~

Half a decade had passed since the Senator's famous speech on January 1945, when he had proposed a post-war treaty among the Allies of the Second World War.  This had been the beginning of his late-blooming fame.  He had reversed field from a career countering interventionists in the State Department, a career as Franklin Roosevelt's most effective congressional adversary.  The isolationist had turned world statesman -- and Washington's darling.  One after the other had come his appointment as delegate to the first UN conference, his role in post-war peace talks, his success in steering through Congress the Marshall Plan and NATO.  Harry Truman was in trouble without him.

In the ensuing five years, a long-awaited peace turned into the Cold War, with the Soviet Union and its satellites ranged behind the infamous Iron Curtain.  The Kremlin descried the sinister influence of the senior Senator from Michigan.  He was a bogeyman, the devil on Truman's shoulder, exemplar of American imperialism.

In November 1950 the dying Senator received a letter from Edward R. Murrow outlining plans for an hour-long CBS Radio documentary.  The subject was the war of nerves between East and West in the shadow of the atomic bomb, "the story of the cold war and the fight for peace in the actual recorded voices of the key figures of these five years," Murrow wrote.  The network wanted a bipartisan story, with Vandenberg "the central pivot of the entire era."

The Senator's speeches and interviews would create "a sort of running narration to this drama."  Murrow knew Van was sick, and would not presume to ask him to read the lines himself.  Instead, he said, "we intend, with your permission of course, to ask the distinguished actor, Spencer Tracy (or someone of his calibre), to play the role of Arthur Vandenberg."

The other voices -- Truman, Churchill, Acheson, Marshall, Byrnes, Dulles, Vishinsky, Bevin, Masaryk, Baruch, Gromyko -- would come from recordings.  Murrow envisioned a prime-time broadcast, without commercial interruption, with recordings furnished to schools and colleges.  To build a large audience, the promotional resources of the network, from Bing Crosby and Arthur Godfrey to Jack Benny, would plug the show.

"Naturally, we will not undertake this project without your assent," Murrow wrote.  "We have turned to you because we believe that the Vandenberg story is so much a part of U.S. foreign policy and because your stature and cooperation have made the bipartisan foreign policy a living, working thing."  Murrow turned up the flattery, always a good tactic in dealing with Vandenberg.  It was, he told the Senator, "your words and spirit" that made a non-partisan program possible.

Words and spirit -- that combination had been Vandenberg's way of charming the Congress and saving the West.  And now Murrow assured him that the network would make no demands on the ailing man's time or energy: "To approach the matter on any other basis would be less than patriotic."

Vandenberg liked the proposal, but he had to be frank.  "I am still far from well," he replied.  Although he nursed hopes of going back to Washington after the holidays, he confided, "just between us, I do not know what I can do if I return in January, as is my fondest aspiration."

~

His wife, Hazel, had died the previous summer, also ravaged by cancer.  She had understood his world, parted the veil of bluster and cigar smoke.  Not so his adult daughters, who fell into familiar roles in the presence of their formidable father: two little girls trying to bring a giggle out of papa.  "And not one of us can change that now," wrote the younger one, Betsy.

The Senator's mind was a dizzy cocktail of agony, hope and despair.  "All we can do is sit with him and give him nothing," Betsy lamented.  As his son, Arthur Junior, fed the newspapers false reports of some slight progress, the calls kept coming.  The President wrote from Key West, George Marshall from Virginia.  From London, Churchill sent word that he wished they might have got to know each other better.  He sensed between them, he said, a "community of soul."

Mitzi Sims called.  This Danish-born widow of a Canadian diplomat had been the Senator's lover in the traumatic years just before Pearl Harbor.  At the behest of the British she had seduced the good Senator out of isolation, some of his enemies claimed, although the Japanese surprise attack and the scream of V-2 rockets over St. Paul's were rather larger factors.  A decade later, alone in Florida, the blonde beauty with the husky voice called Morris Avenue to inquire about Arthur.  Betsy took the call.  Her father, she said, was too ill to talk just then.

His daughter longed for some communion with her dying father.  "He's always been such a lone, unconfiding, self-sufficient person," she wrote.  This big man, shrunken now, always bold with his assertions, sagacious in a keen, practical way, longed, finally, to smoke another cigar.