Michigan’s Forgotten “Giant of the Senate.”
Before his career unexpectedly imploded, a U.S. Senator from Minnesota wrote a tongue-in-cheek memoir called “Al Franken: Giant of the Senate.” The book was funny, but a giant, alas, Al was not.
But Michigan once did have a true giant in the senate, a complex and surprisingly human man who, until now, has been, tragically, mostly forgotten.
There have been many memorable senators, men from Daniel Webster to Lyndon Johnson. But ironically, one of the greatest of modern times, a man from Michigan, has been too little remembered.
Yet it was he, more than anyone else, who led his party and his nation to renounce the isolationism he had once championed. He may have saved the Republican Party as a result – and he certainly helped united the nation and to construct the international system that enabled America to win the Cold War.
His name was Arthur Vandenberg, and he was indeed, as the title of this magnificent biography puts it, a man who stood astride the 20th century and who, whether people realized it, continued to influence politics long after his too-early death from cancer in his native Grand Rapids in 1951.
Soon after, Edward R. Murrow, himself a legend, closed his nightly radio broadcast with a tribute to a man who, as he said, was “a little larger than life in the field of foreign policy.” If anything, Murrow understated Vandenberg’s contribution. The onetime boy newspaper editor, who had come to the senate as staunch an isolationist as Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, underwent an intellectual conversion after America was attacked at Pearl Harbor.
He helped lead his party to the same conclusion, in part during a memorable conference on Mackinac Island during World War II. He also used his prestige and power to get the crucial Marshall Plan through the Senate, and to make the slogan “Politics stops at the water’s edge” reality.
Hank Meijer, born just months after Vandenberg died, labored for years on this excellent biography – and it was well worth waiting for. Superbly written and deeply researched, those who thought they knew Vandenberg the statesman are likely to be startled by the very human being. Though he looked the picture of an old money fat cat, Vanderberg in fact came from very modest means, and had to drop out of the University of Michigan after only a year.
In Washington, he had a reputation as a man who liked both his drink and the ladies – and had a torrid and fairly public affair with the wife of a British diplomat who may have been a spy. Author Meijer thinks that if cancer had not felled him, Vandenberg might have led the Senate to deal with the demagogue Joe McCarthy earlier than it actually did.
“He had a visceral distaste for populism,” Meijer told me. One has an idea of what Vandenberg might have thought of Washington today.
