The Limits on the President's Commander-In-Chief Power
"During recent years a theory has developed that there shall be no criticism of the foreign policy of the administration, that any such criticism is an attack on the unity of the Nation, that it gives aid and comfort to the enemy, and that it sabotages any idea of a bipartisan foreign policy for the national benefit. I venture to state that this proposition is a fallacy, and a very dangerous fallacy threatening the very existence of the Nation.
In very recent days we have heard appeals for unity from the administration and from its supporters. I suggest that these appeals are an attempt to cover up the past faults and failures of the administration and enable it to maintain the secrecy which has largely enveloped our foreign policy since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was a distinguished Democrat, President Woodrow Wilson, who denounced secret diplomacy and demanded open covenants openly arrived at. The adminstrations of President Roosevelt and Presidential Truman have repudiated that wise democratic doctrine and assumed complete authority to make in secret the most vital decisions and commit this country to the most important and dangerous obligations. As I see it, Members of Congress, and particularly Members of the Senate, have a constitutional obligation to reexamine constantly and discuss the foreign policy of the United States. If we permit appeals to unity to bring an end to that criticism, we endanger not only the constitutional liberties of the country, but even its future existence."
Senator Robert A. Taft
United States Congressional Record (1951)
8:23:55 AM 
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