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With this limited delivery and this one gesture he kept the Republican Party alive in the Senate from 1934 to 1939. He developed a new system of attack on the New Deal. Instead of useless frontal offensives, Vandenberg went along with the New Deal far enough to find the flaws; then by reading and study mastered the technical answers to those flaws; then amended constructively. In this way he exposed the "dangers" of the Social Security's so-called $47,000,000,000 old-age reserve fund of the future. Similarly he won smashing victories over Franklin Roosevelt when he needled the Florida Ship Canal and Maine's Passamaquoddy power project so effectively that Democrats joined him to vote them both down.
In 30 Days. This time his battle is bigger, broader, deeper. In it will be no place for his indecision, his flexible politician's outlook that once caused the late Joe Robinson to suggest as a 1936 GOPresidential slogan: "Vacuity, Vacillation and Vandenberg."
In assessing his chances of victory last week, Vandenberg was well aware, as were all the Senate's elders, that: 1) if the President is to win, he should do it in 30 days, for a dragged-out fight makes embargo-repeal unlikely unless such potential horrors as the bombing of Westminster Abbey or the destruction of Paris swing U. S. sentiment; 2) while delaying tactics probably mean victory for the Isolationists, the U. S. public will stand for no filibuster; 3) he must join with his fellow-Republicans in holding down Bob La Follette, who is bent on stealing the show for the Progressives. Well he knew, too, that the Administration's 49-vote majority was a paper majority, that paper majorities are like paper profits unless quickly taken.
Well he knew that he had many friends in & out of the Senate, yet no intimate friend, was even now as lonely as Franklin Roosevelt since the death of crabby, brilliant, gnomish Louis McHenry Howe. Coldly he could figure that this was a fight he must win, for not simply the Presidency but his Senate seat was at stake. Many a Michigan boss would like to see a more employable man in Washington.
To this fight last week Vandenberg came in top form. The much-used bookcases in the unpretentious two-story brick-stucco house in Grand Rapids had been explored night after night; the rolltop desk in his little den had rattled steadily under the impact of his heavy-handed typing. That house holds all of Arthur Vandenberg's private life. There he moved the year (1906) he jumped from city-hall reporter to managing editor of the Grand Rapids Herald—the paper to which he came as a cub the same night in 1902 that Frank Knox also applied for work. To that house went his first wife, Elizabeth Watson, mother of his three children, who died in 1916. Two years later he married Hazel Whittaker of Fort Wayne, Ind., took her home there.
From that den he fired the editorials that brought praise from President Woodrow Wilson, whom he loved and supported until the League of Nations issue burgeoned in 1919. There he fell in love with traditions, with constitutionalism, with Alexander Hamilton. He still wears a rosette of the Sons of the American Revolution in his coat lapel.