite, specific, and direct profit-sharing must be the ultimate relationship between capital and labor." He voted for the Case bill, President Truman's draft-strikers bill, and the Taft-Hartley Act. He led the fight in the Senate to have David Lilienthal confirmed as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

On foreign policy he is the undisputed leader of the Senate and of the Republican Party--thanks to his rank in the Senate, the Republican sweep in 1946, and to his own dramatic conversion. Before the war he was one of the nation's leading isolationists. Four weeks after Germany invaded Poland, he declared: "This so-called war is nothing but about 25 people and propaganda." He voted against conscription, against its extension, against lend-lease, against the repeal of the Neutrality Act in 1941.

But in January 1945 he publicly renounced isolationism, proposed a treaty with Britain and Russia to keep Germany and Japan disarmed forever. As a result, Franklin Roosevelt picked him as a delegate to the San Francisco conference which set up U.N. Since then he has been a delegate to the first and second U.N. General Assemblies and to the Inter-American Defense Conference at Rio de Janeiro. Former Secretary of State Byrnes, a friend of Senate days, took him along to the Foreign Ministers conference in Paris and to the Paris peace conference, and he is largely credited with converting Byrnes to his "patience with firmness" policy. By prodding recalcitrants in his own party and by telling the Administration what it could get through the Senate, he became the real expediter of the bipartisan foreign policy. He has been a sharp critic of the Administration's vacillating China policy, has continually pressed for the formulation of a long-range, overall foreign program.

Pro & Con. His critics point to his age as his greatest liability as a presidential candidate. They feel that he is pompous, vain and unapproachable, that even though he is a good Senator he would make a poor President because of his lack of administrative training. They feel that his conversion from isolationism came long after most men of intelligence had already made the change, that he is virtually blank on domestic affairs.

His admirers point out that he is only six weeks older than Harry Truman. They feel that he is one of the nation's few great Senators in the tradition of Borah, Norris, Daniel Webster and Clay; that he combines international vision with hardheaded common sense; that he has had the courage to admit a big mistake and to put his country above politics; that he is an American statesman known and respected abroad, the only G.O.P. candidate with wide experience in international affairs at a time when international affairs are paramount.

* Previous Who's Whos: Dewey (April 5), Warren (April 12), Taft (April 19), Stassen (April 26), Joseph William Martin Jr. (May 3).

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