Book about an important, but forgotten, man

Earlier this year, before he became embroiled in a scandal stemming back to his days as a comedian, a certain U.S. senator published a memoir with the tongue-in-cheek title: Al Franken: Giant of the Senate.

However, Michigan once did produce a man who was truly a giant of the Senate, a man crucial to the history of the Cold War but who has been, sadly, largely forgotten.

Arthur Vandenberg did more than anyone to convert the modern Republican Party from isolationism to internationalism during the Second World War. It was he who led a solidly GOP congress to approve the Marshall Plan and the resolution to create NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and shape the bipartisan “politics stops at the water’s edge” consensus on foreign policy that kept us united throughout the Cold War.

Yet for a variety of reasons, he has been the subject of no major biography assessing his influence. That is, until now.

Hendrik (Hank) Meijer worked for nearly 30 years on his epic: Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century (University of Chicago Press, US$35) and it is a book and a subject very much worth waiting for.

“I was always curious about Vandenberg,” said Meijer, the 65-year-old executive chair of Meijer Inc., the company that has 200 “supercentre” grocery and department stores in six states, mostly in Michigan.

The more he learned, the more fascinated he became with a man who, besides his importance, was a complex and intensely fascinating figure.

“He was always trying to find the middle ground. He was a master of the art of compromise — that’s what he wanted and was born to do,” Meijer said.

Those are qualities that seem sadly lacking in politics today. Though Vandenberg was one of the world’s most respected statesmen when he died in 1951, Meijer found that he had been largely forgotten even in his hometown.

Nationally, Vandenberg was also beginning to be forgotten by historians, despite the fact President Harry Truman, though he didn’t much like it, needed Vandenberg during the crucial two years Republicans controlled Congress following the Second World War.

Republicans needed him, too. They had been discredited by much of the public since the Great Depression, and forging a bipartisan consensus may have helped them return to power.

Vandenberg looked like a typical fat cat of the period; stout, distinguished and white-haired, usually in a three-piece suit puffing a cigar. But he was also a boy who grew up poor.

He could barely afford a year at the University of Michigan before dropping out and returning to Grand Rapids, where he got a job as a reporter. But he soon learned how to court the powerful, and eventually was appointed to a vacancy in the U.S. Senate. He never left it.

And while his image was one of pompous rectitude, the real Vandenberg was anything but a saint; his dalliances included a flamboyant and fairly public affair with Mitzi Sims, the wife of a British diplomat not long before the Second World War.

There has even been speculation Mitzi may have been assigned to seduce the powerful Vandenberg, then a leader of the isolationists in the Senate, as a way to change his mind about lend-lease aid to Great Britain.

There’s no clear evidence of that, but once war started, Vandenberg did become convinced the United States could no longer go it alone, and helped organize the United Nations.

The cigars that were his trademark may also have been his death sentence; lung cancer spread to his spine. Arthur Vandenberg was only 67 when he died in April 1951.

Had he lived, he would have probably been a major shaping influence in foreign policy in the 1950s. Meijer also thinks Vandenberg might have spurred the Senate to deal faster with the demagogue Sen. Joe McCarthy.

“He really had a visceral distaste for populism,” he said. “Any notion of demagogy was utterly alien to him.”

Speculating about how historic figures might react to modern events is always risky, but Mejier thinks that if Vandenberg, man of compromise, saw Washington today “he would have shuddered.”

If anyone is looking for a fascinating holiday history read, it would be hard to top this book this year.