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Congress and the Cold War
C Robert David Johnson
I
n 1990 Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan caustically observed that
“the neglect of congressional history is something of a scandal of American
scholarship.” 1 The historiography of American foreign relations for the most
part conŽ rms Moynihan’s observation. InsufŽ cient attention to congressional
in uence has yielded a distorted perspective, especially in works dealing with
the Cold War. Many fundamental questions regarding the legislature’s role in
the formation and implementation of postwar U.S. foreign policy remain unexplored. Although some of these questions do not yield themselves to an intensive exploration of congressional in uence, any work focusing on the U.S.
foreign policy decision-making process or on domestic ideological debates
cannot omit the role of Congress.
The tendency to overlook Congress has stemmed from many factors. For
one thing, historiographical developments have conspired against a prominent place for the legislature. The early luminaries of diplomatic history, such
as Samuel Flagg Bemis, Dexter Perkins, and Arthur Whitaker, focused their
research on the presidency, the State Department, and the foreign ministries
of the countries with which the United States interacted. In addition, orthodox historians tended to frame their questions in a way that allowed them to
avoid inquiring into the type of domestic political, constitutional, and legislative disputes in which Congress traditionally has played a major role. Bemis’s
book on Jay’s Treaty, which ends before the highly charged debate in the
House of Representatives in 1795–1796 on the treaty’s implementation,
exempliŽ es the pattern. Moreover, the traditionalist historians concentrated
mainly on the diplomacy of the early republic, when the power of Congress as
a whole was relatively weak and the body played a comparatively minor role
in foreign policy.2 This approach was perhaps unsurprising given the realpolitik tenor of U.S. foreign policy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but it unduly in uenced the Cold War interpretations of1. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, On the Law of Nations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1990), p. 50.
2. On the weakness of Congress during the early republic, see James Sterling Young, The Washington
Community, 1800–1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966).
Journal of Cold War Studies
Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 76–100
© 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
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Congress and the Cold War
fered by orthodox historians. For instance, Herbert Feis, perhaps the most
proliŽ c and certainly the most insightful of the early Cold War scholars, focused almost exclusively on state-to-state relations in his attempt to explain
and assign responsibility for the origins of the Cold War.3
Although revisionist historians have sought to distinguish themselves
from traditionalists by exploring the relationship between domestic forces and
the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, they too have rarely delved into the activities of Congress. Concentrating instead on the in uence of more broadly
based economic or ideological interests associated with the U.S. economy’s
capitalist structure, they have generally treated the U.S. government as a
monolithic actor. For example, The New Empire, Walter LaFeber’s study of
Gilded Age foreign relations, essentially ignores the congressional antiexpansionist coalition that frustrated almost all of the executive-sponsored
initiatives that the volume details, including William Seward’s attempt to purchase the Danish West Indies, Ulysses Grant’s scheme to annex the Dominican Republic, and the Frelinghuysen-Zavala treaty with Nicaragua. The revisionist works that do include Congress—such as William Appleman
Williams’s The Roots of American Empire—almost always minimize congressional in uence. Williams does not treat Congress as an independent actor,
but simply as a source of quotations that sustain his argument on the consensus supposedly behind American economic expansion. Standard revisionist
interpretations of the early stages of the Cold War, such as works by LaFeber
and Gabriel Kolko, share little with Feis apart from a tendency to bypass Congress and to focus on the executive branch as the key to understanding the
U.S. approach to the Cold War.4
A similar pattern of relegating Congress to the periphery has characterized the reinvigorated debates now waged over U.S. foreign policy and the
early Cold War. Except for the typical obliging references to Senator Arthur
Vandenberg, most works that fall into the category of postrevisionism give
3. See, for example, the three works by Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution
(New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1935); Jay’s Treaty, a Study in Commerce and Diplomacy (New York:
Macmillan, 1923); Pinckney’s Treaty: A Study of America’s Advantage from Europe’s Distress, 1783–1800
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1926); Dexter Perkins, The Monroe Doctrine, 3 vols.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927); Arthur Whitaker, The Mississippi Question: A
Study in Trade, Politics, and Diplomacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934); and The
United States and the Independence of Latin America, 1800–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941).
4. William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and
Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society (New York: Random House, 1969); Williams,
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland: Globe Publishing Company, 1959); Walter LaFeber,
The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1961); and Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy (New
York: Random House, 1968). For a critique of revisionism on this issue, see David Pletcher, “Caribbean `Empire,’ Planned and Improvised,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Fall 1990), p. 458.
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Johnson
short shrift to the complexities of securing congressional support for novel
and expensive initiatives, including the 1946 loan to Great Britain, the Marshall Plan of 1947, the creation of the national security state, and the funding
of the remarkable expansion of the defense establishment after the outbreak of
the Korean War. Congress virtually never appears in the work of John Lewis
Gaddis or other leading postrevisionists. Melvyn Lef er’s Preponderance of
Power justiŽ ably attracted widespread praise, but it, like the pioneering works
of revisionism and postrevisionism of the 1960s and 1970s, focuses almost exclusively on the executive branch. Indeed, the book’s bibliography includes
only one congressional manuscript collection, that of H. Alexander Smith of
New Jersey—a thoughtful, moderate Republican. Moreover, re ecting the
shared bias of traditionalists, revisionists, and postrevisionists alike, no prominent review of the volume mentioned this oversight.5
Among recent studies of U.S. foreign relations, Fredrik Logevall’s
Choosing War, which explores U.S. policy toward Vietnam from mid-1963 to
mid-1965, demonstrates the beneŽ ts of incorporating the congressional perspective. Logevall’s meticulously researched volume combines substantial discussion of the international perspective of the war with an equally detailed
analysis of the political and legislative situation that confronted Lyndon Johnson. Logevall not only offers extensive coverage of the congressional role in
the war, but also uses the widespread skepticism in Congress about the Johnson administration’s policy to strengthen his argument that the administration and Johnson himself deliberately chose war, spurning alternatives such as
negotiation or neutralization. It is encouraging to see that some younger
scholars are also beginning to pay more attention to the role of Congress. Andrew Johns, one of Logevall’s students, has been studying the attitudes of congressional Republicans toward Vietnam, and Jeffrey Bass has recently provided the Ž rst sustained analysis of the views espoused not merely by anti-war
Democrats but by the entire Senate Democratic caucus.6
Practical reasons have contributed to the weak coverage of Congress. Unlike material housed in the various presidential libraries or documents from
other executive agencies sorted in the National Archives, congressional archives are spread out across the country, usually in the home states of the various senators and representatives. Graduate students facing decisions about
possible dissertation topics, and even senior scholars, understandably prefer
5. Melvyn Lef er, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, The Truman Administration, and the
Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
6. Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Jeffrey Bass, “Wellspring of a Connecticut Crusader: Thomas J. Dodd and the Nuremberg Trial,” Connecticut History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Spring 1996),
pp. 31–45.
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Congress and the Cold War
the more centralized access that presidential libraries afford. Trips to many
out-of-the-way archives can be expensive and inconvenient. To investigate
even ten of the senators most active on foreign policy issues during the
1960s—J. William Fulbright, Richard Russell, Frank Church, Wayne Morse,
George McGovern, Ernest Gruening, Henry Jackson, John Tower, John
Stennis, and Stuart Symington—a scholar would have to travel to the Universities of Arkansas, Georgia, Oregon, Washington, Alaska-Fairbanks, and Missouri, Boise State University, Mississippi State University, Southwestern
(Texas) University, and Princeton University. Moreover, there would be no
guarantee that these journeys would yield anything of value, since the papers
of postwar members of the upper chamber are of widely varying quality. The
John Culver collection includes detailed staff memoranda, and the Frank
Church Papers contain occasional personal letters; but many of the other collections are like that of Senator Joseph Clark, whose papers consist almost entirely of published background material of no direct relationship to the senator’s activities. Moreover, while the Church Papers at Boise State’s Albertson
Library are impeccably organized—down to the Ž le folder—a more typical
case is that of the Culver Papers, which remain in the boxes sent to the archives following the Iowa senator’s defeat in 1980.
The prevailing weakness of specialized studies of Congress further discourages historians of U.S. foreign relations from studying congressional issues. Institutional histories of Congress, which are quite rare in any case,
mostly explore domestic affairs and rarely cover the post–World War II years,
which are regarded as the domain of political scientists.7 Instead, biographies
are the Ž eld’s most popular genre.
Although biographical studies may not be the historian’s usual fare, they
can be of great use. The new surge of biographies of key members of the postwar Congress is particularly valuable for those studying the Senate during the
Cold War. Three studies of twentieth-century chairmen of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee—William Widenor’s Henry Cabot Lodge and American
Foreign Policy, Randall Woods’s Fulbright, and LeRoy Ashby’s Fighting the
7. For examples of institutional histories, see Young, The Washington Community; David Rothman,
Politics and Power: The United States Senate, 1869–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1966); Elaine Swift, The Making of an American Senate: Reconstitutive Change in Congress, 1781–1841
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1996); Michael Foley, The New Senate: Liberal In uence in a
Conservative Institution, 1959–1972 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); Fred Harris, Deadlock
or Decision: The U.S. Senate and the Rise of National Politics (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993); and Robert Mann, The Walls of Jericho: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell, and
the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1996). For a rare coverage of Congress
from a foreign policy angle, see Wayne Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–1945 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). Ironically, broader coverages tend to focus on the weaker of the two
branches, such as Charles Whalen, Jr., The House and Foreign Policy: The Irony of Congressional Reform
(Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
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Johnson
Odds—are all well-researched monographs that provide the background
needed to incorporate their subjects into the foreign policy of the time.8 Cambridge University Press has issued an abridged version of the Woods biography that focuses exclusively on Fulbright’s foreign policy activities. The volume details the transformation of the Arkansas senator from a somewhat
reluctant Cold Warrior who accepted executive supremacy into an outspoken
critic of the Cold War who demanded a greater role for the Senate in foreign
policy, and it also supplies a stunning bureaucratic history of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, seen largely through the relationship between
Fulbright and the committee’s longtime staff director, Carl Marcy. Ashby,
for his part, draws on the Church Papers and over 100 interviews to provide
the best coverage of the Senate of the 1970s, a period in which Church was
highly in uential, Ž rst as chair of a special committee investigating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and then as chair of the Foreign Relations
Committee.
Unfortunately, too many congressional biographies focus so closely on
the life of the proŽ led Ž gure that they ignore the wider context that would be
of use to diplomatic historians. Gilbert Fite’s study of Richard Russell, the
chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee from the mid-1950s
through the early 1970s, is all too typical in its meager treatment of the politics of the committee and the committee’s broader role in the debates of the
era. This oversight is especially problematic given Russell’s prominence at various levels. The newly released tapes from the Lyndon B. Johnson Library reveal that the Georgia senator played an even more important role in foreign
policy during the early stages of Johnson’s term than historians previously
realized. Within Congress itself, meanwhile, Russell was critical in helping
the Armed Services Committee become the most powerful committee in the
postwar years and in preventing more rigorous congressional oversight of
the national security state. Thomas Becnel’s biography of Allen Ellender suffers from the same difŽ culty. Ellender, a Democrat from Louisiana who concluded his career as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, was a
much less in uential Ž gure than Russell, but he did wage a somewhat quixotic crusade against the foreign aid program, and, more important, he represented an antimilitary strain in Southern thinking. A well-rounded biography
of Senator Henry Jackson was published by Robert G. Kaufman in 2000, but
no full-length biographies exist for other key members of the Senate during
the Cold War, including John Stennis, Stuart Symington, and John Tower.
8. LeRoy Ashby and Rod Gramer, Fighting the Odds: The Life of Senator Frank Church (Pullman:
Washington State University Press, 1994); Randall Bennett Woods, Fulbright: A Biography (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1995); William Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
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Congress and the Cold War
Worse yet, virtually no important House member has been the subject of a recent biography.9
Beyond biographies and narrowly focused narrative histories, most studies of Congress during the Cold War focus exclusively on the constitutional
struggle for supremacy between Congress and the executive branch.10 With a
few exceptions, they describe a series of events in which Congress either voluntarily yielded its power over foreign policy decisions or stood by while the
executive branch usurped it. According to this interpretation, the unbalanced
relationship between the Congress and the executive culminated in the escalation of the U.S. commitment in Vietnam, which in turn paved the way for a
congressional resurgence best symbolized by the passage of the War Powers
Act in 1973. Adherents of the executive usurpation thesis unintentionally imply that historians interested in the actual conduct of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War should look no further than the executive branch, since it
possessed the bulk of the power.11
The work associated with the executive usurpation school has other
drawbacks as well. First of all, it too often focuses on crisis diplomacy, choosing events that by their very nature lead to heightened executive power. In addition, those who subscribe to this interpretation advocate a political agenda
that blurs the line between historical interpretation and public policy recommendation. For example, Loch Johnson, a former aide to Frank Church and
author of several books on Congress and the Cold War, begins one of his volumes by observing that the book’s “normative theme” is that “foreign policy
should be conducted on the basis of a partnership between the executive and
legislative branches.” Johnson concludes by offering what he terms “some
9. Gilbert Fite, Richard B. Russell, Jr., Senator from Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1991); Thomas Becnel, Allen Ellender: A Biography (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1996); and Robert G. Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).
See also Gregory Olson, MansŽ eld and Vietnam: A Study in Rhetorical Adaptation (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995); and Jon Lauck, “Binding Assumptions: Karl E. Mundt and the
Vietnam War,” Mid-America, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Summer 1994), pp. 279–298.
10. For examples of essentially narrative studies, see John Terrence Rourke, “Congress and the Cold
War: Congressional In uence on the Foreign Policy Process” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut,
1974); Gale Harrison, “Congress and Foreign Aid: A Study of the Role of Congress in Foreign Policy
Making, 1961–1975” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1976); Edward Duane, “Congress and
Inter-American Relations” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1969); and Lee Edwards, “Congress and the Origins of the Cold War: The Truman Doctrine,” World Affairs, Vol. 151, No. 1 (Winter
1988–1989), pp. 131–140.
11. For a sampling of this literature, see Cecil Crabb, Jr., and Pat Holt, Invitation to Struggle: Congress,
the President, and Foreign Policy, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1992); Louis Fisher, Constitutional Conicts between Congress and the President (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985);
Fisher, The Politics of Shared Power: Congress and the Executive (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1993);
Fisher, Presidential War Power (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995); Thomas Eagleton, War
and Presidential Power: A Chronicle of Congressional Surrender (New York: Liveright, 1974); and John
Hart Ely, War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1993).
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modest prescriptions toward this end.” Louis Fisher does likewise in his wellreceived book on presidential warmaking. A former staff member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Michael Glennon, also re ects this bias, commenting that his book “proposes that the United States recognize and return
to its constitutional moorings in the making of foreign policy.”12
This agenda becomes especially problematic when these scholars interpret events that took place before the Cold War. Indeed, the key assumption
of this school—that, in the words of Fisher, “gradually the executive branch
claimed for the President the power to initiate war and determine its magnitude and duration”—is of limited utility for the years before 1941. 13 The executive-legislative foreign policy relationship passed through three broad
phases from 1787 to 1941 as congressional power increased and decreased according to shifts in domestic political forces and alterations in the international environment. Keeping this history in mind allows scholars to view the
Cold War battles between President and Congress as part of a broader continuum of executive-legislative struggles in the international arena and offers a
more nuanced perspective on the congressional role in Cold War foreign policy issues.
The executive usurpation school implicitly assumes that the U.S. Constitution granted Congress a predominant voice in the conduct of U.S. foreign
policy. However, scrutiny reveals that the Founding Fathers drew very different lessons from the Revolutionary era. At the very least, the framers of the
U.S. Constitution seem to have anticipated con ict between the executive
and legislative branches in foreign affairs as well as domestic policy. Such
con icts marked the diplomacy of the early Republic, when a surprisingly assertive executive branch encountered a generally meek congressional response.14 Early American history provided a good example of how a constitu12. Loch Johnson, The Making of International Agreements: Congress Confronts the Executive (New
York: New York University Press, 1984), p. xviii; Michael Glennon, Constitutional Diplomacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Fisher, Presidential War Power. Indeed, an excessive
amount of literature on Congress and the Cold War is devoted to what amounts to ideological arguments about the appropriateness of Congress’s role in U.S. foreign policy and whether an expansion of
that role aids or hampers the prosecution of foreign policy. For a sampling of this literature, see James
Lindsay and Randall Ripley, “Foreign and Defense Policy in Congress: A Research Agenda for the
1990s,” Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Summer 1992), p. 418.
13. Fisher, Presidential War Power, p. 13.
14. Charles Lofgren, “War-making under the Constitution: The Original Understanding,” Yale Law
Journal, Vol. 81, No. 3 (July 1972), pp. 672–702; John Yoo, “The Origins of the Warmaking Clause,”
Paper presented at the Conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
(SHAFR), Bentley College, Waltham, MA, 1994; Jack Rakove, “Solving a Constitutional Puzzle: The
Treatymaking Clause as a Case Study,” Perspectives in American History, new series, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Summer 1984), pp. 207–248; William Banks and Peter Raven-Hansen, National Security Law and the
Power of the Purse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 28, 30; Dorothy Jones, License for
Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Abraham
Sofaer, War, Foreign Affairs, and Constitutional Power (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Press, 1976), pp. 5,
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Congress and the Cold War
tional structure evenly divided between the two branches quickly tipped in
favor of the executive. The professionalization of U.S. foreign policy also contributed to executive power, an intriguing point initially raised by Felix
Gilbert in To the Farewell Address. Two other factors played key roles. First, as
long as the wars of the French Revolution persisted, this tangible threat to national security magniŽ ed the signiŽ cance of the power of the commander-inchief. Second, the intimate link between international issues and the Ž rst
multiparty system ensured that contentious foreign policy questions would be
debated along partisan rather than institutional lines.15
The War of 1812 altered the nature of the executive/legislative relationship on foreign policy matters, creating a more paciŽ c situation internationally but a more divisive home front. The four decades following the Treaty of
Ghent witnessed regular congressional challenges to executive supremacy.
Congressional power in the international arena was enhanced only after the
Civil War, partly because presidents during this era were willing to uphold
tradition and negotiate substantial agreements with foreign powers as treaties.
The failure of the three most ambitious of these treaties—Grant’s scheme to
annex the Dominican Republic in 1870, the effort to establish a U.S. protectorate over Nicaragua in 1884, and Benjamin Harrison’s gambit to annex Hawaii in 1893—prompted future secretary of state John Hay to observe that a
“treaty entering the Senate is like a bull going into the arena; no one can tell
just how or when the blow will fall—but one thing is certain—it will never
leave the arena alive.”16
90, 212, 303; Stanley Elkins and Eric McKintrick, The Age of Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Norman Risjord, The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the Age of Jefferson
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1965); Paul Varg, New England and Foreign Relations, 1789–
1850 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983); Banks and Raven-Hansen, National Security
Law, p. 36; Reginald Stuart, “James Madison and the Militants: Republican Disunity and Replacing
the Embargo,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Spring 1982), pp. 145–167; and Harry Fritz, “The
War Hawks of 1812: Party Leadership in the Twelfth Congress,” Capitol Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Winter
1976), pp. 25–42.
15. Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 82–83. On the partisan situation, see Young, The Washington Community; and Joseph Charles, The Origins of the American Party System (New York: Harper and Row,
1956).
16. Piero Gleijeses, “The Limits of Sympathy: The United States and the Independence of Spanish
America,” Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Fall 1992), pp. 481–505; Ernest May, The
Making of the Monroe Doctrine (Cambridge, MA: Belknap University Press, 1975); Thomas Hietala,
Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1985); John Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1848–1848 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973); David Potter, The Impending Crisis: 1848–1861 (New York: Harper
and Row, 1976), pp. 177–198; Robert May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 163–189; Richard Sewell, John P. Hale and the Politics
of Abolition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965); Donathon Olliff, Reforma Mexico and
the United States: A Search for Alternatives to Annexation, 1854–1861 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1981), pp. 84–152; and Frederick Moore Binder, James Buchanan and the American Empire (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1996), pp. 217–271.
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Just when Congress seemed dominant, events at the turn of the century
brought to an end this second era in executive-legislative relations on questions of foreign policy, as Fareed Zakaria has argued in his stimulating new
book.17 On the domestic front, the realignment generated by William McKinley’s triumph in 1896 ultimately paved the way for closer partisan coordination between the executive and legislative branches, a situation reminiscent
of the early years of the Republic. In addition, political activists in the Progressive Era championed a strong presidency on the assumption that Congress
was corrupt and inherently conservative. By the Ž rst few years of the twentieth century, many envisioned the United States in a more active, even
“moral,” international role, a point of view that guided not only McKinley’s
Cuban and Filipino policies, but much of his successor’s agenda as well. Executive unilateralism in decision making reached its high point during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, when U.S. forces were sent to Mexico, Russia,
Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, as well as to Ž ght in World War I.18
Although the Gilded Age pattern of congressional supremacy thus came
to an end, Congress remained a key restraining in uence. The one clear-cut
executive victory on a treaty during this period—the approval of the Treaty of
Paris—occurred only because of McKinley’s deference to Congress during
both the negotiations and the ratiŽ cation. McKinley’s successors lacked either
his political tact or his luck, and they struggled with the ramiŽ cations of the
treaty-making clause. In 1905, for example, Theodore Roosevelt explained
that he had not submitted to Congress a treaty conŽ rming the Dominican
customs receivership for fear that Augustus Bacon, “backed by the average yahoo among the Democratic senators,” would block the measure and in the
process get “a little cheap reputation among ignorant people.” The Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles might have served as the most spectacular assertion of congressional power in foreign policy decisions, but it clearly was
not an isolated example of the upper chamber’s effort to make its presence felt
on international matters.19 When Woodrow Wilson attempted to bypass
17. Fareed Zakana, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1998).
18. David Healy, Drive to Hegemony: The United States in the Caribbean, 1898–1917 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Akira Iriye, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations:
The Globalization of America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and William
Leuchtenberg, “Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign
Policy,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 39, No. 2 (August 1952), pp. 483–504.
19. Theodore Roosevelt to Joseph Bucklin Bishop, 23 March 1905 in Elting Morison, ed., The Letters
of Theodore Roosevelt, Vol. 4 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 1144–1145; Richard
Welch, Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 3–45; and Richard Lael, Arrogant Diplomacy:
U.S. Policy toward Colombia, 1903–1922 (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1987). The best
coverage of the Senate debate over the Treaty of Versailles is Lloyd Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the
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Congress entirely during the abortive intervention in Russia, the legislators
threatened to use the ultimate sanction: the power of the purse. In 1919 a resolution introduced by Senator Hiram Johnson to cut off funding for the intervention failed on a perilously close tie vote. This demonstration of the
“critical spirit in Congress” convinced the acting secretary of state, Frank
Polk, and ultimately the administration as a whole that it had no choice but to
withdraw the troops.20
The intensity of the Versailles battle heightened the importance of foreign policy pressure groups of all ideological persuasions, and their in uence
has grown ever since. In a pattern that was just as evident later in the century,
such groups tended to have a greater impact on Congress than on the executive branch, as demonstrated by the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service’s
highly effective lobbying campaign against the Chemical Weapons Treaty in
1926 and by the role of anti-imperialists in the U.S.-Mexican crisis of 1926–
1927. 21
Foreign policy issues remained a point of contention between the executive and legislature during the Ž fteen years that preceded the Cold War.
Franklin Roosevelt’s domestic focus made him reluctant to spend political
capital on international affairs, such as the protocol for adherence to the
World Court, and this enabled the Nye Committee to dominate public discourse on neutrality issues. As Cordell Hull noted at the time, the Congress
used its legislative powers to impose sharp constraints on the president, most
notably by passing the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936, measures that Hull
considered “an invasion of the constitutional and traditional power of the Executive to conduct the foreign relations of the United States.” Ironically, the
most substantial expansion of executive authority on foreign policy issues enjoyed by Franklin Roosevelt during his Ž rst six years as president—the RecipAmerican Diplomatic Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); although see also
Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge; and Ralph Stone, The Irreconcilables: The Fight against the League of Nations (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970).
20. Polk quoted in David Foglesong, America’s Secret War against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the
Russian Civil War, 1917–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 71, 251;
Polk quoted in United States Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United
States, 1918–1919, Russia, Vol. 4 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing OfŽ ce, 1937), pp.
245–248; and Richard Coke Lower, A Bloc of One: The Political Career of Hiram W. Johnson (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 117–132.
21. John Chalmers Vinson, The Parchment Peace: The United States Senate and the Washington Conference, 1921–1922 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1955); Vinson, William Borah and the Outlawry of War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1957); LeRoy Ashby, The Spearless Leader: Senator
Borah and the Progressive Movement during the 1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972);
Rodney McElroy, “The Geneva Protocol of 1925,” in Dan Caldwell and Michael Krepon, eds., The
Politics of Arms Control Treaty RatiŽ cation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 125–166; Herbert
Margulies, “The Senate and the World Court,” Capitol Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1976), pp. 37–51; and
Thomas Guinsberg, “Victory in Defeat: The Senatorial Isolationists and the Four-Power Treaty,”
Capitol Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter 1973), pp. 23–36.
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rocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934—occurred when Congress willingly
sacriŽ ced its power over foreign economic policy, largely because of the backlash against the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Nonetheless, the measure had the longterm effect of removing foreign economic issues from congressional discussion during the Cold War.22
Some common patterns emerged in the congressional approach to foreign relations in the years before 1941. The Johnson amendment in 1919
(discussed above) re ected a general willingness to use roll call votes on military spending to expand Congress’s built-in power over foreign affairs. The
prevalence of treaties heightened the importance of the Senate’s “advise and
consent” role in the conduct of foreign policy, even though the upper chamber approved 86 percent of the 726 treaties it considered between 1789 and
1926. Internally, Congress settled into a fairly stable bureaucratic pattern
when dealing with international questions. With the important exception of
the tariff, the House of Representatives played a minor role on most foreign
policy issues.23 In the Senate, meanwhile, the Foreign Relations Committee
reigned supreme, while its two chief rivals—the Committees on Military Affairs and Naval Affairs—remained extremely weak. These conditions produced a relatively small “foreign policy elite” within the Senate, composed of
the members of the Foreign Relations Committee and the few other members
of the body who for personal, political, or ideological reasons exhibited intense interest in international affairs. This small group of senators marshaled
the body’s considerable international powers for their own ends.24
World War II brought far-reaching changes. The reemergence of an international threat, Roosevelt’s increasing focus on foreign policy, and the public reaction against the attempts to legislate neutrality tipped the balance in favor of executive action. Perhaps no single piece of legislation demonstrated
22. Wayne Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–1945, pp. 161–178; and Robert Pastor, Congress
and the Politics of U.S. Foreign Economic Policy, 1929–1976 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1980), pp. 73–92.
23. During one congressional session in the 1920s, for instance, the House Foreign Affairs Committee
spent a week debating a 20,000 dollar appropriation for an international poultry show in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, which one committee member recalled as “the most important issue that came before the
Committee in the whole session.” James Sundquist, The Decline and Resurgence of Congress (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 1981), pp. 94–102.
24. W. Stull Holt, Treaties Defeated by the Senate: A Study of the Struggle between President and Senate
over the Conduct of Foreign Relations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933); Wayne Cole,
“With the Advice and Consent of the Senate: The Treaty-Making Process Before the Cold War Years,”
in Michael Barnhart, ed., Congress and United States Foreign Policy: Controlling the Use of Force in the
Nuclear Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 81; Joseph Martin, My First Fifty
Years in Politics (New York: McGraw Hill Book Co., Inc., 1960), p. 49; and James Robinson, Congress
and Foreign Policy-making: A Study in Legislative In uence and Initiative (Homewood: The Dorsey
Press, Inc., 1962), pp. 125–126.
86
Congress and the Cold War
the depth of the changes more than the Lend-Lease Act, which passed despite
congressional recognition that the measure greatly weakened the institution’s
foreign policy powers.25
It thus became clear, even before the emergence of U.S.-Soviet tensions,
that the balance of power between the congressional and executive branches
in the interwar period would not be sustained in the immediate postwar era.
The bipolar international system and intense ideological rivalry that characterized the Cold War conŽ rmed the point. Internationally, the seemingly allencompassing nature of the Communist threat after the outbreak of the Korean War placed the government on what amounted to a permanent war footing, while the advent of nuclear weapons created the need for instant decision
making that was lacking in previous challenges to U.S. national security. This
situation gave rise to a new interpretation of constitutional theory that sought
to increase the power of the presidency through the commander-in-chief
clause. On the domestic front, there was a widespread perception that the late
1930s had revealed the dangers of an overactive congressional role, and this
allowed the Truman administration to sti e congressional dissent by equating
its own foreign policy principles with the concept of bipartisanship. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Tom Connally, equated opposition to bipartisanship with isolationism; and Dean Acheson observed more
colorfully that a bipartisan foreign policy allowed the president to argue that
any critic was “a son-of-a-bitch and not a true patriot.” “If people will swallow
that,” Acheson noted, “then you’re off to the races.”26
Congress embraced calls for bipartisanship mostly because the two
branches agreed on the desirability of vigorously prosecuting the Cold War.27
Indeed, at times Congress seemed positively eager to expand presidential authority. Representative Elden Spence argued in 1949 that “in these highly important international affairs, he [the President] ought to have the same powers
25. For World War II matters, see Robert Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in
America during World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967), pp. 93–113; Warren Kimball, The Most
Unsordid Act: Lend-Lease, 1939–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); and Banks
and Raven-Hansen, National Security Law, p. 102.
26. Acheson quoted in Thomas Paterson, “Presidential Foreign Policy, Public Opinion, and Congress:
The Truman Years,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 1979), p. 17; Connally quoted in
Henry Berger, “Bipartisanship, Senator Taft, and the Administration,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol.
90, No. 2 (Summer 1975), p. 221. That bipartisanship worked to the advantage of Republican presidents as well as Democrats was conŽ rmed in the Eisenhower administration. Anna Nelson, “John Foster Dulles and the Bipartisan Congress,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 102, No. 1 (Spring 1987),
pp. 43–64.
27. Thomas Mann, “Making Foreign Policy: President and Congress,” in Thomas Mann, ed., A Question of Balance: The President, the Congress, and Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1990), pp. 10–12.
87
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as the executives or dictators representing the enslaved peoples in the totalitarian governments.”28 Such sentiments all but guaranteed approval of initiatives
such as the National Security Act, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), and the expansion of the defense budget following the onset of the
Korean War. In the words of Arthur Vandenberg, the fact that issues rarely
reached “Congress until they have developed to a point where Congressional
discretion is pathetically restricted” was of further beneŽ t to the president.
The Korean War was one such example—at the time, several senior members
expressly asked Truman not to involve Congress in the decision to intervene.29
Moreover, as Duane Tananbaum has illustrated, events such as the “Great Debate” of 1951, in which the Senate conceded the presidential right to send
U.S. troops to Europe without its consent, and the Bricker Amendment of
1953, which sought to scale back the power of the executive to enter into international agreements without congressional consent, represented setbacks
for those attempting to assert Congress’s formal powers. In the Cold War era
maintaining a rigid balance between Congress and the executive seemed simply impractical.30
The executive usurpation school therefore has a substantial body of evidence favoring the view that congressional in uence on foreign policy issues
declined in the period from 1941 to the mid-1950s. Postwar presidents further circumvented Congress by relying on executive or statutory agreements
rather than formal treaties.31 Another standard barometer of congressional
in uence—the frequency of attempts to legislate foreign policy through resolutions or by attaching policy-related riders to appropriations bills—also de28. Barbara Sinclair, “Congressional Party Leaders in the Foreign and Defense Policy Arena,” in
Randall Ripley and James Lindsay, eds., Congress Resurgent: Foreign and Defense Policy on Capitol Hill
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 208. Spence quoted in William Long, U.S. Export Control Policy: Executive Authority Versus Congressional Reform (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989), p. 22.
29. James Lindsay, Congress and Politics of U.S. Defense Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1994), pp. 147–152.
30. Duane Tananbaum, The Bricker Amendment Controversy: A Test of Eisenhower’s Political Leadership
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). On lower-proŽ le issues, though, such as human rights treaties, congressional recalcitrance remained an important factor. See Natalie Henever Kaufman, Human
Rights Treaties and the Senate: A History of Opposition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1990).
31. John Norton Moore, “Executive Agreements and Congressional Executive Relations,” in U.S.
House of Representatives, Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on International Security, Congressional Review of International Agreements: Hearings, 94th Cong., 2nd sess., 1976,
pp. 207–219; and Johnson, Making of International Agreements. A few statistics underscore the shift.
In 1930 the United States concluded 25 treaties, as compared to only nine executive agreements. With
the important exceptions of NATO and the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, however, presidents
during the Cold War increasingly turned to executive or statutory agreements rather than treaties
when embarking on new foreign policy ventures. By 1968 the United States entered into just sixteen
treaties as opposed to 266 executive agreements.
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clined during the early stages of the Cold War. The rise of the national security state spread defense spending around the country, leaving members of
Congress who sought to reduce it vulnerable to the charge of subverting national security as well as ignoring the economic interests of their constituents.
Moreover, in the anti-Communist mindset associated with the McCarthy era,
casting a vote against defense spending was often considered a political risk.
In the decade from the end of the Korean War to the end of the Kennedy
presidency, defense bills passed with an average of less than one negative vote
in both chambers. Moreover, this decade featured only Ž fteen roll call votes
(in the House and Senate combined) on amendments to defense appropriations bills, most of which addressed insigniŽ cant issues, such as an amendment to permit rather than mandate the relocation of an army munitions depot near Houston.32 Some foreign policy roll call votes, such as those on joint
resolutions seeking advance congressional approval for policy decisions, had
the effect of compromising future congressional power. As an outgrowth of
Truman’s bipartisanship strategy, the Ž rst such resolution occurred with the
Taiwan Straits crisis in 1955 and culminated with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964. 33
Within Congress, the altered environment resulted in a loss of hegemony
for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The committee came under
challenge from the newly created Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the
Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Senate Appropriations Committee, each of which proved less than zealous in challenging executive policies.
With the expansion of the defense budget, the Armed Services Committee
became particularly important. Its strongly pro-defense members aggressively
sought to funnel defense projects to their constituents. Mendel Rivers, a representative from South Carolina who chaired the Armed Services Committee,
was perceived as so zealous in securing projects for his district that many
joked that the state capital, Charleston, would fall into the sea with the weight
of the concrete poured for military bases there. But as Rivers noted in the
mid-1950s, the committee viewed itself as “the only voice, of-Ž cial voice, the
military has in the House of Representatives.” The committee often gave
32. Ann Markusen, Scott Campbell, Peter Hall, and Sabina Deitrick, The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
33. For the Formosa Resolution, see Gordon Chang, Friends and Enemies: The United States, China,
and the Soviet Union, 1948–1972 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Robert
Accinelli, Crisis and Containment: United States Policy toward Taiwan, 1950–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). For Congress and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, see William
Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, Vol. 2: 1961–1964 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Edwin Moise,
Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996), pp. 252–255.
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Johnson
open-ended authorizations such as “the Secretary of the Army may procure
materials and facilities necessary to maintain and support the Army . . . including guided missiles,” an arrangement that ensured the “inviolability” of
executive branch defense proposals, as Samuel Huntington lamented in his
acclaimed book on the politics of defense budgeting.34 The oversight of other
aspects of the national security state, especially the intelligence community,
was equally lax. The CIA referred to the informal system as BOGSAT
(“bunch of guys sitting around a table”), while Allen Dulles once admitted
that he would “fudge the truth to the oversight committee,” though he would
“tell the chairman the truth—if he wants to know.” Generally, the chairmen
did not. Senator Richard Russell called for Congress to take CIA statements
“on faith,” while his committee’s ranking Republican, Leverett Saltonstall of
Massachusetts, commented that he would prefer not to know the details of
CIA activities. The senator’s admission, ironically, helped beat back a 1956 attempt to establish a formal Senate committee to oversee the CIA.35
Clearly, these developments provide fodder for the executive usurpation
school. But they also obscure Congress’s ability to in uence U.S. foreign policy in less traditional ways even at the height of the Cold War. For instance, although the postwar committee structure generally yielded a less prominent
congressional role in policy making, the reverse occurred in some cases. The
clearest example came with nuclear diplomacy, when the Joint Committee on
Atomic Energy, largely spurred by the personal ambitions of its chair, Brien
McMahon, successfully pushed through legislation restricting U.S. efforts to
share nuclear technology with allied states.36 In addition, as Senator Frank
Church later noted, the decline of the Foreign Relations Committee increased
“the role of dissent as well as the advocacy of alternative courses to individual
senators.” It allowed senators who were not on the committee an opportunity
to in uence foreign policy decisions, and it helped produce a multitude of
subcommittees dealing with foreign policy matters. On domestic issues, sub34. Barbara Hinckley, Less Than Meets the Eye: Foreign Policy Making and the Myth of the Assertive Congress (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 51; Barry Blechman, The Politics of National Security: Congress and U.S. Defense Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 23–32; Herbert Stephens, “The Role of the Legislative Committees in the Appropriations Process: A Study
Focused on the Armed Services Committees,” Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Spring
1971), p. 146; and Christopher Deering, “Decision Making in the Armed Services Committees,” in
Lindsay and Ripley, eds., Congress Resurgent, pp. 156–170, 177. Rivers quoted in James Lindsay,
“Congress and Defense Policy, 1961 to 1986,” Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Fall 1987),
p. 378.
35. Frank Smist, Congress Oversees the Intelligence Community (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1990), pp. 1–24; Thomas Paterson, “Oversight or Afterview? Congress, the CIA, and Covert
Actions since 1947,” in Barnhart, ed., Congress and United States Foreign Policy, pp. 157–158; and
Blechman, Politics of National Security, p. 141.
36. Loch Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: Congress and Intelligence (Chicago: Dorsey, 1988).
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Congress and the Cold War
committees served as one of the key avenues for individual members of Congress to shape legislation, and this pattern held on foreign policy issues as well.
Senators with as diverse ideological viewpoints as Joseph McCarthy, Henry
Jackson, Ernest Gruening, and Hubert Humphrey all used subcommittees of
the relatively weak Government Operations Committee to establish themselves as authorities on various international questions. McCarthy obviously
was the most prominent of these Ž gures, but his activities are perhaps best
viewed as part of a broader trend, namely the decentralization of power
within Congress on national security matters. Overall, the number of foreign
policy subcommittees in the Senate alone grew from seven in 1945–1946 to
thirty-one by 1965–1966. 37
There were thus many ways in which developments during the early years
of the Cold War actually magniŽ ed the congressional presence in foreign policy decision making. Increased public attention to foreign policy issues gave
Congress more opportunities to frame discussions of these issues. Dean
Acheson later admitted that Truman refrained from seeking congressional approval of the Korean War in part because he feared that public hearings might
produce “one more question in cross-examination which destroys you.” Once
out of power, the Democrats remembered this lesson, and Averell Harriman
in 1954 encouraged “our senators and congressmen to pursue the tactic of
asking questions which it will be difŽ cult for the Administration to answer
satisfactorily.” Within the new subcommittee structure, meanwhile, senators
such as McCarthy and Jackson also proŽ ted from the greater public interest in
national security matters.38
Other congressional actions in the early Cold War, such as the resounding votes for measures like the Greek and Turkish aid packages and the
Formosa and Middle East Resolutions, also engendered a more complex rela37. Frank Church to Robert Farning, 12 January 1966, Frank Church Papers, Albertson’s Library,
Boise State University, Series 2.2, Box 9; Roger Davidson, “Subcommittee Government: New Channels for Policy Making,” in Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, eds., The New Congress (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1981), pp. 99–133; and Leroy Reiselbach, Congressional Reform: The Changing Modern Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1994),
pp. 94–146. For a listing of the Senate subcommittees which convened hearings on foreign policy issues, see Congressional Information Service (CIS), U.S. Congressional Committee Hearings Index,
Part V, 79th Congress–82nd Congress, 1945–1952 (Washington, DC: CIS, 1983), pp. 988–998; CIS,
US Congressional Committee Hearings Index, Part VI, 83rd Congress–85th Congress, 1953–1958 (Washington, DC: CIS 1983), pp. 876–892; and CIS, US Congressional Committee Hearings Index, Part VI,
89th Congress–91st Congress, 1st session, 1965–1969 (Washington, DC: CIS, 1983), pp. 814–835.
38. Robert GrifŽ th, Politics of Fear: Joseph McCarthy and the Senate (Amherst, MA: Universtiy of Massachusetts Press, 1987) p. 231; Dorothy Fosdick, ed., Henry Jackson and World Affairs (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990) p. 53; Paterson, “Presidential Foreign Policy,” p. 19; Harriman quoted
in Gary Reichard, “Divisions and Dissent: Democrats and Foreign Policy, 1952–1956,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 93, No. 1 (Spring 1978), p. 56; and Kenneth Entin, “Information Exchanges in
Congress: The Case of the House Armed Services Committee,” Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 26,
No. 4 (Winter 1973), pp. 427–439.
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tionship between the branches than is apparent at Ž rst glance. Because the
ideological nature of the Cold War struggle seemed to demand unity at home
(and thus overwhelming votes of approval), congressional opinion, either actual or anticipated, could affect executive branch decision making. This was
the case when the question of whether to aid the French in Vietnam came up
in 1954 and when the Formosa Straits crisis erupted the following year. At the
time, Hubert Humphrey commented on the existence of a “remarkable difference of opinion in the Senate, way beyond the difference shown by the vote
on the resolution.” The importance of the façade of bipartisan unity strengthened the position of those within the Eisenhower administration who were arguing for restraint.39 The resolutions in 1954–1955 testiŽ ed to the ways in
which indirect congressional in uence affected the conduct of U.S. diplomacy during the early Cold War. Nuclear policy revealed the same pattern—
Bernard Baruch owed his appointment to his close relationship with
Vandenberg—and so did the outcome of the British loan debate: British
ofŽ cials, not “inclined to risk further debate with Congress,” informed the
State Department of their willingness to negotiate the loan to meet congressional concerns. This type of relationship could work the other way as well.
Charles Bohlen later asserted that executive branch ofŽ cials who favored a
harder line against the Soviet Union cited the need to placate Congress as a rationale for their preferred policy.40
In addition, the proliferation of U.S. bilateral and multilateral security
commitments (re ected in the expansion of the foreign aid program), the
growing number of military bases, and the surge of executive agreements increased the opportunity for congressional oversight and thus provided new
tools for Congress to in uence the conduct of foreign policy.41 The vast international role of the United States also encouraged transnational alliances linking congressional blocs with foreign governments. This type of arrangement,
it should be noted, was not peculiar to the postwar period. As early as the
1830s the British government had retained Daniel Webster, then in the Sen39. Reichard, “Divisions and Dissent,” pp. 62–63; and Robert Accinelli, “Eisenhower, Congress, and
the 1954–1955 Offshore Island Crisis,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Fall 1990),
pp. 329–344.
40. Hoyt Purvis, “Tracing the Congressional Role: U.S. Foreign Policy and Turkey,” in Hoyt Purvis
and Steven Baker, eds., Legislating Foreign Policy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 26–29; Charles
Bohlen, Witness to History (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 261; and John Terrence Rourke, “Congress
and the Cold War: Congressional In uence on the Foreign Policy Process (Ph.D. diss., University of
Connecticut, 1974), pp. 9, 141, 163–164. This type of informal diplomatic in uence appeared with
particular frequency on trade issues. See Robert Pastor, “Congress and U.S. Foreign Policy: Cooperative Advantage or Disadvantage,” Washington Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Autumn 1991), p. 105.
41. Lindsay, Congress and the Politics of U.S. Defense Policy, pp. 30–31.
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Congress and the Cold War
ate, to help shape U.S. public opinion on the Canadian boundary dispute.42
The China Lobby of the late 1940s and early 1950s remains the most comprehensively studied of these Cold War alliances. The representatives of the
Dominican Republic and Israel also became well known for their in uence.
Arthur Vandenberg’s comment in 1949 that bipartisanship “did not apply to
everything—for example, not to Palestine or China,” is therefore not surprising. In addition, the increasing frequency of congressional overseas trips,
which totaled nearly two hundred per annum by the end of the 1950s, provided another opportunity for legislators to conduct personal diplomacy.43
Finally, the foreign aid program was largely shaped by Congress through
its power over appropriations. Congress enjoyed far-reaching in uence on
this matter for the simple reason that foreign aid never enjoyed the public
support that defense spending did. The program allowed the body in which
all Ž scal matters originate, the House of Representatives, to play a greater foreign policy role than was usually the case before World War II. Otto Passman,
the chair of the Foreign Operations Subcommittee, regularly secured a reduction of 20 to 25 percent of the total requested by the executive. Moreover, beginning in the late 1950s, Congress also began attaching policy riders to foreign aid legislation, much as it had done with defense bills in the pre–World
War II era. The riders dealt with issues as diverse as economic nationalism,
military coups, and the human rights policies of Latin American governments, and this meant that the foreign aid bill developed into what one commentator described as “the nearest thing Congress has to a `State of the World
Message.’”44
Such efforts demonstrated how Congress adjusted to the altered Cold
War environment. But how signiŽ cant were these actions? Determining congressional in uence on international affairs has never been easy. In
pathbreaking studies of the turn-of-the-century imperialist surge in the
United States, Ernest May appropriately has conŽ ned himself to the vague
42. Howard Jones, To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1783–1843
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pp. 36–43.
43. Henry Berger, “Bipartisanship, Senator Taft, and the Truman Administration,” Political Science
Quarterly, Vol. 90, No. 3 (Fall 1975), p. 224; John Tierney, “Interest Group Involvement in Congressional Foreign and Defense Policy,” in Ripley and Lindsay, eds., Congress Resurgent, pp. 89–90.
44. Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 26 February 1960, pp. 298–307; Rudolph Robert Rousseau, “Factors Affecting Decisions of the United States Senate on Bilateral and Multilateral Foreign
Assistance Legislation, 1965 to 1974,” (Ph.D. diss., Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1976);
Robert Pastor, “Coping with Congress’ Foreign Policy,” Foreign Service Journal, Vol. 52, No. 12 (December 1975), pp. 15–18. For various policy-related riders, see 109 CR, 88th Cong., 1st sess.,
pp. 21840–21842 (14 November 1963); 113 CR, 90th Cong., 1st sess., p. 22968 (17 August 1967);
and Lars Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 193.
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statement that “Congress played a large but ill-deŽ ned role.”45 Apart from
analysis of roll call votes, an assessment of the role of Congress on foreign policy requires a scholar to explore the intentions of congressional activists, to ascertain whether procedural changes mandated by Congress increased legislative in uence, to gauge the effect of speeches and open hearings on Congress’s
ability to frame the discussion of foreign policy issues, and to determine
whether fear of congressional retaliation restrained executive branch ofŽ cials
from undertaking foreign policy initiatives they might otherwise have
launched.46 In addition, skirmishes between committees, tactical divisions
among opposition legislators about how forcefully to assert congressional
power, and the network of alliances between the national security bureaucracy—especially the military—and members of Congress make it difŽ cult to
speak of Congress as a uniŽ ed body on any foreign policy matter after 1945.
Precision about the congressional role in the early stages of the Cold War is
also thwarted because the Cold War made clear measurements of congressional in uence, such as roll call votes, inherently unreliable guides.47 Diplomatic crises and the decline of formal powers like warmaking or treaties do
not illuminate the more subtle ways in which the Cold War Congress
in uenced foreign policy issues. Historians need to move beyond such measurements in evaluating the legislature’s impact on U.S. foreign policy.48 The
appropriations power played an especially important role, since arms transfers
and military aid often became substitutes for formal defense treaties during
the Cold War.49
A closer examination of Congress’s role in the early Cold War is needed
for another reason. As the foreign aid “revolt” of 1963 revealed, the pattern of
congressional deference had begun to break down well before the surge of
45. Ernest May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a World Power (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1961), p. 225.
46. James Lindsay, “Congress, Foreign Policy, and the New Institutionalism,” International Studies
Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3 (August 1994), p. 287.
47. For instance, in analyzing Truman’s foreign policy, Thomas Paterson has observed that Congress
set “very broad and imprecise limits on presidential activity in international affairs.” Paterson, “Presidential Foreign Policy,” p. 2.
48. Reichard, “Divisions and Dissent,” pp. 51–55; James Lindsay, “Congressional Oversight of the
Department of Defense: Reconsidering the Conventional Wisdom,” Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 17,
No. 1 (January 1990), pp. 15–16; and Christopher Gerard, “On the Road to Vietnam: `The Loss of
China Syndrome,’ Pat McCarran, and J. Edgar Hoover,” Nevada Historical Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 4
(Fall 1994), pp. 247–262. For the limited usefulness of an analysis focused heavily on roll call votes,
see James McCormick and Eugene Wittkopf, “At the Water’s Edge: The Effects of Party, Ideology, and
Issues on Congressional Foreign Policy Activity, 1947–1988,” American Politics Quarterly, Vol. 20,
No. 1 (Spring 1992), pp. 26–53.
49. Blechman, The Politics of National Security, pp. 77, 118; Blechman, “The New Congressional Role
in Arms Control,” in Mann, A Question of Balance, p. 110; and Lindsay, “Congressional Oversight of
the Department of Defense,” pp. 9–18.
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Congress and the Cold War
congressional activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The clash over foreign aid itself derived from increasing doubts about many of the assumptions
of the containment doctrine, particularly among a small but articulate band
of Senate liberals. Moreover, the changes within Congress were not conŽ ned
to the foreign aid program. In 1959, for instance, an amendment sponsored
by Richard Russell to require authorization for some aspects of the military
procurement budget provided the Ž rst signiŽ cant enhancement of the Senate
Armed Services Committee’s authority over the defense budget. Five years
later Ž ve members of the House Armed Services Committee, dubbed the
“Fearless Five,” Ž led the Ž rst minority report in the committee’s history.50 Bipartisanship also became less common, and critics such as Jackson,
Humphrey, Stuart Symington, and even Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson became more assertive, as the Eisenhower administration discovered in the late
1950s. 51 Because congressional reformers in the 1960s and 1970s generally
employed tactics pioneered earlier, an understanding of the bureaucratic system that Congress established during the early Cold War is critical to analyzing the wave of activism after 1965. Unfortunately for historians, virtually all
work on the relationship between Congress and the national security state has
been done by political scientists.
For the most part, historians who have looked at the post-1965 period
have focused mainly on what has been described as Congress’s “glorious revolution”: the attempt by the legislature to reclaim a greater role in foreign policy functions that it shared with the executive branch under the terms of the
Constitution.52 As with other shifts in the balance between presidency and
Congress, this one also resulted from a new domestic and international climate, which in turn shook the ideological underpinnings of postwar foreign
policy. If judged in terms of legislation passed, the accomplishments of the era
seem to conŽ rm the techniques used by proponents of the executive usurpation thesis, such as measuring congressional in uence through issues like
warmaking and treaty-making.53 Ultimately, though, these changes did sur50. Kenneth Entin, “The House Armed Services Committee: Patterns of Decisionmaking during the
Eisenhower Years,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 1974), pp. 83–89;
and Stephens, “The Role of the Legislative Committees,” p. 148.
51. Thomas Gaskin, “Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the Eisenhower Administration, and U.S. Foreign
Policy, 1957–1960,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Fall 1994), pp. 341–348; and
Blechman, The Politics of National Security, p. 25.
52. Thomas Franck and Edward Weisband, Foreign Policy by Congress (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1979), p. 84.
53. U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Security Agreements and Commitments
Abroad: Hearings, 91st Cong., 1st sess., 1971; Franck and Weisband, Foreign Policy by Congress,
pp. 149–151; Ashby and Gramer, Fighting the Odds, pp. 305–329; Woods, Fulbright, pp. 410–470;
and Michael Glennon, Constitutional Diplomacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
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Johnson
prisingly little to alter the fundamental balance between the two branches, in
part because the legislation placed such a high priority on abstract constitutional concerns. Legislation still could not restrict the executive’s foreign policy powers, as the era’s more ambitious undertakings on the constitutional
front illustrated. The sponsors of the Cooper-Church Amendment, which cut
off funds for the Nixon administration’s secret incursion into Cambodia, repeatedly denied that the amendment would constrain the powers of the commander-in-chief. Moreover, they declined to call for an instant cutoff of funding for the incursion, and they consented to a modifying amendment that
would uphold the president’s power to “act in emergency situations” when
events “made it impracticable for him to Ž rst consult with Congress.” Similar
complications frustrated congressional attempts to pass a restrictive war powers measure. Negotiations between the House and Senate produced a law limiting the amount of time the president could unilaterally deploy U.S. troops
overseas in hostile situations (90 days), but the law contained no discussion of
justiŽ cations for such action. The bill also enabled the president to decide
when troops were introduced into harm’s way, thus allowing the executive
branch to establish the start of the time limit. An amendment to include the
CIA under the terms of the bill failed.54
Many of the same difŽ culties prevented Congress from assuming an active role throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Congressional investigations of the
intelligence community produced less comprehensive reforms and more political problems for the investigators than was anticipated when the hearings
were launched in 1975. 55 Although both chambers ultimately formed committees to oversee the CIA and other intelligence agencies, old attitudes lingered. William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s Ž rst director of the CIA, asserted in
1984 that “the business of Congress is to stay out of my business.” As in earlier years, many members of Congress agreed. Senator Barry Goldwater, using
the rhetoric of Leverett Saltonstall three decades earlier, declared that “there
are many bits of [intelligence] information that I would rather not know.”56
These problems culminated in the Iran-contra scandal, but even when this af54. Thomas Eagleton, interview, 22 October 1996; Ashby and Gramer, Fighting the Odds, pp. 305–
329; Fisher, Presidential War Power, pp. 114–133; Franck and Weisband, Foreign Policy by Congress,
pp. 117–131; Smist, Congress Oversees the Intelligence Community, pp. 167–201; and Sundquist, The
Decline and Resurgence of Congress.
55. Kathryn Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA
and FBI (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Johnson, A Season of Inquiry.
56. Casey quoted in Hinckley, Less than Meets the Eye, pp. 4, 54. Goldwater quoted in Michael
Glennon, “Investigating Intelligence Activities: The Process of Getting Information for Congress,” in
Thomas Franck, ed., The Tethered Presidency: Congressional Restraints on Executive Power (New York:
New York University Press, 1981), pp. 144–146.
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fair highlighted the executive’s disregard for congressional authority, Congress
sharply limited the scope of its own inquiry.57
Meanwhile, the War Powers Act, whether because of the compromises
necessary to ensure its passage or the unwillingness of presidents to accept its
constitutionality, failed to restore a balance between the branches in the
warmaking power, a point conŽ rmed by suggestions in early 1991 that
George Bush was prepared to go to war with Iraq regardless of the congressional vote.58 In line with precedent, moreover, the Supreme Court proved unwilling to involve itself in foreign policy battles between the two other
branches. The few decisions that the Court has rendered on the matter, such
as I.N.S. v. Chadha in 1983, which struck down the so-called legislative veto
included in numerous statutes, have weakened congressional in uence in foreign policy making.59
At the same time, however, the post-Vietnam era did see Congress build
on the tactics pioneered in the early stages of the Cold War to wield often decisive in uence on a wide array of foreign policy issues. Most frequently, congressional members used the power of the purse. During the 1970s, the breadth
breadth of pro-human rights amendments sponsored by congressional reformers such as Representatives Donald Fraser and Tom Harkin caused a European
diplomat to observe that “it isn’t just the State Department or the President
anymore. It’s Congress now.”60 The human rights legislation had its greatest
impact on U.S. policy toward Latin America, as shown in a somewhat dated
but nonetheless penetrating book by Lars Schoultz.61 By the 1980s decreases
in funding and difŽ culties in passing legislation rendered foreign aid bills less
57. Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991);
and Timothy Cole, “Congressional Investigation of American Foreign Policy: Iran-Contra in Perspective,” Congress and the Presidency, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 29–48.
58. Jean Edward Smith, George Bush’s War (New York: H. Holt, 1992); and Robert Gates, From the
Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 499.
59. Lindsay, Congress and the Politics of U.S. Defense, p. 144; and Thomas Franck and Clifford Bob,
“The Return of Humpty-Dumpty: Foreign Relations Law after the Chadha Case,” American Journal
of International Law, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Fall 1985), pp. 912–960. As one House staffer conceded after
Ronald Reagan’s refusal to invoke the War Powers Act when sending the Marines to Lebanon in 1983,
“War Powers is a law that simply doesn’t work in conventional terms. If it works at all, it does so in
mysterious ways.” Blechman, Politics of National Security, p. 183.
60. Paul Sigmund, The United States and Democracy in Chile (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1989), pp. 88–107; Patricia Fagen, “U.S. Foreign Policy and Human Rights: The Role of Congress,” in Antonio Cassesse, ed., National Control over Foreign Policy Making (Leyden: Sijthoff and
Noorhoff, 1979); Lars Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 195–197; David Forsythe, Human Rights and U.S.
Foreign Policy: Congress Reconsidered (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1988), pp. 36–60; and
Pastor, Congress and the Politics of U.S. Foreign Economic Policy, pp. 265–317.
61. Schoultz, Human Rights.
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useful vehicles for asserting congressional power, but aggressive members of
Congress by then had already turned their attention to defense appropriations
measures.62 Perhaps the most spectacular example of the use of the defense appropriations bill to in uence broader foreign policy concerns came in 1975,
when an amendment sponsored by Senator John Tunney cut off funding for
the U.S. covert operation in Angola. Similar measures were proposed throughout the 1980s, most obviously with the Boland Amendment to halt covert aid
to anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua.63 In addition, a more  exible defense
authorization process generated an explosion of  oor amendments concerning both policy and funding matters on defense bills, ending once and for all
the days of the “inviolability” of executive requests on such matters.64
In the aftermath of Vietnam the political consequences of foreign policy
activism were signiŽ cant. A perception of excessive interest in international issues continued to pose political risks. After Hubert Humphrey left a hearing
in the mid-1970s on U.S. covert operations in Chile, he announced that he
had to go try “to get jobs for four hundred people in Minnesota today,” a task
“a great deal more important to me right now than Chile.”65 But the growing
power of the peace and defense lobbies also Ž t foreign policy issues “into the
bread and butter of routine political business,” as John Culver later described
it.66 Increased public attention on foreign policy matters enhanced Congress’s
62. James McCormick, “Decision Making in the Foreign Affairs and Foreign Relations Committees,”
in Ripley and Lindsay, eds., Congress Resurgent, pp. 118–148; and Blechman, The Politics of National
Security, p. 106.
63. Cynthia Arnson, Crossroads: Congress, the Reagan Administration, and Central America (New York:
Pantheon, 1989), chas. 3–5; and Neil Livingston and Manfred von Nordheim, “The U.S. Congress
and the Angolan Crisis,” Strategic Review, Vol. 5, No. 1 (January 1977), pp. 1–11.
64. Hoyt Purvis and Tura Campanella, “Congress, Country X, and Arms Sales,” in Purvis and Baker,
eds., Legislating Foreign Policy, pp. 107–126; Robert Art, “Congress and the Defense Budget: Enhancing Policy Oversight,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 100, No. 2 (Summer 1985), p. 234;
Lindsay, “Congressional Oversight of the Department of Defense,” p. 60. A few statistics illustrate the
startling nature of the shift. From 1976 to 1983 the two armed services committees and defense appropriations subcommittees alone made over 10,000 changes in dollar Ž gures submitted by the president. From 1969 to 1985 the number of reports requested by Congress from the Pentagon increased
by 1,778 percent, the instances of directed actions escalated by 922 percent, and changes in provisions
to defense-related laws soared by 255 percent.
65. Humphrey quoted in Paterson, “Oversight or Aftervision?” p. 167. Perhaps the most obvious instance of congressional parochialism came after the Pueblo incident in 1968, when Senator John
Stennis sent an urgent message to Lyndon Johnson in the White House Situation Room. Expressing
concern about the political damage of the operation to Democrats in an election year, the senator delivered the following advice: “For God’s sake, do something.” Johnson looked up and muttered to an
aide to “please thank the senator for his helpful advice.” Blechman, Politics of National Security, p. 202.
66. Culver quoted in Blechman, Politics of National Security, p. 114; Blechman, “The New Congressional Role in Arms Control,” pp. 121–122; Lindsay, “Congress and Defense Policy,” pp. 385–387;
and Eileen Burgin, “The In uence of Constituents: Congressional Decision Making on Issues of Foreign and Defense Policy,” in Ripley and Lindsay, eds., Congress Resurgent, pp. 68–76. The old rules
concerning overactivity on foreign policy issues, of course, were not entirely superseded. For instance,
in an unsuccessful bid for reelection in 1978, Dick Clark, the Senate’s most persistent critic of U.S. in-
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traditional ability to frame consideration of diplomatic issues. Two senators
with diverse ideological viewpoints became especially active in foreign policy
debates: Christopher Dodd, a liberal Democrat from Connecticut, who led
the opposition to Ronald Reagan’s policy in Central America, and Richard
Lugar, a moderate Republican from Indiana, who played a key role in ending
U.S. support for Fidel Marcos’s regime in the Philippines. 67 Questions such as
the nuclear “freeze” also demonstrated Congress’s ability to bring domestic
cultural issues and ideological forces into the foreign policy-making apparatus. This role expanded during the 1970s, as newly energized groups, such as
civil rights activists, began turning their attention to international affairs.68 In
addition, congressional debates illustrated the ability of transnational alliances
to affect the day-to-day conduct of U.S. diplomacy. With the decline of the
Chinese and Dominican lobbies, Israeli interests emerged as the most powerful foreign lobby on Capitol Hill, where they frequently succeeded in either
blocking or scaling back executive requests for arms sales to Arab states. Other
foreign and ethnic lobbies hoped to imitate the success of organizations like
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Roughly 125 former government ofŽ cials represented Japan as lobbyists in the mid-1980s, and Kuwait
paid 12 million dollars for a public relations Ž rm in 1990. 69
At the most basic level, then, diplomatic historians cannot aspire to produce an adequate synthesis of American foreign policy during the Cold War
without including the congressional perspective. The constitutional powers of
Congress have given it a role to play in virtually all foreign policy decisions. At
the very least, Congress acted to modify executive policies on the domestic
scene in much the same way that the policies of U.S. allies did in the international arena. At most, as with human rights policies and other initiatives in
the immediate aftermath of Vietnam, Congress imposed major restrictions on
volvement in Angola and champion of a more liberal U.S. policy toward Africa, came under attack as
the “senator from Africa.” See Patsy Mink, “Institutional Perspective: Misunderstandings, Myths, and
Misperceptions,” in Franck, ed., Tethered Presidency, p. 65.
67. Lindsay, Congress and the Politics of U.S. Defense, pp. 119–135; and Bruce Jentleson, “American
Diplomacy: Around the World and Along Pennsylvania Avenue,” in Mann, ed., A Question of Balance,
p. 197.
68. David Meyer, A Winter of Discontent: The Nuclear Freeze Movement and American Politics (New
York: Praeger, 1990); and Stephen Metz, “Congress, the Antiapartheid Movement, and Nixon,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring 1988), pp. 166–196. In general, Congress has been an
underused resource for historians who explore domestic actors such as peace movements or women
and foreign policy. For the lack of attention to Congress in such literature, see “Culture, Gender, and
Foreign Policy: A Symposium,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter 1994), pp. 47–124; and
Lawrence Wittner, “Peace Historians and Foreign Policy: The Challenge to Diplomatic Historians,”
Diplomatic History, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Fall 1987), pp. 355–370.
69. Tierney, “Interest Group Involvement,” pp. 95–109; and Melvin Small, Democracy and Diplomacy: The Impact of Domestic Politics on U.S. Foreign Policy, 1789–1994 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996), p. 135.
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executive actions. In either case, historians need to go beyond citing such anecdotes as Arthur Vandenberg’s advice to Harry Truman that the best way to
obtain congressional support for U.S. aid to Greece and Turkey was to “scare
the hell” out of the American people. (Whether the Michigan senator actually
uttered the phrase is unclear.) As Ernest May recently observed, key congressional shifts in policy from the late 1940s and early 1950s remain a “mystery.”70 But, as Senator Moynihan recognized a decade ago, this type of oversight should come as no surprise. Despite the productive work on the topic
that has been done in the last ten to Ž fteen years, historians of U.S. foreign relations are still a long way from solving the mystery of Congress’s role in U.S.
Cold War policy.
70. Ernest May, Address to the Charles Warren Center Seminar on International History, Cambridge,
MA, 20 March 1998.
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