The Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen took Speaker Paul Ryan to task this week for Ryan’s tepid endorsement of Donald Trump—”What I know about Ryan is that he could not be proud of endorsing Trump”—and compared him at length, and distinctly unfavorably, with a Republican from an earlier era, Robert Taft.

Taft, explains Cohen, was “an uncommon man of uncommon courage.” And on the eve of the 1946 congressional elections, he risked his party’s prospects (and his own presidential ambition) by condemning, on the floor of the Senate, the impending execution of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg. In Cohen’s words, Taft “had his principles … and he stuck to them. The Constitution commanded no ex post facto laws. The Nazis were convicted of waging an aggressive war — a crime without legal precedent. Taft was adamant that they had broken no existing law.”