I thought immediately of the present-day partisan divide over prosecution of the War on Terror, as I read Lee Edwards’ description of the political debate linked to the Marshall Plan nearly 60 years ago.

If your memory needs refreshing — as mine did — Democrat Harry Truman needed help from a Republican Congress to pass the plan for European economic aid.

Edwards wrote the following in his 1999 volume The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America (Free Press):

Republicans payed a high political price for their patriotism. By collaborating with the Democrats in approving the European Recovery Program and the largest peacetime foreign aid budget in U.S. history, they deprived themselves of an important campaign issue — Fair Deal spending overseas — and gave the Truman administration its major success in foreign policy.

Sen. Robert Taft — one of Truman’s strongest critics — “supported both the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan because America was engaged in an ideological battle of freedom against communism — of justice, equality, and liberty against a ‘totalitarian state.'”

It’s not as if Republicans had no alternative to Truman and Marshall’s plan. They could (and did) quibble with the specific proposals, winning significant concessions from the administration before settling on a final deal.

But the GOP did not reject the administration’s plan solely for purposes of political gain.

Of course, Edwards reminds us that Truman repaid Republicans by railing against the “do nothing” 80th Congress during the 1948 campaign, calling the GOP opposition “totally un-American,” referring to the Republican platform as the “most hypocritical, deceitful document in history,” and referring to an “unholy alliance” of Republicans and communists.