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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Today's GOP demonizes any dissent, but one of its most influential forebears openly criticized WWII plans -- and just 12 days after Pearl Harbor.
Mar 19, 2002 | 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").
