The Fifties

by David Halberstam

The Robert Taft who finally showed up as a senator in Washington in 1938 was quite possibly the most cerebral politician of his era. His views were not likely to be influenced by the results of polls and were, by contemporary standards, libertarian. He hated the draft, not merely because he saw it as an escalating step toward militarism but because he believed it limited a young man’s freedom of choice. He opposed federal aid to education, not because he did not value education but because he thought it yet another intrusion of the federal government into the rights of the states. As the shadows of war in Europe began to fall on American politics, his reservations grew. “Modern war,” he said, opposing any escalation which would bring us into the Second World War, “has none of the glamour which we were taught to associate with war in our childhood. It is nothing but horror and mechanical destruction. It leaves the victor as exhausted as the vanquished.” He even opposed Lend Lease aid to England during England’s darkest hour. His lack of concern for traditional allies in Europe shocked even his family. “One of the best fellows in the world,” Uncle Horace Taft said of him, “but dead wrong on our foreign policy.” The pressure on him to change, to become more internationalist, was immense. One of his few friends in the press corps, Turner Catledge of The New York Times, saw him on a train in 1940, his glasses slipped halfway down his face, repeating to himself, “I’m just not go...