Today, the Stanwright Institute begins its inaugural post at Town Hall. As Institute Director, I have no particular insight into anything affecting the world, but I feel that blogging therapy will help me, the Institute's only (delusional) patient.

I was prompted to blog by a story I read in Richard Ketchum's excellent history, The Borrowed Years, which chronicles the US from 1938 to 1941.  The book illustrates many parallels, besides the obvious ones, between the rection to Hitler then and the reaction to the terrorist threat today.  Paricularly significant to me, however, was an anecdote Ketchum writes about Senator Arthur Vanderberg, whose pre-war isolationism placed him, at least in popular thinking, in the pantheon of history's narrow-minded thinkers.

After the passage of Lend Lease, which Vanderberg had opposed with all his will, he confided in his diary and in private letters:  "If America cracks up, you can put your finger on this precise moment as the time when the crime was committed."  He added that he felt that he "was witnessing the suicide of the republic."

Nevertheless, once headed down this path, Vanderberg placed his personal feelings aside for the betterment of his country, and vowed to support the president:  "I fought it from start to finish.  I think it was wrong.  I think it will not stop short of war.  but it is now the law of the land [and] we have no alternative but to go along." "If we stand any show, it will be from pursuing this new, revolutionary policy to the last limit with swiftest speed.  I shall vote hereafter accordingly."

It is, perhaps, a commentary upon our current political leaders, that Vanderberg's spirit seems so extraordinary.  One wonders where are the Vanderbergs of today (and if they still exist, how will they survive the Lamonts)?