Bush's "Nazi appeaser" was a Republican.

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Thursday May 15, 2008 · 9:50 AM PDT

2008/05/15 · 09:50

We all heard Bush say that "an American senator" said he could have stopped Hitler from invading Poland, if only he'd been able to talk to him first. But Bush didn't name the guy, making it tough for us to put this comment in context. So: who was this senator?

He was William Edgar Borah, senator from Idaho and 1936 presidential hopeful—and, of course, a Republican. Bush didn't mention Borah's name because, apparently, he didn't want to remind people that most of the opponents to intervening against Hitler were the isolationist Republicans!

Borah was 74 years old when he said this. He died a few months later. It's interesting, though, that even though Borah was an isolationist, he still saw the need to talk to foreign powers. Borah opposed the Treaty of Versailles and advocated in 1931 to revise it, and supported the Treaty of Trianon, which divided the old Hungarian Kingdom into the distinctly non-Hungarian countries of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. Very telling that even an avowed non-interventionist like Borah saw the wisdom of engaging with foreign leaders—but only after the Nazi tanks were streaming across the Polish frontier...

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