Bipartisanship Works

As President Obama encounters substantial challenges in creating a bipartisan approach to governance, largely overlooked are the ways that Franklin Delano Roosevelt successfully made bipartisanship a key instrument in conducting American foreign policy during the Second World War.

In the face of escalating international conflicts in Europe and Asia well in advance of Pearl Harbor, FDR had appointed two prominent Republicans to key posts in his cabinet. Henry L. Stimson, acknowledged among the giants of American foreign policy experts in the first half of the twentieth century, became his Secretary of War. He previously had served President William Howard Taft as his Secretary of War and President Herbert Hoover as his Secretary of State. Frank Knox, prominent as a Chicago newspaper publisher, was appointed Secretary of the Navy. He had been the Republican nominee for vice president in the election of 1936, running on the ticket led by Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas. Late in the 1930s Knox had attained Roosevelt’s respect as a result of editorials he had written in the Chicago Daily News endorsing the president’s plans for a naval construction program. Yet even while serving in the cabinet, Knox pointedly demonstrated his independence by signing editorials criticizing President Roosevelt’s domestic policies!

In another demonstration of bipartisanship, President Roosevelt also enlisted Wendell Willkie, his vanquished Republican opponent in the hotly contested election of 1940. Willkie embarked upon a widely publicized worldwide tour, at the president’s behest, for the purpose of explaining to foreign nations the president’s strategy for postwar internationalism. Upon returning, he wrote a best-selling book entitled One World, underscoring why the United States should sustain its international role in global affairs in the postwar era.

Nor did President Roosevelt ignore Republicans in Congress. Unquestionably the foremost dividend of his sustained devotion to fostering bipartisanship in foreign policy was a catalytic speech by a United States senator from Michigan, Arthur H. Vandenberg. Long associated with Republican critics of internationalism, the senator had expressed a highly skeptical view of American entry into World War II prior to Pearl Harbor. But in the final year of the war, in January of 1945, he joined with Roosevelt by way of advocating American membership in the United Nations. Subsequently Senator Vandenberg served as a prominent member of the San Francisco Conference, culminating in the formation of the United Nations.

Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to foster bipartisanship also influenced whom the Republican party selected as its presidential nominees. Beginning with Wilkie in 1940, the party opted for candidates from its internationalist wing in the five successive general elections: Thomas E. Dewey (1944 and 1948) and then Dwight D. Eisenhower (1952 and 1956).

During the perilous international economic crisis of 2009, Republicans no less than Democrats surely would benefit from contemplating the legacy of bipartisanship fostered by Franklin D. Roosevelt. In choosing to link arms with a Democratic president, Republicans such as Frank Knox, Henry Stimson, Arthur Vandenberg, and Wendell Willkie surely had recognized the pressing need to transcend the imperatives of one political party. Each of them obviously recognized bipartisanship as a national virtue.