Michael Tomasky

Tuesday, Mar 19, 2002 10:23 PM UTC

The Republican war critic

Today's GOP demonizes any dissent, but one of its most influential forebears openly criticized WWII plans -- and just 12 days after Pearl Harbor.

By Michael Tomasky

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When Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said on Feb. 28 that Democrats would start “to ask the tough questions” about President Bush’s war strategy, Republicans reacted predictably. Trent Lott accused Daschle of “trying to divide the country.” Tom DeLay issued a one-word press release: “Disgusting.” Bill Frist, the Tennessee senator who chairs the GOP’s senatorial campaign arm, called Daschle’s words “thoughtless” and “ill-timed.” The charge amounted to something just this side of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

They’ve since calmed themselves a bit, but the intensity of their choler raises a fair question: Were Daschle’s remarks — not a formal speech or even a press release, but rather a few sentences in response to some questions toward the end of a press conference that he’d called to discuss other topics — so shockingly without precedent in American history that those blunt reproaches were deserved? More than that, what does history tell us about the appropriate parameters of loyal opposition after America has been attacked and while U.S. soldiers are at battle?

It turns out there is precedent for Daschle’s position. That precedent comes from the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the most direct analogy in our history to Sept. 11. And it comes, wouldn’t you know it, from a Republican. And not just any Republican, but the icon of modern conservatism who was known during his lifetime as “Mr. Republican.”

Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft was a devoted conservative, an adversary of the New Deal, a spirited isolationist and, by 1952, the man whom the right, which harbored grave suspicions about the moderate Eisenhower’s internationalist tendencies, was backing for the presidency. While he tended to focus his legislative labors on domestic issues, Taft — his son and namesake is now Ohio’s governor — had made his isolationist views well known throughout the 1930s, and no GOP leader of the day had greater influence over his party’s right wing.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the GOP faced pressures similar to those Democrats are under now. There were admonitions not to criticize the sitting administration, and declarations, immediately after the Japanese attack, that politics had to stop at the water’s edge. But conservatives had detested Franklin Roosevelt, his New Deal and his foreign policy — the lend-lease program and the destroyer deal with Britain in particular. And the events of Dec. 7, 1941, seemed to stifle their ability to dissent.

What, then, were they to do? Taft had his answer. He gave a speech to the Executive Club of Chicago arguing that it was precisely the duty of the opposition party to ask the tough questions. He didn’t give this speech five and a half months after the attack, as Daschle did (and remember, Daschle didn’t even give a speech). He wasn’t speaking five weeks after hostilities began, which was how long it took DeLay to blast President Clinton on the war in Kosovo. Taft delivered his speech … on Dec. 19, 1941!

And quite a direct speech it was. His defense of criticism as patriotism is worth quoting at some length:

“As a matter of general principle, I believe there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government … too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think that it will give some comfort to the enemy to know that there is such criticism. If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it as far as I am concerned, because the maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur.”

Taft invoked Woodrow Wilson, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Francis Biddle, FDR’s attorney general, as defending this right, and argued that “the duties imposed by the Constitution on Senators and Congressmen certainly require that they exercise their own judgment on questions relating to the war.”

There was more, a lot more. Debates were raging in Congress at the time — and, remember, American territory had just been attacked, bodies and wreckage still lay in the harbor, and U.S. soldiers were already in harm’s way — over questions like the conversion of industry to support the war and the best way to expand the draft. Taft weighed in on each, specifically opposing plans the Roosevelt administration had floated (“I see no use in sending boys of nineteen or twenty to war”).

At great length Taft argued that the higher defense appropriations Roosevelt was seeking should lead to the end of both Keynesianism (New Deal economists “are confident that a people can spend itself into prosperity”) and New Deal programs like the Works Progress Administration. Thus Taft was tying the war to domestic politics in a way that today’s Republicans have also carped at Democrats for sometimes doing. Finally, there were shades of renegade Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind. (who, angered at the administration’s secrecy, has threatened the Bush White House with “war”), when Taft called for a congressional investigation into whether Cordell Hull, FDR’s secretary of state, had informed Secretary of the Navy Franklin Knox of the contents of his famous Nov. 26 note to the Japanese. The note contained conditions that Hull knew the Japanese would never accept, and the suspicion was rife among Republicans that Hull, and Roosevelt, actually wanted the Navy to be ambushed at Pearl Harbor to stoke war fever among the populace. “Perhaps the fault at Hawaii,” Taft said, “was not entirely on the admirals and generals.” Mr. Republican, that Dec. 19, minced few words.

And his fellow Republicans got the message. According to historian Richard Darilek in “A Loyal Opposition in Time of War” (1976), Republicans entered 1942 ready to fight the administration head-on. Wendell Wilkie, the party’s nominal leader, was an interventionist, but in a bid to placate the GOP’s isolationist wing he appointed an America Firster named Clarence Boddington Kelland head of public relations for the Republican National Committee. On Jan. 8, Kelland delivered a speech in Salt Lake City on the importance of robust partisanship. Democratic National Committee chairman Ed Flynn countered by cautioning against the election of a hostile Congress. New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, who would run against FDR in 1944, warned of the existence within the administration of “an American Cliveden set … scheming to end the war short of military victory” (“Cliveden set,” a reference to the Astor estate in Britain that served as a salon for government ministers, was synonymous with “appeasers”). By the time of the Republican Lincoln Day dinners — mid-February, just two months after Pearl Harbor — politics in Washington, Darilek writes, were more or less back to normal.

Two points need to be made about Taft’s speech. The first is that he was exactly right to make it. Who can possibly argue with Justice Holmes’ statement, the one Taft quoted, that “we do not lose our right to condemn either men or measures because the country is at war”? Well, we know who can, but certainly the vast majority of the American public understands such a right to be a nonnegotiable principle of democracy.

The second is that it’s virtually impossible to imagine a Democrat delivering a similar talk these last months without being labeled a traitor. Republicans have decreed that anything but blind support is beyond the pale, and the major media, in their coverage, have largely absorbed the idea that to criticize Bush on foreign policy is to flirt with signing the death warrants of American soldiers. This makes for a stark, and distressing, contrast with Roosevelt’s time.

Taft’s speech hardly caused a ripple. If the New York Times covered it at all, it did so in a small enough way to escape my notice as I looked through newspapers from that time. The Washington Post did mention the speech, but only at the tail end of a larger story that was mostly about Hull. In the American political system that existed then, Taft’s right to speak his mind on policy was a given, and no high-ranking Roosevelt official launched a major public attack.

But imagine the frenzied spasms of today’s Republicans and media if Tom Daschle had emulated Taft: asserting the right to dissent, hinting that Democrats might hold the administration’s domestic policy hostage to bipartisan agreement on war aims, and calling — on Sept. 23! — for an investigation into why our intelligence agencies didn’t know Sept. 11 was coming.

No historical analogy is exact, and some things were true then that aren’t now, and vice versa. But the real difference between then and now, of course, is that today’s hard right has made an art form of demonizing those who disagree with it and turning legitimate, necessary dissent into insurrectionist treachery. The next time they try that, Democrats should remind Republicans of a time when their own party, and one of their supposed heroes, thought differently.

Monday, Jun 28, 2010 1:14 PM UTC

Byrd: An astonishing career, missteps and all

He overcame his embarrassing opposition to civil rights and became an important critic of executive power

By Michael Tomasky

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Byrd: An astonishing career, missteps and all

FILE - In this Sept. 9, 2005 file photo, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., speaks about Hurricane Katrina response efforts at a press conference in Charleston, W.Va. Byrd a fiery orator versed in the classics and a hard-charging power broker who steered billions of federal dollars to the state of his Depression-era upbringing, died Monday, June 28, 2010. (AP Photo/Bob Bird, File)(Credit: AP)

I think I was six years old when Lyndon Johnson came to my hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia to give a speech touting some Great Society programs in what must have been mid-1967. All the state’s big shots were there, up on the dais. Dad, a local attorney active in politics, wasn’t quite big enough to be on stage, since he held no office, but we were seated at the ace table in the ballroom, and I remember that Johnson, describing conditions faced by poor children, pointed at me several times (“just like this child right here…”).

I also remember that even then — even though Robert Carlyle Byrd wasn’t yet a decade into his Senate service — dad spoke of Byrd not familiarly, as he did most of the state’s pols, but quietly and reverentially. Dad knew Byrd, certainly. But there were no stories about him, no anecdotes of taking him to shake hands outside a local mine at a change of shift, no tales of seeing Byrd knock back a bourbon in the bar of long-gone Daniel Boone Hotel down in Charleston and craning forward as he delivered the inside dope on what those crazy people in Washington were really up to.

Well, Byrd was from the southern part of the state, down below Beckley. We were northerners, almost Pittsburghers. In those days especially, you could have built a wall across the state more or less along U.S. Route 50 — above it north, below it Dixie. And the roads were such back then that Beckley was far, far away; it was probably faster to get to Philadelphia. So there was certainly that.

But I would wager that even well-placed lawyers from Byrd’s part of the state spoke of him quietly and reverentially, and I bet they discovered, when they thought about it, a surprising dearth of anecdotes. He just wasn’t that kind of pol. “Pol” isn’t even the right word. He did enough flesh-pressing to get by. He’d learned the fiddle as a young man, and that certainly paid dividends on the hustings. But a lot of the time, he was probably at home reading Polybius.

Now Byrd is gone, at age 92, having served a record-setting 51 years in the United States Senate. The career is astonishing mostly for all the history he witnessed and shaped, all the eras he outlasted.

He came to a deeply reactionary Senate, dominated by the Southern barons, in which, alas, he felt all too at home. But it was a changing Senate, too: His class, that of 1958, was notable for the many liberals it elected, men like Ed Muskie, Phil Hart, Gene McCarthy. By 1963, the Southerners were being challenged. Byrd was, famously, on the wrong side of history then. He opposed the 1964 civil rights bill and spoke against it for 14 hours. He was, frankly, terrible on the question, and although his also-famous membership in the Ku Klux Klan many years before was brief, it stuck with him, and it deserved to stick with him. It took him too long to change his racial views, which always seemed to me more reflective of his part of the state than mine, although maybe I’m being naive there.

But as the Southern-baron era faded and the Senate entered its era of liberal activity, Byrd eventually joined and embraced it. By the 1970s, after he’d defeated Teddy Kennedy in a whip election, he’d become more or less a moderate-to-sometimes-liberal Democrat. In 1977, now majority leader, he hit what many regard — well, okay, what my father always regarded — as the high point of his career, when he defended handing over the Panama Canal Zone to Panamanian authority and rounding up the votes in the Senate for it.

If you weren’t around then or were too young: It was a ferocious battle marked by the kind of nativism and xenophobia with which we are alas still quite familiar. It’s almost impossible to imagine that 68 senators would have the guts to vote that way today. Byrd was instrumental in making it happen.

In the third era Byrd lived through, the era of partisanship and polarization and lobbying and money, Byrd again played an important role, and one history will largely applaud, as guardian of senatorial power. That posture wasn’t always good for the republic: As I noted on my Guardian blog, he was an ardent defender of the filibuster. But he opposed giving Bill Clinton the line-item veto on separation-of-powers grounds, and he opposed giving George W. Bush his war on largely the same grounds. He said in February 2003: “On this February day, as this nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war. Yet, this chamber is, for the most part, silent — ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate, paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events.” He was also unusually prescient in warning that the war wasn’t going to be quite as easy as most were advertising.

That position cost him some points back home, in a state whose politics became increasingly conservative during Byrd’s tenure. While West Virginia was never Massachusetts, it was always heavily union and, in my youth, surprising in certain ways (one of the most liberal state supreme courts in the country, for example). Over the decades, the massive decline in union membership — barely around 15,000 UMW members in the state today — and the little-discussed incursion by the Southern Baptist Convention into the state — a handful of churches when I was little, more than 300 last time I checked — changed the state into pretty fertile Limbaugh territory.

There was talk among the state’s Republicans in 2003 and 2004 of taking Byrd out in 2006. The Republicans found a rich conservative, John Raese, a native of Morgantown, to run against him. (My dad represented the striking Newspaper Guild workers against Raese’s newspaper-owning family in 1972). But Byrd crushed him by two-to-one. West Virginians were going to let the old man run out the clock. All that infamous pork helped, of course. You can’t throw a rock in the state without hitting something named for Byrd, and no, no one feels the remotest shame about it.

But I don’t think it was only the pork. West Virginians knew they had someone of stature representing them, and a small, poor state doesn’t produce many of those. There are the university’s basketball and football teams, and Byrd and Jay Rockefeller. Mary Lou Retton maybe, although that’s getting to be an old one, and she hasn’t lived in the state in ages. In stature terms, that’s about it. West Virginians don’t take that cavalierly.

A man his age has lived a more than full life, but if there is a sad thing about his passing now, it is that he was just starting to use that stature to do something he’d never done: challenge the coal industry. Like most West Virginia politicians, he was predictably in coal’s corner. When federal judge Chuck Haden handed down a pro-environmental decision about mountaintop-removal mining in 1999, Byrd actually went to the length of trying to get Haden’s decision overturned in Congress.

Then, out of nowhere, last December he started attacking the coal industry, saying: “Change has been a constant throughout the history of our coal industry. West Virginians can choose to anticipate change and adapt to it, or resist and be overrun by it. The time has arrived for the people of the Mountain State to think long and hard about which course they want to choose.” He meant, without saying it, the rape of the mountains that was no longer ignorable. He also went after Massey Energy more recently, after the hideous deaths of the 29 miners in that April explosion in his home county. Most surprisingly, he recently voted against the Lisa Murkowski resolution to strip the EPA of authority to define and regulate greenhouse gases. Rockefeller voted for big coal. Byrd bucked it. I don’t think he ever would have done that five or 10 years ago. It would have been fascinating to see what he would have said about coal and Massey and Don Blankenship over the next few years.

Byrd is not easy to categorize or eulogize. He was not avowedly liberal or conservative, and as such doesn’t suit this partisan era. As a man who taught himself law, read ancient classics, used a few too many five-dollar words and was never any good at all on television, he was also out of place in our age. But he spanned ages, embodying the good and the bad of America over those decades, and standing consistently in what Arthur Schlesinger called the time of “the imperial presidency” against presidential power. Many of the tributes that are pouring in today from his colleagues are coming from people who haven’t the slightest idea what his career was actually about, or who do but who simply put partisan gain ahead of constitutional belief. The Senate will always need a Byrd. I’m not sure who the next one will be, but I am sure it will miss this one.

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