AIKEN, George David

(b. 20 August 1892 in Dummerston, Vermont; d. 19 November 1984 in Montpelier, Vermont), U.S. senator from Vermont from 1941 to 1975 who was one of the leading opponents of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia.

Aiken was the son of Edward Webster Aiken, a farmer, and Myra Cook. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Putney, Vermont, where Aiken attended school. There he graduated from Brattleboro High School in 1909, ending his formal education. In 1912, at the age of twenty, Aiken and a friend borrowed $100 to purchase land for planting raspberries. A few years later, he increased the parcel to 500 acres that included a nursery. Aiken's interest in cultivation remained throughout his life, and was reflected in his sponsorship and support for legislation regarding farms and agriculture.

Before entering politics, Aiken served for seventeen years as the school director for the town of Putney. His first attempt at election to Vermont's house of representatives in 1922 failed, but he ran again for the same position and was elected in 1930. Three years later, he became speaker of the state house of representatives. Elected lieutenant governor of Vermont in 1935, Aiken later won election as the state's governor, a position he held from 1937 to 1941.

Aiken was elected U.S. Senator from Vermont in 1941, and remained in the Senate until his retirement in 1975. Throughout his time in the Senate, Aiken was a member of the Agriculture and Forestry Committee, and in 1954, he gave up thirteen years of seniority on the Labor and Public Welfare Committee in order to fill a vacancy on the Foreign Relations Committee. Had he not done so, the seat would have gone to Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, for whom Aiken did not attempt to hide his distaste. By the 1960s, Aiken had become a most vocal and respected member of this committee. In 1958 Aiken became chair of the Subcommittee on Canada, a position he held until his retirement, and in 1959, he was appointed to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.

Although he represented a small rural state, Aiken was an internationalist who supported the notion of the United Nations (UN) as a peacekeeping organization. In 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him delegate to the fifteenth session of the UN General Assembly. Ten years later, President Richard M. Nixon appointed Aiken to the President's Commission for the Observance of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the United Nations.

Aiken believed that U.S. foreign policy should be formulated in conjunction with Congress and the executive branch. In 1968 he voted for Senator J. William Fulbright's resolution that required the president to seek consent from Congress before making "national commitments" to other nations. Aiken also believed that foreign policy issues should be approached in a spirit of bipartisanship.

Consistent with this principle, Aiken supported President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, when he sent 20,000 troops to stabilize the government of the Dominican Republic in 1965. He believed that this action prevented bloodshed, protected U.S. investments, and stopped the spread of similar rebellions to other Caribbean and Latin American countries.

Likewise in the early 1960s Aiken supported Johnson's policy on the Vietnam War. In 1964 he voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which gave the president more power to increase U.S. troops in Vietnam. As the war escalated, however, Aiken became an opponent of Johnson on the issue of Southeast Asia. He later voted for the Cooper-Church Amendment, which called for a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam.

In 1966 Aiken made his famous proclamation, "if a face-saving device was needed to pull out of the fighting, President Johnson should simply declare the United States the winner and begin de-escalation." Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield called Aiken the "wise old owl" as opposed to the "hawks who wanted victory in Vietnam and the doves who wanted to pull out of the region." Aiken supported President Richard M. Nixon's Vietnam policy of bombing Hanoi, which he hoped would quickly put an end to the war. When Nixon in 1973 negotiated a withdrawal from Vietnam, which eventually led to a Communist takeover of the country, Aiken noted: "What we got was essentially what I recommended six years ago—we said we had won, and we got out."

As the ranking Republican on the Agriculture and Forestry Committee, Aiken in 1965 introduced the Aiken Rural Water and Sewer Act, which provided federal assistance for rural water and sewage systems. Among his other agriculture legislation was the Talmadge-Aiken Act, adopted in 1962, which coordinated federal and state laws dealing with the flow of farm products to consumers. This law was expanded in 1967 to include meat products. Aiken also continually promoted rural electrification in Vermont. He was a great supporter of the Vermont Electric Co-op, and helped place the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Vernon in 1972.

Aiken admired President Johnson's social programs and his fight against poverty. In 1964, he helped sponsor the Food Stamp Act, a program he had hoped to make permanent three decades earlier when it was first introduced by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the period from 1939 to 1943. Johnson also turned to Aiken in the writing of a compromise to the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, when the longest filibuster in Senate history threatened to prevent the enaction of the most far-reaching civil rights legislation passed since the Reconstruction. Aiken's contribution to the public accommodation section, which was known as the "Mrs. Murphy's Boarding House," because Aiken insisted that small businesses (like "Mrs. Murphy's boarding house") remain exempt from federal regulation, helped in the passage of this bill.

Aiken ran for his last term as senator in 1968, and during that final stint on Capitol Hill, he supported Nixon throughout the Watergate scandal. His last term was noted for his environmentalist legislation, including sponsorship of the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act in 1974.

From 1914 until her death in 1966, Aiken was married to Beatrice Howard, with whom he had four children, including a son who was killed in a 1959 plane crash. He married Lola Pierotti, his longtime administrative assistant, in 1967. Books by Aiken include Pioneering with Fruits and Berries (1936), Speaking from Vermont (1938), Pioneering with Wildflowers (1968), and Aiken: Senate Diary, January 1972–January 1975 (1976).

A collection of Aiken's papers is at the Bailey/Howe Library at the University of Vermont at Burlington, Vermont. An informative source on Aiken's last term in the Senate is his own Aiken: Senate Diary, January 1972–January 1975 (1976). Twenty-four interviews with Aiken recorded from 1975 to 1980 are part of an oral history collection at the Bailey/Howe Library at the University of Vermont. An obituary is in the New York Times (20 Nov. 1984).

Margalit Susser