Arthur Vandenberg: From Diehard Isolationist to Architect of NATO

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Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican U.S. Senator from Michigan, went from one of the Senate's most entrenched isolationists to a builder of postwar American foreign policy. Born in Grand Rapids in 1884 to a family with Dutch American roots, he graduated first in his class at Central High School in 1900 and was publishing the Grand Rapids Herald in his early 20s, a paper owned by Senator William Alden Smith. He mocked Henry Ford's 1915 Peace Ship as a "loonship" and, as a widower with three young children after his first wife died in 1917, spoke at hundreds of Liberty bond rallies. Governor Fred W. Green appointed him to the Senate in 1928, and he won the full term that year with over 70 percent of the vote.

He piloted the 1929 Reapportionment Act that fixed the House at 435 seats and wrote the amendment to the 1933 Banking Act that created the FDIC, but later fought the Wagner Act and Franklin Roosevelt's court packing plan. The Nye Committee hearings on the munitions industry turned him toward strict neutrality laws. On December 7, 1941 he wrote in his diary that Pearl Harbor had ended isolationism for any realist, and on January 10, 1945 he announced his conversion on the Senate floor. He was a delegate to the San Francisco conference that produced the United Nations Charter, and as Foreign Relations chairman from 1947 worked with the Truman administration on the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the Vandenberg Resolution that led to NATO.

• A 1939 resolution he introduced to force new treaty talks with Japan gave Roosevelt and Cordell Hull cover to cancel the 1911 commercial treaty instead.
• In a confidential 1943 assessment, Isaiah Berlin called him a capable, ambitious political manipulator who preferred the label nationalist.
• He coined the maxim that politics stops at the water's edge.
• He announced in 1950 that he had cancer and died on April 18, 1951, at 67.
• In 2000 the Senate added his portrait to the Senate reception room alongside Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun.