While foreign policy makers in the United States, and our allies around the world, regard with dismay and apprehension the clash between a Republican administration and a Democratic Congress over such controversial issues as arms sales and control, terrorism and protectionism, foreign aid and the Contras, we sometimes hear the plaintive query, "Whatever happened to bipartisanship?" This is often followed by: "Is it even possible for a Congress dominated by one political party and a White House occupied by a member of the opposite party to conduct jointly an effective American foreign policy, particularly in the face of an approaching national election?"
Before surrendering to despair, we should examine a remarkably parallel period of political history, the years 1947 and 1948, when a Democratic president, Harry S Truman, and a Republican 80th Congress coproduced the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Vandenberg Resolution, which prepared the way for NATO - the foundation upon which U.S. foreign policy rests to this day.
It was an extraordinary accomplishment for a very odd political couple. No one could call Truman anything but the most partisan of presidents, and Republicans had just won control of Congress after 14 years in the electoral wilderness and were looking forward eagerly to capturing the White House in 1948.
Why it worked
And yet, the overwhelming majority of Democrats and Republicans put aside partisan politics and worked together in the most exemplary bipartisan manner in the area of foreign policy for almost two years. Why? As in most things human, there were a number of factors, political as well as strategic.
1. Truman was determined to cooperate closely with Congress to obtain its approval of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Vandenberg Resolution, even insisting that his name not be associated with either of the latter two measures, for fear of endangering their passage. He accepted congressional amendments that significantly altered the original form of his Marshall Plan proposal, as when he agreed to the Brookings Institution's recommendation to make the Economic Cooperation Administration substantially independent of the State Department. Truman preached and practiced that "politics should stop at the water's edge." In short, he exerted the necessary leadership on the Democratic side to make bipartisanship work.
2. Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, at the apex of his political power as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, president pro tem of the Senate, and spokesman nonpareil for the Republicans in the field of foreign policy, also believed in bipartisanship. Indeed, it may be said that if he did not invent bipartisanship, he brought it to a level of effectiveness unmatched to the present. As a former leader of the isolationist wing of the GOP, Vandenberg was in a unique position to say that he had seen the past and it didn't work and it was time to look beyond America's borders to protect America's interests. He and Truman knew each other, respected each other, and cooperated with each other when partisans around them gave only grudging lip service to bipartisanship - like Democrat Clark Clifford in the White House, who urged the president to promote issues that would put him in direct conflict with the Republican Congress, and Republican Majority
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