Mr. Republican

The reign of the great sectional leaders of American politics did not pass with Calhoun, Webster and Clay. One of the most powerful in history died just last year: Robert A. Taft. The Republican parties of the twenty-odd states that make up the heartland of America followed him to the point of devotion. Because of this it was he, more than any other man, who stopped the New Deal dead in its tracks after the Second World War and begrudged the nation a bipartisan policy of world leadership.

William S. White, Congressional reporter for the New York Times, followed Taft and his influence for six years. Now he has tried to set down the whole story. The result is only disappointing insofar as it never gets behind the man to the driving attitudes of the section he represented. White details the well-known Taftian qualities: the bluntness, integrity, intellectual forcefulness and parliamentary skill which made him the Republicans most respected partisan. Recounting Taft's Republicans' most respected partisan. But the actions and attitudes of the Republican Old Guard, the core of Taft's national influence, emerged from The Taft Story as inexplicable as they entered.

These Republican leaders of the midwest and Great Plains states plainly need to be explained to the rest of the nation. For though they have been four times repudiated at national Republican conventions, they have steadily strengthened their grip on the Senate. For the last twelve years, the Taft Republicans have formed the largest cohesive political group in the nation, exerting a powers beyond the population of the states they represent.

In a sense, Taft's greatest political failure was his inability to use his tremendous prestige among Mid-western Republicans to lead them into a reconciliation with the rest of the party. He knew the East--he had graduated from Harvard Law, served on the Yale Corporation, and was respected in Eastern financial circles. As "the only mind in the conservative ranks," he knew the facts of the internationalist position. But he could never rise above the short-run interests of his own section. Never, that is, until the first months of the Eisenhower Administration when, acting as Eisenhower's "Prime Minster," he whipped Eastern and Midwestern Republicans into the same line. But death cut short Taft's brief experience with truly national leadership. For most of his public life, he was too much a representative to be a statesman.

Of Taft's relationship with the Old Guard, White says this: he was in it but not of it; he knew his colleagues were men of smaller mind and narrower interest than he, but he tolerated them because he was a party man first and they were 100 percent Republican. Taft hated Democrats; but he did not equate them with traitors. He condemned the Yalta agreement, but supported the nomination of Charles Bohlen, a "man of Yalta," for Ambassador to Russia.

In short, Taft was a big enough man to prevent the Old Guard from passing the limits of responsible partisan competition. But his death removed this check, and allowed the Jenners and McCarthys of the Old Guard to plow on unrestrained. It is they who must be understood, to be better combatted. The Taft Story tells much about their dead leader. White could now make an even better contribution to understanding American politics if he could use his background in Taft and Congress to explain the more difficult, and currently more important story, of the people Taft led.