He was the “Lion of Idaho.”

He kept the United States out of the League of Nations
after World War I.

William E. Borah took seriously President George Washington’s warning to stay out of foreign entanglements. His critics suggested that he and others who believed this were "little Americans.

"Call us little Americans if you will," he answered in his speech against the League of Nations in 1919. "But leave us the consolation and the pride which the term American, however modified, still imparts. . . . If we have erred we have erred out of too much love for those things which from childhood you and we together were taught to revere .. . because we have placed too high an estimate upon the wisdom of Washington and Jefferson, too exalted an opinion upon the patriotism of the sainted Lincoln."

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was perhaps the nation’s most powerful voice against going to war.

And now a president who was quick to jump into what is becoming one of the nation’s longest wars, is trying to paint Barack Obama as an appeaser using Borah’s words.

"As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history," President Bush told Israeli lawmakers this week in a speech marking the 60th anniversary of Israel.

That Senator was Borah and as Idahoans know he was Republican. Bush simplified Borah’s complex and colorful legacy when he sought to make talking to adversaries the same as appeasement. Appeasement wasn't just talking in 1938, it was handing over Czechoslovakia, which Britain's Neville Chamberlain did.

Borah was known for political courage like failing to support Republican Herbert Hoover for President. His foundation principle that he would not shake even to his death after six terms in the Senate was that war was wrong except for the defense of American liberty and union. Borah was so sure of his own power of persuasion that he probably believed that he, and maybe only he, could convince Hitler of the illogic of his aims.

Borah didn't live to see just how evil Hitler was, dying in 1940. But he certainly wasn't the only American who did not want Americans to go to Europe to fight the Nazis at that time.

By the way, Larry Craig sits behind his desk just as other Idaho senators have proudly done since his death.