Senator Taft
IT is a commonplace and an erroneous commonplace to assert that there is no room in American politics for the man of good family. It was never true and is not true now, as the career of the late Senator Taft shows. For he certainly owed a great deal in his early years in politics to the fact that he was the son of a President and Chief Justice of the United States, the grandson of a cabinet member, even the brotherof a well-known reformer. He was lucky in other ways : his uncle was a celebrated headmaster; he went to Yale and to Harvard; he had an extremely capable wife interested deeply in politics. He was lucky, too, in the date of his entry into national politics, 1938. The Republican Party was just making its feeble come-back from the disasters of 1932 and 1936, and the election of Robert Taft to the Senate from Ohio was one of the signs of that come-back. The Roosevelt land- slides had wiped out the old Republican leadership and the new Senator stepped into a position of prominence that otherwise he might have had to wait for. Within two years of his enter- ing the Senate, he was a formidable candidate for the Repub- lican presidential nomination, a role he played every four years since 1940. Yet he never made it; by what, to a professional politician, must have seemed an outrageous breach of the rules, he lost to amateurs like Eisenhower and Willkie as well as to so professional a politician as Governor Dewey. The luck that had run with him in his Senatorial career did not run with him in his Presidential ambitions. Had he been nominated in 1952, he would (if elected) have had one of the shortest Presidential terms in history. As it is, he will be known as one of the great parliamentarians of modern American politics.
That was his strength and weakness. To his skill as a debater he owed his early fame; to his industry as a parlia- mentary leader he owed that primacy in Congress which got him the name of "Mr. Republican." But neither debating skill nor intelligent industry could make of him a really popular figure. His voice was harsh and flat; his speaking style, how- ever effective, was not winning. He lacked the real or synthetic common touch possessed in different ways by such different characters as F. D. R., General Eisenhower and Mr. Truman. Indeed, in modern times, Congress, even the Senate, has not been a good springboard for presidential ambitions; only one Senator has been directly elected to the Presidency in this century, and, even in Ohio, the precedent of Warren Gamaliel Harding was not thought encouraging. It was in the Senate that Taft had to make his career.
He made that career by a combination of political efficiency and of independence and originality that were rare indeed. Taft was a good party man; he was never suspected of any hankerings after political independence such as were credited to his brother Charles. He brought to the Republican party a hereditary devotion that had an archaic charm. He grew up in Ohio politics, in Cincinnatti politics, and the politics of Ohio and Cincinnatti are very political indeed. They have very strange bedfellows in that state, and the in-and-out running on the Ohio political race-track evokes the admiration of con- noisseurs. Taft played the game as it had to be played. He was genuinely indignant at imputations of dishonesty in round- ing up southern delegates in 1952.. Was not that how his father had been nominated in 1912? The skill with which the backers of General Eisenhower exploited the situation may have aroused Taft's professional admiration, but not his moral admiration. What a Taft supporter said of Governor Dewey's men in 1948 could have been said in 1952: "We don't know what politics is compared with those New York boys." The nomination, the triumphant election of General Eisen- hower, might have been a fatal blow to Taft's authority. It wasn't for two reasons. The President needed the Senator and the Senator was too good a party man to sulk. He was leader of the Republicans in the Senate; no one could deprive him of that position, and, as that leader, he proposed to support, and did support, the Eisenhower administration. He was soon its indispensable man. Nor was this really very surprising. For one thing, in domestic issues Taft was not much to the right of the new President if he was to the right at all. Labour has made the co-author of the Taft-Hartley Act a bogey man, ignoring that, just because of Taft's leadership, the Act was less hostile to Labour than might have been feared. In many social matters Taft was at least as close to moderate New Dealers as he was to his Republican die-hards. He knew that the Republican party was now numerically inferior to the Democratic party, and that it could not for long win ground by standing pat. The results of the Congressional elections of 1952 rubbed that lesson in. It was not in the safe districts of Messrs. Taber and Reed that the real battle had to be fought. And Taft knew the importance of making the Eisen- hower administration look like a success. To the job of making it a success he brought honesty, talent, industry and prestige. All of which will be badly missed now.
Of course, there were and are deep cleavages inside the Republican party between the natural allies of Taft and the forces that put over General Eisenhower. Only very slowly did Taft come to see that the simple isolationism of the mid- West was obsolete. In the early summer of 1940 he lost the nomination by failing to pay adequate attention to the impact of the Fiihrer's victories on the public mind. There was no conversion as in the case of Senator Vandenberg. Reluc- allay, cautiously, Taft accepted the new role of the United States. Characteristically, he objected on legal grounds to President Truman's action in Korea. His heart was un- doubtedly with the simpler, easier days, though his father and his brother were both much more internationally-minded than the average Ohio Republican. But it is probably in domestic politics that Taft will be most missed. His presence at the side of General Eisenhower was a guarantee to the average Republican that the "Grand Old Party" was not being sold down the river by camouflaged New Dealers. On the other hand, his social philosophy, his known competence, was a guarantee to millions of independent voters that the mandate given to President Eisenhower would not be interpreted in purely archaic, terms .such as appeal to some Senators. His support, when it was given to the foreign policy of the Administration, was most valuable because he was not suspected of being a "do-gooder," of being "starry-eyed." He recalled neither Wendell Willkie nor Mrs. Roosevelt. Who is to succeed him ? In a sense, no one can. No one combines such party authority. with public weight. Taft was able to transfer his official position to Senator ICnowland, but he could not so transfer his own personal position. The Administration may miss him very badly, even if there is discipline in the Republican ranks; even if the post of "Mr. Republican" is successfully put in commission. And indeed it may well be that the most important result of his death will be to force on the President more open Congressional leadership than he has chosex to exercise so far. Perhaps the only possible "Mr. Republican" now is the President of the United States —who is that and so much more.
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