Petty Partisan Politics No Longer Stops At The Water’s Edge

In 1947, Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan took to the Senate floor and delivered what many consider to be a “speech heard ‘round the world.”

Vandenberg, a Republican who helped create the United Nations, led the GOP away from isolationism to internationalism. He supported the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO. On that day in 1947, Vandenberg, the first chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asserted that we must stop “partisan politics at the water’s edge.”