Taft and the New Isolationism

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...He bitterly opposed lend-lease and accused Roosevelt of trying to ease the United States into war...

...He insisted that America defend Asia, like Europe, without committing large numbers of ground troops to "continental soil," by relying instead on aid to our allies and strong airpower...

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...Surely, he did not expect Communist governments to abide by the decisions of a world court voluntarily...

...He was not being insincere in expressing this apprehension...

...In foreign policy, as in domestic matters, his deeply felt conservatism was based on a Whiggish distrust of mammoth government undertakings and altruistic projects in foreign as well as in domestic affairs...

...The Roman Republic became an Empire...

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...Charter was not an adequate substitute, in Taft's view...

...its implicit motto is: do unto others...

...He strenuously opposed the creation of an Export-Import Bank and the subsequent $3.5 billion American contribution to the Bank, warning that the enterprise would create resentment in other countries and lead to the charge that the project was merely economic exploitation by the U.S...

...The Taft Record In 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams outlined in a a July 4th oration his view of the United States' proper role in world affairs: "She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy...

...These concerns put Taft in the sad position of preaching a vehement anti-Communism while shrinking from a leadership role for the United States...

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...Taft never believed that the President should be immune to criticism in foreign policy matters, even during war-time...

...Don't ignore the bags and sags, the fat legs and plasticized chests, the pathetic "sexy" leers that passed thirty years ago for sensuality...

...Although he warned of the pitfalls of a land war in Asia, he was utterly unrealistic in his belief that airpower alone would give us great leverage in foreign affairs...

...In June 1950, for example, he had "much sympathy" with Truman's position on Korea, though he questioned whether the President had chosen "the right time or the right place to declare this policy...

...His opposition to sending troops to Europe and Asia should not obscure his belief, clearly demonstrated by his bitterness over the Communist victory in China, that the United States had an important responsibility to resist Communism on those continents...

...Disliking budget deficits and "garrison states," he hoped by these means to limit the size and influence of the military to three million men and its budget to $75 billion...

...The Taft Philosophy The perspective on foreign policy that Robert Taft presented throughout his political career, one 'that was usually dubbed "isolationist," was probably attributable in part to temperament...

...But political failure did release him from political responsibility...

...Although he never was captured by the wild romanticism about the East that seized a great many conservative Republicans, especially the partisans of the so-called China Lobby, he was surprisingly militant about the need to defend places in Asia—particularly Formosa...

...Taft's opposition to broad Presidential power to curb labor abuses is ample evidence of his consistency on the subject...

...In addition, Taft simply was never much interested in foreign policy...

...Waging war would concentrate even more power in Washington than had been gathered there in the New Deal, which Taft at various times had called totalitarian, collectivist, socialist, and fascist...

...but today, statesmen usually think of foreign and domestic politics as separate matters except for efforts to muster domestic political support for a certain foreign policy...

...But Taft's most wide-ranging attack on the potential for American imperialism focused on Henry Luce's dream for an "American Century": "It is based on the theory that we know better what is good for the world than the world itself...

...Conclusion The tradition that Taft represented faded rapidly after his death in 1953, as John Foster Dulles' "liberationist" rhetoric became the Republican answer to the Democratic containment policy...

...His loss to General Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican convention was the most stinging rejection of all...

...This is not a new idea...

...And in contrast to the relish with which he studied and spoke of domestic matters, he took part in foreign policy debates more as a matter of duty than of preference...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 29...

...While Taft was always influential within his own party, he was frustrated in all of his attempts to gain real political power...

...It reminds me of the idealism of the bureaucrats in Washington who want to regulate the lives of every American along the lines that the bureaucrats think best for them...

...Only America's persuasiveness and example would spread freedom...

...Nevertheless, this fashionable regard for Taft is ironic in several respects...

...But in a world where body (matter) and sensations are all there is, we eventually come to the situation described by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment, where God is dead and thus "everything is permitted...

...she said, "I've never cared much for that 'end of civilization' chatter...

...The horrors of modern war, which he called "murder by machine," were especially abhorrent to him, and he believed they could not be justified by a desire to bring His deeply felt conservatism was based on a Whiggish distrust of mammoth government undertakings and altruistic projects in foreign as well as in domestic affairs...

...Nevertheless, he opposed the Atlantic Pact on the grounds that it violated the spirit of the U.N...

...One of the reasons Taft advised caution in making foreign commitments was that he was very scrupulous about the need to keep them once they were made...

...One of Taft's greatest fears was that the U.S., in its zeal to spread democracy throughout the world, might instead become an imperialist power spreading injustice and resentment...

...The post-Vietnam era, however, presents different problems...

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...There are striking similarities between Taft's foreign policy views and those of the New Left, just as his views paralleledthose of some of his most liberal contemporaries, such as Henry Wallace and Claude Pepper...

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...Thus Taft could criticize U.S...

...While President Truman, like all Presidents, was forced to choose the least unsatisfactory alternative open to him, Senator Taft was free to counsel a more agreeable path than was open to the statesmen of his time...

...War is worse even than a German victory," he declared to the Senate...

...The U.N...

...Taft worked for Herbert Hoover at the Food Administration during World War I, and this experience led him to believe that the "war to end all wars" had been a tragic error...

...If someone had resuscitated Taftism in the early '60s, for example, he would have performed a needed service...

...Only with the rule of international law, and the adjudication of disputes by an impartial world tribunal, he believed, could international justice, as well as peace and security for the U.S., be achieved...

...His repeated warnings against getting involved in land wars in Asia have also contributed to his reputation among today's liberals...

...Taft was not so opposed to long-term commitments when it came to Asia...

...Taft's great contribution to the political debate of his times was his insistence that foreign policy has an important influence, often unfortunate, on domestic policy...

...Years later, in 1951, he told his biographer, William S. White, that he still believed Germany had never menaced the security of the U.S...

...Taft felt not only that ground troops would be ineffective against Russian airpower in Europe, but that the United States was incurring the military expense needlessly...

...At its worst, this imperialism could lead to the use of war as "an instrument of public policy rather than its last resort...

...Medieval republics became monarchies...

...It would no doubt disturb Robert Taft to find his policies being voiced and his name invoked by those who want to turn the nation's attention away from foreign involvement and toward enlarging the public sector at home...

...Perhaps, too, Taft absorbed, to some extent, Hoover's conviction that European realpolitik and America's traditional idealism were incompatible, and that it would be best for the latter to "retire from Europe lock, stock and barrel...

...And the book jacket endorsements of Prophets on the Right is a "Who's Who" of American radicalism, including Noam Chomsky, Anthony Lewis, and Karl Hess...

...Like its girls, Penthause writers are almost certainly rejects from Playboy, which pays more money...

...The Korean War he saw as the gravest example of this disregard for the Constitution...

...Nostalgia, or admiration for Taft's integrity, does not obviate the need to take an honest look at his stand on specific issues...

...Containment, he said, was only a "negative program...

...The misogyny, if not misanthropy, of Penthouse is obvious to anyone who can look clearly at the burnt-out cases who make up the "Pets...

...Stylization is the homage the artistic sensibility pays to reality...

...Taft feared that world war would inaugurate an era of Anglo-American imperialism and lead to the complete nationalization of American industry...

...It assumes that we are always right and that anyone who disagrees with us is wrong...

...Taft is perhaps most famous for jealously guarding the prerogatives of Congress, particularly the war-making power, against the encroachments of the executive branch...

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...After the war he turned down a place on the Foreign Relations Committee...

...Not the "consenting adults," whose instincts, wishes, and desires have for so many the force that Yahweh's prophets had for the Hebrews...

...He wavered on many of the crucial issues of the day...

...In the first place, Taft was a nationalist in the best sense of that word...

...If we are in danger of paralyzing the executive or turning our back on international responsibilities we have voluntarily assumed, then perhaps we can benefit more from the example of Taft's willingness to stand against the common wisdom than from his policy views...

...Taft was constantly wary of threats to such freedom, and during the thirties he even preached his own version of that ancient idea, the cycle of regimes: "In Greece republics gave way to tyrannies...

...Taft was also concerned that military spending would result in a destructive inflation and divert funds from needed social welfare measures...

...Note well the awkward poses: the girls teetering on one leg, or nearly toppling off a hard chair, or spreading their legs grotesquely like a 1930s whore...

...It is ironic that Taft, who had displayed a distrust of foreign crusades and international idealism from the days of the First World War, would put forth such a naive solution to postwar problems...

...His constitutional strict constructionism and his courageous rejection of the Nuremberg trials (on the grounds that they were an application of ex post facto law) showed his reverance for rule of law...

...And the strongest case for American policy, in Europe especially, was rooted not in Wilsonian ambitions but in the balance of power and national security...

...it probably serves some good purposes, for example as a do-it-yourself kit for Prufrock's "lonely men in shirt sleeves...

...War should never be undertaken or seriously risked except to protect American liberty," he wrote...

...Robert MeTiernan Taft and the New Isolationism • • One of the fascinating side-effects of the widespread disenchantment with America's postwar foreign policy has been a revival of interest in the foreign policy views of Senator Robert A. Taft, especially among New Left critics of our Vietnam involvement...

...At best, the U.N...

...Criticism in time of war," he said after Pearl Harbor, "is essential to the maintenance of democratic government...

...And he saw the "internationalism" of the postwar period as an even greater threat to freedom, because it would require that the central government retain for an indefinite period the same powers it had exercised during the war...

...Taft always showed a deep distrust of intervening in the affairs of other nations, and he feared that after the war America would become an imperialist power...

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...One thing that our experiments with domestic reform have made clear is the importance of the unplanned effects of government policies...

...Taft favored the basic purpose of NATO, which was to warn the Soviets that aggression against Western Europe would lead to retaliation by the United States...

...18 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 TAFT (continued from page 18) For Taft's foreign policy to be carried out by his New Left defenders would defeat his basic purpose...

...Nor did Taft like alliance politics or the balance of power concept...

...A revival of Taft's policies today might only bolster the neo-isolationism that is abroad...

...It will be more than sad if we are liberated from the mistaken belief that sex is "dirty" only to be imprisoned by the even more dangerous notion that the human body is ludicrous and contemptible...

...He was to say after the second world conflict, "I do not believe that any war can be justified as a crusade...

...Penthouse does not have any style...

...M. J. Sobran, in a fine National Review article on Playboy (February 1, 1974) decided that what Hugh Hefner, his magazine, and its readers had in common was that they were "self-consciously tasteless...

...But Taft's overriding concern in foreign policy, as in all political affairs, was his fear of the aggrandizement of federal and executive power...

...I do not want to imply that by itself Penthouse is a major threat to Western civilization...

...I do not think the Russians are going to start a Third World War," he explained to a friend...

...But to conclude that a policy was inflexible is not to say that its premises were incorrect...

...It was precisely in order to prevent the ascendancy of those who advocate a "socialist solution" to America's problems that he was willing to tolerate a Nazi Britain and even risk a Communist Europe...

...But theredoes seem to be a force other than mere aesthetic blindness operating here...

...The preservation of American liberty, he thought, should be the primary goal of foreign policy, and his most basic reason for resisting activism in foreign affairs was his belief that it would lead inevitably to an increase of government power over the individual...

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...A token force in Europe, he believed, would be enough to demonstrate and satisfy America's commitment to Europe without antagonizing the Soviets or dividing the world into two armed camps...

...Perhaps it was made in desperation in order to provide some alternative to the onslaught of the power politics that Taft foresaw and dreaded...

...His position on NATO was more moderate than Herbert Hoover's, for example...

...And he did finally vote to establish the Voice of America and the Marshall Plan...

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...Distrust of involvement in European affairs had long been a hallmark of Taft's 16 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 foreign policy views...

...In 1948 Taft went so far as to say: "I believe very strongly that the Far East is ultimately even more important to our future peace than is Europe...

...Charter and encouraged Russian aggression...

...Indeed, he often seemed to defend Asian anti-Communism with a fervor that ran against his traditional distrust of European entanglements...

...He also vigorously advocated public housing and federal aid to education, even in the face of the disapproval of many of his supporters...

...At the same time, despite his dire warnings, Taft's view of the postwar situation was, in a sense, overly optimistic...

...foreign policy without having to provide a viable alternative, and, sometimes, while advising the pursuit of contradictory goals...

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...But perhaps, at least in part, he realized that the U.S...

...Although the President's pronouncements were incompatible with Taft's desire to remain detached from internal conflicts, and to avoid antagonizing the Soviet Union, Taft eventually did vote for the Truman Doctrine, lest American credibility be undermined by our reneging on a commitment Truman seemed to have already made...

...Despite his distaste for the New Deal and federal bureaucracies, Taft recognized a role for the federal government in helping to provide a minimum standard of living for all citizens...

...This has been a deeply held view in America, and at the end of the Second World War, Robert Taft was its leading spokesman...

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...There was also, however, a serious moral and philosophical basis for his views...

...After our recent failures and a torrent of books, articles, and sermons on the limits of foreign policy, and the risks inherent in Congressional abdication of responsibility, confusion more accurately describes the national mood than hubris...

...He defended American neutrality before we entered World War II because he believed that winning the war might be almost as destructive of liberty as losing it...

...Taft's views on American policy in Asia, however, were at times ambiguous and contradictory...

...There was no messianic note in his speeches...

...With the armed might of each superpower freezing the other into military inaction, the Communists, he believed, would rely on domestic infiltration and propaganda...

...A female colleague of mine at the University of Georgia mentioned that she had recently looked at a few of the girlies...

...While he favored the use of such tactics by the free world, America's chief weapons in the defense of liberty would be the force of its arguments and, above all, its example...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 17 freedom to others across the globe...

...Potential power over other nations, however benevolentits purpose, leads inevitably to imperialism...

...Senator Eugene McCarthy said recently that the country would have been better off if Taft had beaten Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican convention...

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...continued on page 29) His most basic reason for resisting activism in foreign affairs was his belief that it would lead inevitably to an increase of government power over the individual...

...Our military forces will work with our commercial forces to obtain as much of the world trade as we can lay our hands on...

...Despite Arthur Vandenberg's conversion to bipartisan foreign policy, i.e...

...He was unwilling to accept the fact that none of the alternatives facing the United States government after the war were particularly palatable...

...It was not until Taft led the attack on ratification of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that he really emerged as the leading conservative critic of the Administration's foreign policy...

...Penthouse's lack of philosophy, relatively attractive compared to Playboy's excess of same, is finally a lack of self-consciousness...

...In the long run, Taft expected that the struggle between Communism and liberal democracy would not be a military one, but rather a battle for men's minds...

...Taft returned to this theme repeatedly throughout the postwar period...

...No one was more adamantly anti-Communist or more determined to thwart Communist success in Asia than Robert A. Taft...

...This, for him, was not merely a partisan position, but a deep faith...

...I am not accusing Mr...

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...The difference between "The Naked and the Nude," as Robert Graves suggests in a poem of that name, is style, another name for grace...

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...it has all the vices of selfishness...

...We do not need to recall Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to remind us that relatively few people really believe in the worth and dignity of the human person...

...She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all, she is the champion and vindicator only of her own...

...He distrusted even the Anglo-American alliance that had faced up to Hitler, fearing that the coalition would spark vast rearmament and clothe militarism with a new respectability: "Our fingers will be in every pie...

...Above all, he knew that such a policy would carry a heavy price in tension, dollars (through both taxes and inflation), and lives, and that the price would lead eventually to domestic turmoil...

...But in October 1950, Taft unequivocally declared the war a "tragic example of the results of wavering and weakness...

...Perhaps it would have encouraged an early form of the Nixon Doctrine, and, specifically, a wariness of committing ground troops in Vietnam...

...He foresaw that an activist foreign policy would require as a permanent feature of American life, a stronger federal government, a huge military budget, and a powerful executive...

...It might also have tempered our blind confidence in Presidential competence and, above all, the faith that the government can accomplish anything...

...Contrast, in short, these "poor bare forked animals" with, say, the Venus of Praxiteles...

...Congressional government was to Taft synonymous with rule of law...

...He found the very idea of a world state repugnant...

...But above all, he refused to accept that preventing a Nazi victory over Britain justified the American casualties that would result from American participation in a European conflict...

...Before Pearl Harbor, he waged a vigorous campaign to keep the United States out of World War II...

...In the first place, it is not clear that the Truman Administration's assessment of Soviet intentions was incorrect...

...If we extend Federal power indefinitely, if we concentrate power over the courts and Congress in the executive, it will not be long before we have an American Fascism...

...In order to resist Communist pressure in Greece and Turkey, President Truman requested $400 million in aid to those countries and stated that the policy of the United States should be "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures...

...the Administration's internationalism, Taft was to remain an ardent believer in avoiding entanglements with other nations...

...Taft's greatest concern and insight was that foreign policy has serious, unintended domestic consequences...

...was a "diplomatic weapon...

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...Radosh, a former student of revisionist historian William Appleman Williams, calls himself "an advocate of a socialist solution to America's domestic crisis...

...How long can nations restrain themselves from using such force with just as little of the aggressiveness of Germany and Japan...

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...It was clear that for Robert Taftthere would be no foreign policy "Era of Good Feelings" in the postwar period...

...And considering his fierce insistence on an independent American course in world affairs, it is unlikely that he thought that the United States should commit itself in advance to war for the purpose of enforcing such a court's decisions...

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...Conservative Republicans increasingly met the Democrats in political debate by denouncing them for not being tough enough in facing up to the Communist challenge...

...entrance into World War II and critics of America's postwar "containment" strategy...

...It is unfortunate that, in a crucial period for foreign policy, America was thus deprived of an important perspective...

...it was "an unnecessary war" by then, and it had been "begun by President Truman without the slightest authority from Congress or the people...

...Second, his hatred of war was intense-(his wife in fact was a pacifist), and he approved of practically any course of action that would safeguard peace...

...One of the chief duties of an American statesman, he believed, was to protect and preserve American lives and American liberty...

...Guccione and the other photographers of consciously making homely girls look ridiculous...

...Other people simply do not like to be dominated, and we would be in the same position of suppressing rebellions by force in which the British found themselves during the nineteenth century...

...I do not think that the American people have ever faced a more serious constitutional issue or one which in the end may present a greater threat to their freedom," he wrote in 1951...

...It is merely "tasteless...

...Taft was also less than enthusiastic about the "Truman Doctrine" when it was announced in March 1947...

...It at least might have prevented us from committing ourselves so heavily to that country without any discernible military goal...

...The President was an administrator, and rule by executive order was arbitrary and unjust...

...but when I looked at that magazine for the first time I thought I saw the beast slouching...

...A recent book by Ronald Radosh, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism, contains sympathetic portraits of Taft and four other right-wing opponents of U.S...

...But in his last, and one of his best known speeches, read by his son to the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Taft warned that a land war anywhere in Asia, including China and Indochina, "would bring about complete exhaustion, even if we were able to win...

...Taft, however, probably underestimated Stalin's challenge in Europe, and he overestimated the control that the United States could exercise over the vast area and turbulent affairs of Asia...

...Taft's new popularity with the Left is especially ironic in light of these views...

...perhaps they convince the fat man in Dubuque that they care about him, that if he were in the right place they would be available, eating their apples and pouring their water over themselves...

...Taft discerned all of the unpleasant aspects of a world role for the United States, and hoped that they somehow could be avoided...

...But who, after all, does incest harm...

...Despite his wariness of Asian land wars, it would be difficult to imagine Taft supporting, as so many liberals did, a cutoff in aid to a long-time ally such as South Vietnam...

...Any foreign adventure undertaken by the U.S., he warned, should be well within its capacity and almost certain of success...

...foreign policy...

...Placing the war-power in the hands of the executive was an old mistake, in Taft's view, and made war more likely...

...Later, in the "Great Debate" of 1951, Taft joined Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska in opposing the sending of troops to Europe "without the approval of Congress...

...A dose of Taft's skepticism would have been valuable at a time when New Frontierism was the orthodoxy of voters, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians alike...

...Once this power was surrendered to government, it would not be returned, and individual freedom would eventually be extinguished...

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...And President Truman's exercise of sweeping powers in international affairs drew sharp fire from Taft...

...On the eve of the Cold War in 1945, Taft was again wary of American involvement in Europe...

...This made it an act of war, requiring Congressional authorization...

...Submitting international disputes to the Security Council and the General Assembly turned questions of justice into ones of politics and power...

...The girls are not very pretty, a deficiency exacerbated by their struggles to simulate erotic gestures...

...And most important, Taft opposed military buildups and foreign commitments because hefeared they would augment the power of the federal government...

...could not avoid that responsibility without even graver consequences...

...When columnist Xaviera Hollander advises that incest can be fun, that the taboos against it are unscientific, the genetic defects exaggerated, she is wrong (as a scientist informs her in the "letters" section...

...According to Taft's analysis, sending troops to a country under attack made the military involvement of American troops inevitable...

...Taft, however, insisted that we view politics as a whole, that we not ignore the domestic consequences of foreign policy...

...The way in which our postwar policy was framed probably led policymakers and politicians to see foreign affairs in Manichean terms and to ignore subtle changes that did occur in the postwar power structure...

...and that a German victory over Britain would not have increased the danger from Germany...

...The increased Communist threat that followed the war only confirmed his view that if Germany had not declared war on the United States, we would have been wise to continue our policy of neutrality...

...We will occupy all the strategic points in the world and try to maintain a force so preponderant that none shall dare attack us...

...It is startling to find the cautious, pragmatic Taft making such a matchlessly impractical and idealistic proposal...

...There was some justice in the New York Times' characterization of Taft as the "Hamlet" of U.S...