HISTORY WATCH : We All Won It

Did the Republicans or the Democrats win the Cold War? Last January, Russia’s Boris N. Yeltsin said: “I don’t think the United States has won the Cold War. I think we all have won it.”

Indeed, and that’s why President Bush seemed, to put no finer point on it, grudging when he said Thursday in accepting the GOP nomination that “while the U.S. postwar strategy was largely bipartisan, the fact remains that the liberal, McGovern wing of the other party--including my opponent--consistently made the wrong choice. . . . Now the Cold War is over and they claim, ‘Hey, we were with you all the way.’ ”

Even in the heat of a highly political moment, the President might have remembered that the Taft wing of his own party led the opposition to Harry S. Truman, a President from “the other party,” (as the Republican speech writers put it this week) at the all-but-aborted birth of NATO. As there were Republicans who refused to join Truman in mobilizing against Stalin, so, earlier, there were Republicans who refused to join Franklin D. Roosevelt in mobilizing against Hitler.

There were also, we hasten to add, many in the GOP who recognized clear and present danger on both occasions and rose to meet it. Our point is not to snatch the laurels of victory from the Republican brow but simply to spread them around. One wing or another of both parties has, on occasion, “made the wrong choice.” But both, joined by millions of courageous allies much nearer the foe, have stayed the course in a 50-year policy of remarkable consistency.