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The death of the Old Right - Tracy Riddle - 27-06-2014
An interesting take from the libertarian/"isolationist" wing of the Right by Murray Rothbard:
http://mises.org/daily/2755
It is important to note that the later, 1960s Republican right wing, the Goldwater-Buckley Right, had no connection with the old Taft Right, even organizationally. Thus, Barry Goldwater was himself an Eisenhower delegate from Arizona; the conservative warmonger Senator General Pat Hurley was an Eisenhower man from New Mexico; the two doyens of the China Lobby were anti-Taft: Representative Walter Judd (R-MN) being for Eisenhower and Senator William Knowland (R-CA) being a supporter of Governor Earl Warren, who was decisive in throwing his support to Ike on the Southern delegate question.
Richard Nixon was also instrumental in the California deal, and both Nixon and Warren went on to their suitable rewards. And furthermore, the famous Southern delegation fight was scarcely what it seemed on the surface. The Taft delegations in the South were largely Negro, hence their name of "Black and Tan," and were led by the veteran black Republican Perry Howard of Mississippi, whereas the Eisenhower delegations, the representatives of the "progressive" white suburbanite businessmen of the Southern Republican future, were known quite properly as the Lilywhites.
Meanwhile, let us note the bitter but accurate portrayal of the Taft defeat by Chicago Tribune reporter Chesly Manly two years later, as an example also of the right-wing muckraking style:
New York banks, connected with the country's great corporations by financial ties and interlocking directorates, exerted their powerful influence on the large uncommitted delegations for Eisenhower. They did it more subtly, but no less effectively, than in 1940 when they captured the Republican convention for Willkie. Having made enormous profits out of foreign aid and armaments orders, the bankers and corporation bosses understood each other perfectly. The Wall Street influence was most fruitful in the Pennsylvania delegation … and in that of Michigan. … Arthur Summerfield, Michigan's national committeeman and the largest Chevrolet dealer in the world, was rewarded for his delivery of the bulk of the Michigan delegation by appointment as Eisenhower's campaign manager and later as his Postmaster General. Charles E. Wilson, President of the General Motors Corporation, which had strong influence in the Michigan delegation, became Secretary of Defense. Winthrop W. Aldrich, head of the Chase National Bank and kinsman of the Rockefeller brothers, the front man for Wall Street, was in Chicago pulling wires for Eisenhower, and his labors paid off with an appointment as ambassador to Great Britain.[9]
With the election of Eisenhower, the old right wing of the Republican Party began to fade out of the picture. But Senator Taft had one final moment of glory. In the last speech on foreign policy delivered before his death, Taft attacked the foreign-policy hegemony beginning to be exercised by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles,[10] the epitome of global warmongering and anticommunism, the man who hailed from the top Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell and was a long-time counsel for the Rockefeller interests. In this speech, delivered on May 26, 1953, Taft leveled at the Dulles policies the same criticism he had made against the similar policies of Harry Truman: the system of worldwide military alliances and aid was "the complete antithesis of the UN Charter," a threat to Russian and Chinese security, and furthermore valueless for the defense of the United States.Taft in particular centered his fire on Dulles's nascent policy in Southeast Asia. He was especially concerned because the United States was increasing to 70 percent its support of the costs of the fight of the French puppet regime in Indochina against the revolutionary forces of Ho Chi Minh. Taft feared with great prescience! that Dulles's policy, upon the inevitable defeat of French imperialism in Indochina, would lead to its eventual replacement by American imperialism, and to Taft the worst of all possibilities the sending of American forces to Vietnam to fight the guerrillas.
Declared Taft:
I have never felt that we should send American soldiers to the Continent of Asia, which, of course, included China proper and Indo-China, simply because we are so outnumbered in fighting a land war on the Continent of Asia that it would bring about complete exhaustion even if we were able to win. … So today, as since 1947 in Europe and 1950 in Asia, we are really trying to arm the world against Communist Russia, or at least furnish all the assistance which can be of use to them in opposing Communism.
Is this policy of uniting the free world against Communism in time of peace going to be a practical long-term policy? I have always been a skeptic on the subject of the military practicability of NATO. … I have always felt that we should not attempt to fight Russia on the ground on the Continent of Europe any more than we should attempt to fight China on the Continent of Asia.[11]
Is this policy of uniting the free world against Communism in time of peace going to be a practical long-term policy? I have always been a skeptic on the subject of the military practicability of NATO. … I have always felt that we should not attempt to fight Russia on the ground on the Continent of Europe any more than we should attempt to fight China on the Continent of Asia.[11]
The death of the Old Right - Tracy Riddle - 28-06-2014
It's important to remember that Robert Taft was admired by JFK (at least his foreign policy views) and was one of the Senators he wrote about in Profiles in Courage.