Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century by Hendrik Meijer (review)

In Michigan, the reminders of him are everywhere: His bespectacled statue stands at a downtown hub in Grand Rapids; his name emblazons a couple of elementary schools as well as an Oakland University dorm in metro Detroit; and a state historical marker commemorates his role in the birth of the UN and NATO, near the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. Yet now Arthur Vandenberg may have his most enduring monument of all, in the form of an excellent biography by Hendrik Meijer.

The Man in the Middle of the American Century is a fitting title. A leading senator of his time, Vandenberg (1884–1951) was a legislative middleman who cut deals with presidents and colleagues. He was a middle-of-the-road Republican who balanced his own conservative impulses with the progressive imperatives of his time. Close to the twentieth century's midpoint, he demonstrated the ability to change his mind and made a lasting mark in foreign policy. Meijer sums up his legacy with appealing concision: "Harry Truman was in trouble without him."

As a boy, Vandenberg got into his own bit of trouble because of Th eodore Roosevelt. In 1900, when Vandenberg was 16, the vice-presidential candidate, a fellow Dutchman, visited Grand Rapids on a campaign stop. A curious Vandenberg slipped away from his job at a biscuit factory to have a look. When he returned, his boss fired him for truancy. The next day, this apparent misfortune became a lucky break because Vandenberg secured a job as a writer at the Grand Rapids Herald, the city's morning newspaper. From this position, he began his long climb.

He took a big step in 1906, when he was just shy of twenty-two years of age. The Herald's editor died suddenly, and its owner turned to his bright young writer. Vandenberg had earned a reputation for productivity as well as verbosity: "No one was better at bulking up a story with five-dollar words," writes Meijer. As Vandenberg matured, he never lost his willingness to work hard or his penchant for pomposity, but he also became a "gift ed phrasemaker." He may have popularized the term "fiddle-faddle," meaning "nonsense." Both Warren Harding and Henry Cabot Lodge sought his advice and borrowed his lines—a reminder that regional newspaper editorialists once enjoyed much more influence than they do today. Vandenberg's prominence as a journalist, in fact, led to his appointment to the Senate in the spring of 1928. He remained a senator until his death twenty-three years later.

A colleague once described him as "the only Senator who can strut sitting down." Driven by the mix of ambition and insecurity that propels so many careers, then and now, Vandenberg engaged in the day's disputes over congressional reapportionment and tariffs, mainly hewing to GOP positions. Yet he also broke with President Herbert Hoover, a fellow Republican, over the Supreme Court nomination of John J. Parker, a segregationist from North Carolina. Vandenberg cast a decisive vote against Parker, who became the only potential justice formally rejected by the Senate during the seventy-five-year period from 1894 to 1969.

Vandenberg clashed more often with Hoover's Democratic successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom he referred to as "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Park." During the early days of the New Deal, the Michigander pushed for the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which Roosevelt initially opposed. For the most part, though, Vandenberg was a fiscal conservative who wanted to keep government spending in check. The New Deal, he quipped, had become the "New Ordeal." He went on to block a White House scheme to build a ship canal across Florida's peninsula in the kind of negative achievement that historians often overlook. Roosevelt became so wary of his rival that he ordered FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to open an office in Grand Rapids and, in Meijer's...