THE CONGRESS: New Leader

On the first day of the session, G.O.P. Senators quietly elected a new floor leader to succeed Nebraska’s late Senator Kenneth Wherry. Their choice, by a vote of 26 to 15: New Hampshire’s Styles Bridges, whom Bob Taft and other Republican Senators had agreed upon after Wherry’s funeral (TiME, Dec. 17). The minority, led by Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., had hoped to elect Massachusetts’ Leverett Saltonstall, a firm Eisenhower supporter. No one, however, was offended by the selection of Bridges. Not yet pledged to any candidate, he has the respect of both the Taft and the Eisenhower factions.

Bridges, 53, an agricultural expert by profession, got into New Hampshire politics through his activity with state farmers’ groups. In 1934, in the face of a Democratic landslide, he was elected governor, the youngest (36) in the state’s history. During two years in office, he stabilized New Hampshire’s shaky finances, started a new system of state services (unemployment insurance, old-age benefits) that to some of his old farmer friends smelled suspiciously like the New Deal. Elected Senator, he went on to Washington in 1937 to wage a long and persistent guerrilla fight against the Senate’s overwhelming New Deal majority. “They always spoke of me as a radical or a liberal in my own state,” said Bridges at the time. “In Washington they call me a conservative.”

Now the senior Republican Senator, Styles Bridges has gone after the Fair Deal with better effect. From his vantage point on the Senate Appropriations Committee, he has put a crimp in several of Harry Truman’s expansive budgets, and led G.O.P. attacks on Dean Acheson and the Administration’s Far East policy.

Bridges supported Lend-Lease and Selective Service before World War II, ECA and the North Atlantic Treaty after it. Last week Styles Bridges moved his desk (which once served New Hampshire-born Daniel Webster) to the floor leader’s spot in the first row of the G.O.P. side of the Senate Chamber, and settled down to a hard session’s work.