Lodge in 1919 and Vandenberg in 1948 gave two Republican answers on treaties

Two men sat in the same chair, thirty years apart, with the same job, the same party and the same problem. Each was a Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Each faced a Democratic President who wanted the Senate to approve a great international commitment. Each was suspicious of handing the country's safety to a committee in a foreign capital. One of them killed his President's treaty. The other helped write the treaty that anchored the security of the West for three-quarters of a century.

If you ask the usual textbook, you will hear that the first man was an isolationist and the second was an internationalist, and that is the end of the story. I think that is too easy, and it gets the lesson wrong. Both men believed the same thing about the Constitution. They differed on how to get a commitment that the country would actually keep. Let me set the two fights side by side and show you what separated a failure from a success.

The constitutional ground rules

Article II, Section 2 gives the President the power to make treaties, "provided two thirds of the Senators present concur." That is a high bar. It was set deliberately. The framers wanted a treaty, which binds the whole nation as the supreme law of the land under Article VI, to have broad support. A bare majority is not enough.

Two notes will help you through the rest of this post. First, the requirement is two-thirds of the senators present. On March 19, 1920, the roll showed 49 yes votes and 35 no votes, so 49 plus 35 is 84 senators voting, and two-thirds of 84 is exactly 56. That is the bar the League treaty had to clear. Second, Article I, Section 8 gives Congress, not the President, the power to declare war. A treaty that promises military help to another country raises an obvious question: does the promise bind Congress to declare war when the time comes? Both Lodge and Vandenberg cared about that question. They answered it differently, and the answers decided everything.

Lodge and the League, 1919 and 1920

Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee when Republicans took the Senate after the 1918 elections. He was a scholar, a historian, a long-time rival of President Woodrow Wilson, and a man with a sharp tongue and an even sharper memory.

Wilson had negotiated the Treaty of Versailles in Paris in 1919. It included the Covenant of the League of Nations. The provision that mattered most was Article X, in which League members promised to respect and preserve one another's territorial integrity and political independence against outside aggression. Lodge and many others read Article X as a blank promise: if a border anywhere were attacked, the United States was bound to defend it, and the League Council would advise on how.

Lodge's response was a set of reservations, fourteen in all. The heart of them was a reservation to Article X: the United States would assume no obligation under it unless Congress, by act or joint resolution, so provided. The war power stayed in Congress. Other reservations protected the Monroe Doctrine, domestic matters and the right to withdraw from the League. Lodge also did something that infuriated Wilson's allies: he had the entire treaty read aloud in committee, which took a good while, and then held hearings.

Wilson's response was equally stubborn. He would not accept the reservations, which he said gutted the treaty. In September 1919 he went on a long speaking tour to appeal to the public over the heads of the Senate. On October 2, 1919, he suffered a severe stroke that left him incapacitated. In November his loyalists in the Senate were told to oppose the treaty with Lodge's reservations attached.

The votes tell the story. On November 19, 1919, the Senate voted on the treaty with the Lodge reservations and rejected it, 39 yes to 55 no. Then it voted on the treaty without reservations, which Wilson's side had demanded, and rejected that too, 38 to 53. Wilson's own supporters voted with the Republican irreconcilables, the senators who opposed any League at all, to sink the treaty with reservations. In March 1920 the Senate tried again. On March 19, 1920, the treaty with reservations drew 49 votes in favor and 35 against. It needed 56. The treaty came up seven short (56 minus 49 is 7), and Wilson's loyalists, following his instruction, again voted no. Some Democrats broke ranks to vote yes that time, but not enough.

Note the lesson carefully, because it cuts against a common story. The treaty with Lodge's reservations got a majority. It did not get two-thirds because the President told his own party to vote against it. This was not Republican obstruction alone. It was an all-or-nothing standoff between two proud men, and the country lost.

Vandenberg and the Atlantic pact, 1948 and 1949

Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan had been a prominent isolationist before the Second World War. On January 10, 1945, he gave a speech in the Senate that renounced it. The war, he said in effect, had shown that no nation was immune, and America had to take a part in building a lasting peace. He was a delegate at the San Francisco conference that wrote the United Nations Charter, and the Senate approved the Charter in July 1945 by a vote of 89 to 2.

In January 1947 Republicans took control of Congress, and Vandenberg became Foreign Relations chairman, facing President Harry Truman, a Democrat. This is the symmetry I wanted you to see: same party, same chair, same kind of opposing President. What did Vandenberg do differently?

The Soviet Union had tightened its grip on Eastern Europe. In February 1948 a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia shocked Western capitals. In March, Britain, France and the Benelux countries signed the Brussels Treaty, a mutual defense pact among themselves. They wanted American backing. Truman's administration could have sent a finished treaty to the Senate and dared Republicans to vote it down. Instead, the State Department worked with Vandenberg first. Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett sat down with him and drafted the language together.

The result was the Vandenberg Resolution, passed by the Senate on June 11, 1948, by a vote of 64 to 4. It advised the President to pursue security through regional arrangements under Article 51 of the UN Charter, the article that preserves every nation's right of collective self-defense, and it said the United States should associate itself with arrangements based on continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid. In plain words: the Senate told the executive, in advance, what kind of alliance it would approve.

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949. Its heart is Article 5, in which an armed attack on one member is an attack on all, and each member will take "such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force." Look at those words. As it deems necessary. Each ally decides for itself. And Article 11 says the treaty is to be carried out "in accordance with their respective constitutional processes." For Americans that means Congress. The Senate gave its consent on July 21, 1949, by 82 to 13.

Compare that with Lodge's complaint about Article X. Lodge feared that the League Council could tell the United States what it had to do. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty does the opposite: it reserves the decision to Washington. The Senate got the very reservation that Lodge had wanted in 1919, written into the treaty text itself, and they got it because Vandenberg was in the room when it was drafted.

The two fights side by side

Look at that table for a minute. Every row that mattered was about process and about the war power, and not one was about whether America should be involved in the world.

Taft's dissent

Now for the honest complication. The North Atlantic Treaty was not unanimous among Republicans, and the strongest voice against it was no isolationist crank. Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, known as Mr. Republican, voted against the treaty in 1949. He supported the United Nations and he opposed the Soviet Union. His objection was different: he feared that a standing military alliance, paired with arms shipments to Europe, would lock America into a permanent, expensive commitment, and that it might provoke the very war it was meant to prevent. He preferred a simple declaration of purpose, short of a formal alliance. (Our profile of him is Mr. Republican Robert Taft lost the nomination three times, yet won the party, and the wider debate is in Taft Versus Eisenhower and the Republican Fight Over the World.)

Here is the strongest version of Taft's case: alliances are easy to enter and hard to leave, they can drag a country into quarrels it did not choose, and the people who should decide for war are the people's representatives, not the treaty text. That is a Madisonian argument, and it is a serious one.

Here is why the Senate went the other way, in order.

1. Deterrence was the point. An alliance that is announced in advance is meant to make an attack unthinkable. A promise made after the shooting starts deters nothing. (We take up that idea in Why Deterrence Is a Promise You Have to Be Willing to Keep.)
2. The text protected Congress. The "such action as it deems necessary" clause meant that Article 5 did not automatically mean war. The decision stayed in Washington.
3. The Senate was part of the drafting. The Vandenberg Resolution meant the treaty was shaped by the body that would have to approve it, so there were no surprises.
4. The alternative was worse. A Western Europe that could not defend itself invited Soviet pressure and invited a scramble for its own arms.

Taft lost the vote, and the republic did not fall. But his warning about open-ended commitments is one a careful conservative should keep in a drawer for the next time someone proposes a new one. Our timeline of the one time Article 5 was invoked, The One Time NATO's Article 5 Was Invoked, and Who Answered the Call, is a good place to see what the promise cost and what it earned.

What the two men had in common

It would be a mistake to call Lodge a villain or Vandenberg a saint. They were more alike than their reputations suggest. Both wanted the war power to remain with Congress. Both thought a commitment you cannot keep is worse than none at all. Both distrusted a standing international body that might outvote the United States. The history of the post-war order, told in Vandenberg's Conversion and the Republicans Who Built the Postwar Order, shows how many Republicans shared the second man's view.

What differed was the method.

• Lodge was handed a finished treaty and asked to approve it or reject it. Vandenberg was brought in while the text was still wet.
• Wilson treated amendments as an insult. Truman's team treated them as a negotiation.
• The League's central clause was vague about who decides. The Atlantic treaty's central clause left no doubt.
• Wilson's allies and enemies were both at fault in 1919. In 1948, both parties took part in a deliberate effort to keep foreign policy bipartisan.

Vandenberg is remembered for the idea that partisan differences should stop at the water's edge. That does not mean politics goes quiet. It means that when a commitment is made in the name of the whole country, it should be made in a way that the whole country can stand behind.

The bottom line

• A treaty needs two-thirds of the senators present. In 1920 that meant 56 votes, and the League treaty with reservations got 49, seven short. Treaties are supposed to be hard to pass.
• Lodge's central demand, that Congress decide on force, was not isolationism. It was Article I, and the Atlantic treaty adopted the same idea in the words "such action as it deems necessary."
• The treaty that worked was written with the Senate's chairman in the room, and the one that failed was presented to the Senate as a finished product. Process is not a technicality. It decides whether a promise holds.
• Taft's objection deserves a fair hearing. Any commitment that sounds permanent deserves the question: who decides, who pays, and how do we leave?
• When you hear about a new international agreement, read the operative article, ask who decides on force, and ask whether the Senate was consulted before or after. Then tell your senator what you think.