Awhile back a friend of mine sent me a New York Times article discussing the Coolidge Administration's intervention in Nicaragua in 1927. Coolidge had sent in U.S. Marines for what turned out to be a six-year undeclared war that ended with the dictator Anastasio Somoza in charge. The author, Peter R. Kornbluh, said that Ronald Reagan's approach to "the crisis in Central America is strikingly close to that of Calvin Coolidge." Both, he said, use "bellicose rhetoric," prefer a "military solution," and "raise the specter of international communism."

The article was particularly interesting to me because it quoted from a speech my father made on the floor of the House of Representatives, objecting to the Coolidge policy. I located the quotation in a collection of my father's speeches, delivered over 22 years in the House. In it, he said the Administration intervened in Nicaragua not to protect American lives, as the president had claimed, but

for the purpose of establishing the particular government that happens to be satisfactory to him and to those behind him.... Great Britain in her most arrogant days never dreamed of an imperialism to that extent; imperial Rome never asserted over other powers any comparable authority.