Master of the Senate (18 page)

The same was true of the other reasons for the Senate’s increasing inability to perform the function for which it had been created: the autocratic, paralyzing power of the committee chairmen, their selection not by ability but by seniority alone—these practices were not changed because the Senate did not want them changed, and in fact had incentives not to change them. And the Senate did not have to change them. It was increasingly unable to respond to the demands of a changing world, but, because of the armor that the Framers of the Constitution had bolted around it, that world couldn’t touch the Senate. The Framers had sought to insulate the Senate against the executive and the people, against outside forces, and they had done the job too well. No one could take away the Senate’s power to play the role the Framers had envisioned for it; the Senate had, without consequence to itself, given that power away.

A
ND WHEN
, in foreign affairs at least, it attempted to play that role, the attempt resulted in a tragedy that vividly illuminated the full potential for disaster that could be caused by the Senate’s unshakable power—and that illuminated as well the Senate’s utter inability to respond to the modern world.

After the First World War, an America sickened by the war’s horrors, disillusioned by its apparent senselessness, and cynical and distrustful of the political maneuvering of foreign powers turned its back on the world, refusing to accept responsibility for maintaining the peace; insisting rigidly on the repayment of the colossal war debts it was owed by its struggling Allies, while raising tariff walls against them and thereby exacerbating international tensions. While totalitarian regimes in Italy, Germany, and Japan were building huge military machines, America scrapped its navy, reduced its army, tried to lull itself into a belief that trouble could best be avoided by ignoring it, and refused to participate in attempts to create a collective security and an international rule of law. The Twenties and Thirties were decades of a tragic national self-delusion, of shortsighted diplomacy, of a refusal to understand the terrible new forces arising in the world, of a belief that America could simply isolate herself from them. And the Senate was the stronghold of isolationism.

Many of the most influential senators—Wheeler, Norris, both La Follettes, Vandenberg, Taft, Key Pittman, Hiram Johnson—were isolationists, as was Henry Cabot Lodge’s successor as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William E. Borah of Idaho.

In a Chamber filled with renowned orators, Borah, a former Shakespearean actor, was the orator without peer. Whenever during his thirty-three-year senatorial career word spread through the Capitol that “Borah’s up,” spectators would pour into the galleries, and senators would hurry onto the floor to hear him speak. “The Lion of Idaho” possessed, as well, a gift for
attracting the journalistic spotlight. At his daily three o’clock press conferences, journalists crowded into his office, leading a disgruntled President Coolidge to comment that “Senator Borah is always in session.” For decades, a historian says, “it seemed impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading a Borah pronouncement.” And while Borah, a liberal Republican on domestic issues, often employed his eloquence on behalf of the farmer or the factory worker, its impact was greatest on foreign policy.

In rejecting the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Senate had undermined the possibility of peace in the world. For more than twenty years thereafter, it carried on that work. In 1923, President Coolidge proposed that the United States become a member of the World Court. Since this tribunal could settle disputes only when every member agreed, its threat to America’s sovereignty was minimal, and not only the President but both political parties, in their platforms of 1924, and the House of Representatives, by an overwhelming vote of 303 to 28, and in polls, a majority of the American people, endorsed the World Court treaty. But treaties require Senate ratification, and the Senate, following Borah’s lead, made ratification contingent on five conditions. The Court’s twenty-one member nations accepted four of them, and expressed a willingness to negotiate on the fifth, but the Senate made clear that its resolution was non-negotiable—and America’s failure to become a member made the Court ineffective. In 1931, the Japanese invaded Chinese Manchuria, and quickly began turning it into a puppet state. Amid warnings that failure to force Japan to disgorge its new territory acquired by naked aggression would encourage not only the Japanese but other potential aggressors, the League of Nations met to consider action, and American representatives sat in on the discussions. But the discussions were shadowed by the old concern: even if the League members agreed on some course of action, what would the American Senate do? And nothing—at least nothing effective—was done. In 1933, President Roosevelt asked for congressional authority to block arms shipments to aggressor countries. The House gave it to him. The Senate didn’t. In fact, it amended the House resolution to force the President to embargo shipments to
every
country involved in a war—an amendment which, as Arthur Schlesinger puts it, “destroyed the original purpose of the resolution, which was precisely to discriminate against aggressors,” and which would actually have an effect opposite to what Roosevelt had wanted, “by strengthening nations that had arms already” at the expense of those who didn’t.

For almost two years beginning in September, 1934, the high-ceilinged, marble-columned Senate Caucus Room was the chief rallying point for isolationist sentiment in the United States, as a special Senate committee, chaired by the ardent isolationist Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, held ninety-three hearings, staged with great public fanfare, to “prove” that America had been lured into the Great War to boost arms makers’ profits. In 1935, with Hitler rapidly rearming, the danger of a worldwide conflagration increased as Mussolini
massed troops on the borders of the primitive kingdom of Ethiopia. When Roosevelt asked for authority to impose an arms embargo, the Senate’s response was to pass, in twenty-five minutes, the Neutrality Act of 1935, which tied the President’s hands by making it impossible for him to exert effective influence against Italy by forbidding the export of munitions to
all
belligerents. While noting that the bill penalized not Italy but Ethiopia, Roosevelt, afraid of exacerbating isolationist passions, felt he had no choice but to sign it. That same year, the President urged the Senate—as, twelve years before, President Coolidge had urged the Senate—to allow America to join the World Court. From the Senate floor came the response. “We are being rushed pell-mell to get into this World Court so that Señor Ab Jap or some other something from Japan can pass upon our controversies,” Huey Long shouted. “To hell with Europe and the rest of those nations,” Minnesota’s Thomas Stall cried. Although there were seventy-two Democrats in the Senate, the proposal could garner only fifty-two votes, a majority but short of the two-thirds needed for passage. At the very height of Roosevelt’s popularity, twenty Democratic senators had deserted him. “Thank God!” Borah said. That same year, the Senate passed legislation, drafted by Borah, strictly limiting expenditures for warships or for any other form of national defense. Nineteen thirty-six brought a further escalation in international tensions, so the Senate passed that year’s Neutrality Act, which restricted even more tightly America’s ability to deter aggressors by adding to the earlier restrictions on arms aid to all belligerents restrictions on financial aid as well. By the time Congress convened in 1937, Francisco Franco’s fascists, armed and aided by Hitler, had launched a campaign against Spain’s Republican government. This was a civil war, and the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936 did not apply to civil wars. So Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1937, which broadened the embargo so that it
would
apply to civil wars. “While German planes and cannon were turning the tide in Spain, the United States was denying the hard-pressed Spanish loyalists even a case of cartridges,” Garraty observes.

“With every surrender the prospects of European war grow darker,” Roosevelt was warned by his ambassador to Spain, but it was not the President but Capitol Hill’s isolationists who were shaping American foreign policy. The Senate vote for the Neutrality Act of 1937 was an overwhelming 63 to 6. In October, 1937, with Japanese troops now pushing into North China, with the fascists winning in Spain, with Germany having reoccupied the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles treaty and with Germany, Italy, and Japan having formed a military alliance, Roosevelt warned that if totalitarianism rolled over one country after another, America’s turn would eventually come. Predicting that there would be “no escape through mere isolation or neutrality,” he called for a “quarantine” of aggressor nations. Nye and Borah accused the President of trying to police the world and plunge America into another “European war.” In December, 1937, Japanese warplanes sunk the United States gunboat
Panay
(foreshadowing
another surprise attack on a December Sunday morning) as it lay in a Chinese river. Borah reminded the reporters crowded into his office that America had “the Atlantic on one side and the Pacific on the other,” and was therefore safe from invasion. “The United States is getting worked up over the prospect of war. I’m not,” he said.

Forced to abandon his hopes for collective security, Roosevelt began concentrating on America’s own military preparedness, calling for huge defense appropriations. To these Congress agreed, particularly after Nazi tanks rolled into Austria in May, 1938. But when, in September, with Hitler now menacing Czechoslovakia, the President asked also for a modification of the Neutrality Acts that would allow him at last to discriminate, in supplying arms, between aggressors and their victims, the isolationists on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee flatly refused to report out any modifications at all; they, not the President, were the best judges of the international situation, they made clear. When Roosevelt predicted that war in Europe was imminent, Borah replied confidently: “We are not going to have a war. Germany isn’t ready for it…. I have my own sources of information.” In March, 1939, in violation of his promises at Munich, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. Borah had a reaction: admiration. “Gad, what a chance Hitler has!” the Senator said. “If he only moderates his religious and racial intolerance, he would take his place beside Charlemagne. He has taken Europe without firing a shot.” The Senator’s sources of information were evidently still operative. “I know it to be a fact as much as I ever will know anything … that Britain is behind Hitler,” he said at this time. Roosevelt again appealed to the Senate to repeal the arms embargo, but on July 11, 1939, in a showdown vote, the Foreign Relations Committee decided, 12 to 11, to defer consideration of the matter until the next session of Congress. In August, Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact. In desperation, Roosevelt called the committee members to the White House and, urging them to reconsider, came as close as Franklin Roosevelt ever came to begging. The world was on the verge of a catastrophe, he told them, and he needed all the power he could muster to avert it. “I’ve fired my last shot,” he said. “I think I ought to have another round in my belt.” The senators sat there cold-faced. Vice President Garner, their leader in 1939 as he had been in the court-packing fight, showed Roosevelt who was boss. After polling the senators one by one in front of the President, he turned to him, and said: “Well, Captain, we may as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes, and that’s all there is to it.” (Not until Germany invaded Poland in September, and World War II was actually under way, was the arms embargo finally repealed. And even then—and even after a poll that showed that 84 percent of the American people wanted an Allied victory—it was repealed only after six weeks of acrimonious Senate debate, during which Borah, still adamantly insisting that America need not be involved in war, made his last impassioned radio address to the American people.)

In April, 1940, the full force of the Nazi blitzkrieg struck Europe. Denmark
fell, and Norway, and Holland and Belgium and then France. And month after month the Nazis rained bombs on London as a prelude to a planned invasion of the last country to stand between America and Hitler’s military machine. Americans were suddenly forced to confront some facts about Senator Borah’s invincible oceans. Fleets could sail over them, and Britain’s might soon be flying the swastika. And planes, as Roosevelt pointed out, could leave West Africa with their bomb bays crammed with bombs and re-emerge over Omaha. As the national mood changed with dramatic swiftness, Senate and House acted with unaccustomed speed in approving Roosevelt’s requests for vast new sums for the Army and Navy.

But when Britain, alone, beleaguered, asked for help to keep fighting—fifty or sixty overage World War I destroyers to combat Nazi submarines—Roosevelt feared the Senate mood hadn’t changed, at least not enough. “A step of that kind could not be taken except with the specific authorization of Congress, and I am not certain that it would be wise for that suggestion to be made to the Congress at this moment,” he told Churchill. The accuracy of the President’s assessment was demonstrated that summer, when the Senate amended the Naval Appropriations Bill to stipulate that military equipment could be released for sale only if the Navy certified it was useless for defense. A nation may have been jolted awake; its Senate hadn’t. Roosevelt, fearing that if he went to Congress, the isolationists might very well block the proposals, at last determined to bypass Congress and trade the destroyers for the lease of a number of British naval bases through an executive agreement that did not require its approval. The help given England in its darkest hour was given in spite of the United States Senate.

Following his re-election in November, 1940, Roosevelt, with Britain running out of funds to purchase military equipment, hit upon the idea of lending or leasing arms and supplies. First he took his case to the American people in momentous fireside chats, and then he took it to Congress.