Kings of Containment: Truman and Vandenberg flank Secretary of State George C. Marshall Washington airport. Marshall and Vandenberg leaving for the Inter-American Conference in Rio de Janeiro. ARCHIVE PHOTOS

Advise and Torment
U.S. foreign policy used to be the province of the president. Not anymore

NO SOONER HAD REPUBLICANS stormed Congress in 1994 than President Clinton took to admonishing his Hill critics that "partisan politics should stop at the water's edge."

Four years later, the GOP is still in charge -- and it's election time again. Afraid to wade into the Lewinsky firefight and unable to hit Clinton on the domestic front because of the booming economy, Republicans, led by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, are again gleefully tearing away at what remains Bill Clinton's softest political underbelly: foreign policy.

The "water's edge" line sounds like the plea of an embattled President -- and in 1994, it was. But the man who coined it 50 years ago was a conservative Republican and career isolationist: Senator Arthur Vandenberg, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1941 Vandenberg fought Roosevelt's arming of Britain as bitterly as Jesse Helms ever fought a Clinton appointee. But Pearl Harbor was Vandenberg's epiphany; he became a dedicated internationalist and foreign-policy bipartisan and never looked back. Time after time, he delivered the Hill to Truman, including the aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947 that inspired the Marshall Plan. The birth of NATO -- authorizing the administration to negotiate a military alliance with Canada and Western Europe -- was called "the Vandenberg Resolution." In short, he was no Jesse Helms.

Look for a Vandenberg (continued)