We bow to the God bipartisanship.

AuthorGelb, Leslie H.
PositionReport

Upon his departure as secretary of defense, none other than Washington's latest living legend Robert Gates cautioned those he was leaving behind to cherish and nurture bipartisanship. "When we have been successful in national security and foreign affairs, it has been because there has been bipartisan support." To drive the point home, he added: "No major international problem can be solved on one president's watch. And so, unless it has bipartisan support, unless it can be extended over a period of time, the risks of failure [are] high."

Contrary to Gates's Holy Grail sentiments and to most homilies to bipartisanship, Dean Acheson tagged the practice a "magnificent fraud." As President Truman's secretary of state and thus one of its earliest practitioners, he knew of what he spoke. In a 1971 interview at the Truman Library, Acheson offered a taste of his usual roughand-tumble candor:

The question, who is it bad for, and who is it good for, is what you ought to put your mind on .... No, I wouldn't be too serious about bipartisanship. It's a great myth that ought to be fostered. And don't bring too damn much scholarship to bear on it. You'll prove it out of existence if you're not careful. The intent here is not to slaughter the sacred cow, but to reduce its high-flying levitation, thereby giving its Washington worshippers a better view of when bipartisanship might be useful and harmful--and to whom. Presidents seek bipartisanship to tamp down domestic critics and to convince foreign leaders that they cannot outlast or undermine presidential policies--as happened with Hanoi during the Vietnam War, Moscow during arms-control talks of the Cold War and the Taliban in the current war in Afghanistan. But in these and many other cases, bipartisan backing at home has too often been purchased at the price of good policy abroad.

When worrying too much about bipartisanship, presidents also would do well to reflect on their vast powers to make foreign policy, powers to act as they think best--even in the face of serious political attacks. My concern is that Gates and many others have so inflated bipartisanship's centrality that it has become a distraction from, and detriment to, making good policy. And if it is greater political support presidents are seeking, they'd find it better in the results of smart thinking than in compromised positions. Good policy enhances the chances of success abroad, which in the end is good politics as well.

The distance from Gates to Acheson is not small: Gates holds that two-party to getherness is essential to successful foreign policy. Acheson saw it as a useful political tool for presidents, presumably to curb domestic opposition and add some weight to U.S. foreign policy--but did not want key decision makers to be teary eyed and reverent about it. Three national-security advisers interviewed for this article--Brent Scowcroft for Presidents Ford and George H. W Bush, Sandy Berger for President Clinton and Stephen Hadley for President George W. Bush--fall somewhere in between, though closer to the latter. Whatever their differences, all agree that a review of bipartisanship--its meaning, practice and value--is long overdue.

Indeed, the story and study of bipartisanship best reveal why Acheson's cynicism is preferable to Gates's worship. And most begin the narrative with Truman, Acheson and George Marshall. More or less, this trio maneuvered Senator Arthur Vandenberg, then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, into being their cat's-paw in a Republican-controlled Senate. They needed the very influential Michigan senator to cajole more than a dozen of his fellow conservatives to vote for Truman's highly controversial Cold War initiatives: the Marshall Plan, NATO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and the like. With the brilliance and effectiveness of these initiatives, cries for bipartisanship became a Washington staple. The idea grew so agreeable that few policy hands carefully examined exactly what bipartisanship meant or searched for its telling derivations.

The roots of bipartisanship go back to the well-worn trope that "politics stops at the water's edge." Vandenberg is often credited as its author, but it seems that the first utterer of this biblical phrase was Daniel Webster, as a member of the House...

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