Vandenberg For President?

Bert Andrews, the Herald Tribune Washington bureau chief, reported on a boom for Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan for the Republican nomination for president in 1948, tracing the development chronologically.

In December, 1945 The United States News magazine reported that the main contenders were liberal Harold Stassen of Minnesota, moderate Thomas Dewey of New York, the 1944 candidate, and conservative, anti-United Nations John Bricker of Ohio, Dewey's running mate in 1944, with a half-dozen “leftovers” from prior conventions. Senators Leverett Saltonstall (Mass), Robert A. Taft (Ohio) and Vandenberg among them.

According to a March 11, 1946 Life magazine poll, the consensus of Washington correspondents was that Vandenberg had “grown tremendously toward statesmanship.”

On April 2, Roscoe Drummond, Washington bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor, referred to the Michigan senator as the “most influential Republican member of Congress.” He also wrote that a year earlier Vandenberg's presidential prospects were not taken seriously but that he now might well emerge as the most acceptable middle-of-the-road candidate between Right Winger Bricker and progressive Stassen. Some observers thought that a ticket that paired him with a Western liberal like Oregon's Wayne Morse might make a strong ticket.

This past week, Collier's Weekly, for which Vandenberg had once worked, named Vandenberg the “Senator of the Year” for 1945 for “the moral courage to abandon his former isolationism in favor of active and constructive internationalism.” and for rising above partisan politics.

Andrews then reviewed Vandenberg's actions in foreign policy over 1945.

Vandenberg was a conservative and opponent of the New Deal on most domestic issues. He had been among the isolationist leaders before the war but became an internationalist, a proponent of the UN and a supporter of Truman's foreign policy after the war. His name was put up in nomination as a favorite son in the 1948 Republican convention but Dewey became the candidate. He died in 1951 of cancer.