National Affairs: This Sad Episode

Past midnight, the bright white light atop the Capitol dome still shone over Washington, signaling that Congress was still in session. On the Senate floor, after six months of stalling, wrangling and maneuvering, U.S. history’s bitterest battle over confirmation of a presidential appointment marched toward the showdown.

In the milling around just before the vote, New Mexico Democrat Clinton P. Anderson and Virginia Democrat Harry F. Byrd greeted each other with grins and back slaps. They had been fighting on opposite sides, but now the fighting was over. “Well, Clint,” asked Byrd, “are you going to win?”

Anderson: “By three or four votes.”

Byrd: “No, you’re going to lose by three or four votes.’-‘

Replied Anderson to the U.S.’s No. 1 apple-grower: “Harry, you really know how to grow good apples, but you sure don’t know how to count votes.”

Anderson had counted with painstaking, implacable care. By a cliffhanging, 49-10-46 roll-call vote that kept the crowded galleries breathless with suspense, Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, 63, the President’s nominee for Secretary of Commerce, became the first Cabinet appointee to be rejected by the Senate since 1925, and the eighth in the nation’s history.

Talent for Controversy. Sometime Wall Street banker, longtime member (1946-50) and chairman (1953-58) of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis L. Strauss made a lot of enemies during his AEC years in the controversies that swirled about him: his winning fight to get an H-bomb program started, the lifting of Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, the Dixon-Yates electric-power contract with AEC. But weighed calmly against his long record of achievement, going back 42 years to his service as secretary to Food Administrator Herbert Hoover in World War I, Strauss’s talent for controversy would hardly have cost him half a dozen votes in a normal confirmation test. What defeated Lewis Strauss was a combination of Dolitical disgruntlement and personal vendetta.

Strauss was a victim.of Senate Democrats’ heaped-up frustration at their inability to use their 64-34 majority to achieve a Democratic record. He was also the victim of Clint Anderson’s obsessive campaign against him (TIME, June 15). Nursing a violent dislike built up during his years as a member and chairman of Capitol Hill’s Joint Atomic Energy Committee, Anderson, to collect anti-Strauss votes, drew on his personal popularity in the Senate, drummed up party loyalty, and cashed every IOU he had for past favors rendered fellow Democrats.

The Lady Wavers. One by one, through the weeks, Anderson scratched off the undecideds on his worn tally sheet, wrote their names among the nays. Early last week he was only a couple of votes short of the magic 50 nays that would assure him of victory. For Louisiana’s Russell Long he had a reminder of a personal favor done for father Huey a quarter-century ago, swung a needed vote despite pressure on Long from the pro-Strauss Southerners led by Harry Byrd. For Georgia’s Herman Talmadge he had some flowery praise given in a speech just two weeks before at Georgia Tech; word naturally got back to Talmadge, and he growled: “You can put Herman Talmadge down against Strauss.” Three times Anderson guided West Virginia’s wavering freshman Robert Byrd through the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee’s 1,128-page transcript of the bitterly quarrelsome confirmation hearings, finally won his vote, even though Byrd was under heavy pressure from coal operators and the United Mine Workers, who like Lewis Strauss’s quota on oil imports.

Then, on the morning before the showdown, Anderson checked off his second Republican vote. Unlike North Dakota’s maverick William (“Wild Bill”) Langer, who announced back in May that he was going to vote against Strauss, Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith kept a pursed-lipped silence about her intentions, but she tipped Anderson off by asking him to help her go over the committee hearings. What ever she found in the transcript, her decision seemed to be motivated in part by pique at getting no G.O.P. help at all in her feuding campaign to keep Air Force Lieut. General Emmett (“Rosie”) O’Donnell Jr. from getting a fourth star, in part to her feeling, well known to Senators of both parties, that the Eisenhower Administration does not pay enough attention to the only woman in the Senate.

Men in a Hurry. Sure at last that he had enough votes to beat Strauss, Anderson asked Texas’ Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson to insist on a vote at midweek. Still stinging from the “Won’t-Do Congress” gibe that G.O.P. National Chairman (and Senator from Kentucky) Thruston B. Morton hurled at him in early June, Johnson suddenly became a man in a hurry.

Right after an appropriations bill tally that showed five Republicans absent and all 64 Democrats present—Johnson and Anderson had seen to the Democratic attendance—Johnson pushed for a vote on Strauss. Caught with three men scattered far from Washington, Republican leaders huddled in Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen’s office, decided on a strategy: filibuster until the missing

Republicans could get to Capitol Hill to cast their ayes. Dirksen himself got on the phone to do some long-distance calling. He hustled Kentucky’s Morton onto a plane in Denver, where he was about to address the Young Republican National Federation. With help from the White House, he whisked Utah’s Wallace Bennett back from Salt Lake City in an Air Force two-seat T-33 trainer—Bennett’s first jet flight of his 60 years.

Dirksen reached North Dakota’s Milton Young at remote Devils Lake, N. Dak. through the county sheriff’s office. Young set off in an Air Force jet tanker, but in mid-air got a radio message from Dirksen that his vote was not needed: the Democrats had agreed to pair him with Montana’s Democrat Mike Mansfield.

Unproved Accusations. Meanwhile, the filibuster was turning into a rear-guard defense of Lewis Strauss. “He has amply demonstrated character, integrity, emotional stability, absence of conflict of interest, intellectual and moral competence, patriotism and experience,” said New York’s Kenneth Keating in a three-hour speech. “What more can we ask?” Keating’s fellow New Yorker, Jacob Javits, took over, then Arizona’s Barry Goldwater.

But it remained for a Democrat, Connecticut’s Thomas J. Dodd, to make the debate’s most ringing defense. “If I could briefly summarize all the charges made against Strauss,” said Dodd, “I would divide them into three groups:

“Accusations that are grave but not proved.”

“Accusations that are proved but not grave.”

“Accusations that are both grave and proved but which, in my judgment, reflect credit and not discredit upon Admiral Strauss.”

In the last category Dodd took up the accusation that Strauss had “persecuted” Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in the wrangle over Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1953-54. “Nine people judged the Oppenheimer case. Seven of them, including Strauss, ruled against Dr. Oppenheimer. I suppose I should not be too surprised or shocked, as I am, that . . . the leftwing extremists should attribute this decision to the sinister motives of one man, and that they should persevere in their attempts to destroy him. Strauss’s conduct on the Oppenheimer matter was exemplary throughout.”

If Strauss’s public record had been “unobtrusive and unspectacular,” said Dodd, he would have been “confirmed with ease and dispatch. It is, therefore, precisely because he has played a commanding role, an aggressive role, a decisive role in Government that his confirmation is in doubt . . . The record as a whole, in my judgment, reveals a man who has courage, competence, intellectual power, a sincere and deep patriotism, and an essential integrity.”

Gasping Galleries. Near midnight, Barry Goldwater abruptly yielded the floor. Morton was in from Denver and Bennett from Salt Lake City. Besides North Dakota’s Young, the only Senator absent was Arkansas Democrat William Fulbright. (Fulbright, who had supported Strauss on Dixon-Yates, yet did not want to be counted against his fellow Democrats, went home to avoid the vote, agonized through the night as he won the flabby distinction of being the only member of the Senate unrecorded.)

With the outcome in doubt, the vote at 12:35 a.m. was the most dramatic and suspenseful roll call on Capitol Hill since the Senate killed the Bricker Amendment by a single nay back in 1954. The galleries gasped when Maine’s well-tailored, frosty-eyed Margaret Chase Smith, head downward, spoke her hush-voiced no. A murmur swept across the Senate floor. Barry Goldwater slapped his desk and let out an audible “goddam!”

When the voting was over, Republicans sat in stunned dismay. Democrats clustered around Anderson to pat his back and shake his hand. But there was no real joy in it. Democrats were too aware that the Strauss fight, as a top White House aide grimly put it, “will leave an awfully deep scar.”

“The Best I Know.” Lewis Strauss sat out the session with a friend in his cavernous Commerce Department office. When he got news of the vote by phone, his eyes reddened, he bit hard on his pipe, then he said quietly: “We have to be able to take things like this.” Next morning, summoned to the White House for a 20-minute talk with the President, Strauss genially told reporters that he was going to spend some time on his Virginia cattle farm and write a book, tentatively entitled Men and Decisions, about his Washington years. “It has been a privilege to have served our country for so many years,” said he. “I have done the best I know how to do to protect and defend the national security, even when that was not the recognized, or easy, or popular course of action at the time. I leave with confidence that history will be just.”

For the second time* in his 6½ years in the White House, President Eisenhower called newsmen to a special conference in his oval, green-walled office. Lewis Strauss, said Ike, reading a statement that he had scrawled out in black ink shortly before, is “a man who in war and in peace has served his nation loyally, honorably and effectively under four different Presidents. I am losing a truly valuable associate in the business of government. More than this—if the nation is to be denied the right to have as public servants in responsible positions men of his proven character, ability and integrity, then indeed it is the American people who are the losers through this sad episode.”

* The first time: in August 1957, to fight against a threatened congressional slash in foreign aid.