When Congress gets mad
Foreign policy battles in the 1950s and today
Steven Casey
The scholar Edward Corwin famously described the separation of powers between the executive and the legislative branches set out in the U.S. Constitution as an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy. With different parties controlling different branches of government, partisan politics tends to intensify this struggle, and the consequences can be ugly. These days, for example, hardly a week seems to go by without vicious sniping between the Obama administration and Republicans in Congress over one issue or anotherfrom China to Russia, Iran to Syria, Cuba to Israel. And on most issues, process as well as discourse has broken down, with each side openly trying to thwart or bypass the other.
This is not the first time things have descended to such a level. What the current situation most resembles, in fact, is the early Cold War era, when Republicans in Congress made foreign policy central to their attacks on President Harry Truman. Then, as now, the GOP condemned a Democratic president for being too soft, letting down key allies, and leaving the nation ill equipped to deal with its adversaries. And then, as now, congressional hard-liners sought greater control over foreign policy, proposing all manner of resolutions and hearings to rein in and embarrass the president.
The historical parallel is not exactthey never arebut a look back at the earlier strife offers useful context for evaluating todays bitter divisions and their likely outcome. The main takeaway is not comforting to contemporary Republicans: trying to fight a no-holds-barred war over foreign policy against a determined White House can limit the effectiveness of U.S. efforts abroad and discredit those who launch what can come to be seen as obstructionist assaults.
THE GOOD OLD DAYS
Ironically, the Republican challenge of the late 1940s and early 1950s followed one of the most productive periods of bipartisan cooperation in congressional history. Between 1947 and 1949, the Truman administration worked closely with the Republican-dominated 80th Congress to pass some of the central components of containment. Just weeks after Truman laid out a vision for an interventionist foreign policy against Soviet influence in March 1947, Congress appropriated $400 million so that Greece and Turkey could confront internal communist threats. After the Truman Doctrine came the Marshall Plan, an even more ambitious initiative that provided $13 billion for the reconstruction of Western European economies devastated by World War II.
Many Republicans, including Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan (who wielded impressive power over his partys rank and file), supported these measures because they had become committed internationalists in the wake of Pearl Harbor.
Trumans sweeping rhetoric on the Soviet threat also helped. The story that Vandenberg instructed Truman to scare the hell out of America to win Republican support might be apocryphal, but it contains a kernel of truth: Truman did use hyperbolic language to sell containment, and he conspicuously failed to place geographic limits on where such a strategy would apply.
For his part, the intensely partisan Truman never grew comfortable working with Republicans, especially those in the partys nationalist wing, who hoped to limit both the size of the U.S. government and its long-term global commitments. Indeed, he invited Robert Taftan Ohio senator who so epitomized GOP conservatism that he was dubbed Mr. Republicanto the White House only twice during his presidency. And rather than negotiate privately with his critics, Truman chose to attack them publicly, culminating in the whistle-stop tour of his 1948 reelection campaign, when he traveled the country by train and relentlessly lambasted the do-nothing Republican Congress.
Republicans were initially unconcerned by the criticism, since they considered Truman an accidental president who lacked the charisma and gravitas for the top job. New York Governor Thomas Dewey, their candidate for the presidency, was so confident of victory in the 1948 election that he scarcely challenged Trumans foreign policy during the campaign season. Then the votes were counted, and Dewey lost in the Republicans fifth straight defeat.
So the Republicans returned to Washington in 1949 in a surly mood. Many in the GOP concluded that their cooperation with the Democratic White House on foreign policy had consigned their party to the political margins.
With Vandenberg sick with cancer, leadership on Capitol Hill passed to senators in the partys nationalist wing, such as Taft, Bridges, and Wherry. And the days of bipartisan cooperation shuddered to a halt.
SCARE TACTICS
In the years after 1949, Republicans made a concerted effort to depict Truman and the Democrats as weak, especially on communism in Asiaa charge that both the nationalist and the internationalist wings of the party initially embraced. Truman, Republicans insisted, had lost China to Mao Zedong by refusing to provide sufficient help to Chiang in the Chinese Civil War. Even worse, they claimed, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had given the green light for North Korea to invade South Korea in June 1950 by publicly excluding South Korea from the U.S. defense perimeter earlier in the year.
When Truman responded to the North Korean attack by deploying four U.S. divisions to the peninsula, Republicans hardly rallied around the flag. Taft began by claiming that the administrations weak Asia policy had effectively invited the invasion. Then, as U.S. troops retreated south in disarray, Republican lawmakers charged that Truman had wasted taxpayers dollars on domestic projects while so neglecting the nations defenses that the U.S. military could not even halt the North Korean army. The name-calling often got ugly. Wherry declared that the blood of our boys in Korea was on Achesons shoulders, and no one elsea statement Truman considered contemptible.
In November, after the Inchon landing and then Chinas entry had whipsawed the course of the war back and forth, this name-calling turned into something more sinister. Some Republicans went so far as to portray the partisan tensions as a contest between loyal Americans and actual and potential traitors. Senior Republicans began to consider the possibility of impeaching both Truman and Acheson for treasonable actions, and South Dakota Senator Francis Case even introduced a bill to abolish the State Department.
A year earlier, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy had already begun escalating policy disputes to ones of character and patriotism, alleging that card-carrying Communists had infiltrated the State Department. As the Korean War ground on, McCarthy widened his sights. He dubbed Acheson a tool of Moscow and encouraged him to flee to Russia. He also accused George Marshall, the U.S. secretary of defense, of selling out American interests to the Communists.
The virulence of McCarthys indictments worried many Republicans, including Taft, who privately described his colleague as a hard man for anybody to work with, or restrain. Yet when trying to forge a Republican position on McCarthys allegations, Taft and other GOP leaders allowed partisanship to override their private qualms.
McCarthy, Taft believed, should keep talking, and if one case doesnt work out, he should proceed with another, until he eventually succeeded in tarnishing the reputation of Truman and the Democrats.
Yet when Republicans began to analyze MacArthurs actual policy advice, its appeal faded. As a rhetorical device, accusing the president of weakness had its merits, but as the basis for a new policy, it presented obvious problems. FP
