Mr. Bush, Meet Mr. Taft

Prospect: Some Ammo For Those Who Think Dissent = Loyalty

(The American Prospect)  Taft, the conservative Ohio senator who is a hero to many of today's conservatives, gave a speech at the Executive Club of Chicago in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. There are a number of paragraphs that are just grand, but here's the best one, which is worth quoting in full:

As a matter of general principle, I believe there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government ... too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think that it will give some comfort to the enemy to know that there is such criticism. If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it as far as I am concerned, because the maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur.

Drink in those words. That's not William Fulbright two years into the Vietnam War. It's not Ted Kennedy last week. It's Mr. Republican, speaking — when? Not mid-1943, or even March 1942. Taft delivered this speech… on December 19, 1941!

That's right: Twelve days after the worst attack on American soil in the country's history, perhaps with bodies still floating in the harbor, the leader of the congressional opposition said to the president, we will question, we will probe, we will debate.

And he was right to do so. In fact, when I was researching this, I came across no evidence that Taft's assertion was even controversial. As I wrote in Salon: "Taft's speech hardly caused a ripple. If The New York Times covered it at all, it did so in a small enough way to escape my notice as I looked through newspapers from that time. The Washington Post did mention the speech, but only at the tail end of a larger story that was mostly about [Secretary of State Cordell] Hull. In the American political system that existed then, Taft's right to speak his mind on policy was a given, and no high-ranking Roosevelt official launched a major public attack."

Taft said much more in that speech. (The full speech doesn't seem to exist online; if you Google it, you get my piece and blogs linking to my piece. Some Democrat staffer ought to shoot over to the Madison Building and dig up the original.) And every word of it demolishes the Bush administration's horrendously un-American posture.

There is a carillon on the Capitol Hill grounds, 100 feet high, on the Senate side, named for Taft. Senators see it every day. Democratic senators might point it out to their Republican colleagues, and remind them of a time when their party was led by people who, whatever their ideology, understood the principles on which the United States was founded and honored them.


Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.