"Everything to Gain"

The U.S. Senate was droning through its regular business one warm day last week when into the chamber strode two large and familiar figures. All business stopped. While the presiding officer rapped futilely for order, members crowded around Texas' big, spaniel-haired Tom Connally and Michigan's big, balding Arthur Vandenberg. They were back from San Francisco with the design for world peace.

They wasted no time. Day after their return, Tom Connally rose to present the San Francisco charter to his colleagues.

The gallery was crowded. In the front row, leaning over the rail, was Britain's cadaverous Ambassador, Lord Halifax, one hand cupped to his good ear. Over & over again, Texan Tom Connally, who had snorted interventionist fire in the Senate before the war, now breathed peace. Said he: "Peace can be preserved. . . . We leagued our armed might for war. Now let us league our moral and material might for peace."

Peace with Justice. Vandenberg spoke the next day. Again the gallery was crowded, and once again Lord Halifax sat in the front row, listening intently. Vandenberg was the man who had once led some Republicans in the ways of strict isolation.

Vandenberg also spoke of peace--but peace with justice. The charter, said he, "invokes the moral pressures of the organized conscience of the world. There is no escape for any power, however great, from the clear responsibility which it will unavoidably assume before an outraged world if it takes to the warpath before it has exhausted these paths of peace.

"Justice," said the Michigan Senator, "is thus guaranteed its hearing under the healthiest possible auspices available to this distraught and tangled world. ... I would not agree that force is the real genius of this new institution."

Facts of Life. He anticipated objections. "You may tell me. that some of the signatories to this charter practice the precise opposite of what they preach even as they sign. ... I reply that the nearer right you may be ... the greater is the need for the new pattern which promises at least to stem these evil tides. . . ."

Is the charter "in stark reality" a three-power military alliance? Said Vandenberg: "The world is at the mercy of Russia, Britain and the U.S. regardless of whether we form this league or not. Those happen to be the facts of life, but I submit that the world is even more at their mercy without the San Francisco charter than with it."

He pleaded for the Senate's "reasonable expedition" in registering approval. "History is writing with a rushing pen and we must accommodate its pace. . . . America has everything to gain and nothing to lose by giving [the charter] support; everything to lose and nothing to gain by declining this continued fraternity with the United Nations in behalf of the dearest dream of humankind."

As the Senator sat down, colleagues and visitors, who had listened to him in almost hypnotic silence, broke into applause. Senators lined up to shake his hand. His famed speech of last Jan. 10 had foreshadowed the coming bipartisan approval of U.S. internationalism. Now Arthur Vandenberg had done it again.

The charter was now officially before the Senate. There was no doubt of the outcome. Even Senator Bob La Follette, who had denounced the San Francisco conference (TIME, June 11), declared that he would vote for the pact.

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