THE ADMINISTRATION: The Strauss Affair

THE ADMINISTRATION The Strauss Affair

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Along a dim corridor outside the U.S. Senate chamber one evening strode a big, round-shouldered man with a conspicuous smile curling on lips that more often turn soberly downward. New Mexico’s Democratic Senator Clinton P. Anderson was obviously happy with his thoughts. Spotting Anderson alone in the corridor, a newsman hurried up, asked a question heard constantly throughout Washington: “Will he make it?” Anderson paused, drew from his inside coat pocket a well-worn tally sheet, heavily marked with circles and underlines in blue ink. The smile tugged harder at the corners of his mouth. “I’m not worried any more,” said Clinton Anderson. “There will be enough votes.”

Thus last week did New Mexico’s Clint Anderson report on the progress of his battle against the confirmation as U.S. Secretary of Commerce of one of the nation’s ablest and thorniest public figures: Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, 63, longtime member and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and a man whose governmental career Anderson has sworn to end. Despite Anderson’s optimism, the outcome of that battle was still in cliff-hanging doubt, with the decision likely to swing on two or three Senate votes—and with the U.S. already the loser in one of the biggest, bitterest, and in many ways most unseemly confirmation fights in Senate history.

Blood Feud. In its simplest, unhappiest terms, the fight is the result of a blood feud between Lewis Strauss and Clint Anderson, both eminently capable, dedicated citizens who have served the nation long and well, but who, by the chemistry of personality and the conflict of ideas, have come to hate each other. But the Strauss case has gone far beyond the personal quarrel between two men; it has widened out to involve their friends and their associates, strained old ties and old loyalties, brought charge and countercharge, insult and counterinsult, rumor and counterrumor. And it has become a major test of the relationship between Republican President Dwight Eisenhower and the Democratic 86th Congress.

In meeting that test, President Eisenhower has deeply committed himself, both personally and politically. He has broken off a longstanding friendship with Clint Anderson, until recently a frequent fourth at White House bridge games. The President has declared himself behind Lewis Strauss to the end, no matter how bitter it may be.

Last week, at the regular White House meeting between Ike and Republican congressional leaders. Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen mentioned the buzzing rumors—false, like so many rumors in the Strauss affair—that the

President would be happy to dodge the fight by accepting Strauss’s resignation. Replied Ike: “I wouldn’t accept Lewis’ resignation even if he offered it. You can go out and say that when you leave this room.” Dirksen did—and with the battle lines thus firmly, flatly drawn, the confirmation of Lewis Strauss finally came to the Senate floor after months of wrangling and wrestling.

Above Suspicion. The President, says the U.S. Constitution, shall appoint officials “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” But over the years, even when a President faced an opposition-controlled Congress, the Senate has generally granted him the right to appoint to his Cabinet anybody he wants. Only four Presidents in U.S. history have felt the sting of a Senate refusal to confirm a Cabinet appointment.

In 1834, in the thick of Andrew Jackson’s fight with Congress over Treasury policy, the Senate rejected Treasury Secretary-designate Roger B. Taney, later (by appointment of President Jackson) Chief Justice of the United States. During a short, hectic span in 1843-44, the Senate turned down four nominees of President

John Tyler after he enraged the Whig majority by breaking with the Whig Party. In 1868, under embattled Andrew Johnson, the Senate refused to confirm Henry Stanbery as Attorney General. And, in 1925, the Senate balked at Corporation Lawyer Charles B. Warren. Calvin Coolidge’s nominee for Attorney General, on the ground that he might be suspected of softness toward big business: after the scandals of the Harding Administration, the Republican-controlled Senate felt that the Attorney General had to be above suspicion.

All seven of the Cabinet rejects from 1834 to 1925 were victims of special circumstances. If Lewis Strauss is turned down by the Senate, he will hold the bleak distinction of being the first Cabinet appointee in U.S. history rejected because of his personality.

Differences of Opinion. For it is the personality, and not the competence, of Lewis Strauss that is clearly at issue as he nears the crisis of his career. Strauss, by the extraordinary ingredients of his makeup, is one to arouse superlatives of praise and blame, admiration and dislike. In the eyes of friends, he is brilliant, devoted, courageous and, in his more relaxed moments, exceedingly charming. His enemies regard him as arrogant, evasive, suspicious-minded, pride-ridden, and an excessively rough battler. (“He has more elbows than an octopus.”) President Eisenhower has called Strauss “a man of the highest type of character” and “one of the finest public servants I have ever known.” The majority report of the Senate Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, submitted last week, 16 days after the committee had approved Strauss’s nomination by a breathless 9-to-8 vote, said that he should be confirmed because of his “honesty and integrity, competence, and his long record of cordial and willing cooperation with the Congress.”

But the committee’s minority report, released at the same time, accused Strauss of “misstatements of fact . . . half truths . . . untruths.” On the Senate floor, Wyoming’s freshman Democratic Senator Gale McGee charged him with “a brazen attempt to hoodwink” the committee. His implacable enemy, Clinton Anderson, tells frankly why he worked to stretch out Strauss’s committee hearings for weeks: “I thought if the committee members saw enough of him, he would begin to irritate them, just as he has me.”

A vital key to Lewis Strauss’s character is a perfectionism that still seems to nag him at an age when he might have become more mellowed. It shows in the studied elegance of his tailoring, in a precision of speech that comes natural to him from long habit but seems a bit affected to unfriendly ears, and above all in a fierce reluctance to admit his mistakes, no matter how human and understandable they may have been. Some of his perfectionism traces back to a sense of being an outsider. As a Jew, he has sometimes felt the wounding edges of anti-Semitism (and again last week, that ugly term popped up). For all his wealth (he is a millionaire) and intellect (even his enemies admit that he is brainy), Strauss seems unable to live down in his own mind an awareness that he never went to college and that he started out as a traveling shoe salesman.

“Colossal Effrontery.” Son of a Virginia shoe jobber, Lewis Strauss (pronounced straws) was born in Charleston, W. Va., raised in Richmond. Chosen valedictorian of his high school class, he combined his two boyhood passions, physics and religion, in an address entitled “Science and Theology: A Reconciliation.” “Fortunately,” says Strauss, “this colossal effrontery has not survived.”

Instead of accepting the scholarship offered to him by the University of Virginia, Strauss set out to sell shoes for the family firm, headed southward with volumes of Latin poetry—Virgil, Ovid, Horace—packed along with his samples. After four years in the shoe business, he took a train to Washington in 1917 and offered his services as a volunteer worker for Herbert Hoover’s Belgian Relief Commission. Drawing no pay (he skimped along on his savings), Strauss worked for Hoover for 2½ years, first as a sort of office boy and then as secretary (“My jewel of a secretary,” Hoover called him). When Hoover went to Europe as wartime Food Administrator, he took Strauss along.

Into the Money. After war’s end, the Wall Street investment firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. astonished Lewis Strauss by offering him a job at a five-figure starting salary. A Kuhn, Loeb partner, passing through Hoover’s headquarters in Paris, had spotted Strauss as a truly promising young man. He was right. Sometime Shoe Salesman Strauss prospered spectacularly on Wall Street, pushed Kuhn, Loeb into highly profitable steel-company financing (Inland, Republic, Great Lakes), became a full partner at 32, piled up a fortune.

Invited to dinner early in his Kuhn, Loeb career by Partner Jerome Hanauer, Strauss offered to help Hanauer’s pig-tailed daughter Alice with her Latin homework. He made some mistakes in translation, as Alice found out in class next day, but she apparently forgave him. In 1923, when she was 18 and he was 27, they were married. The Strausses have one son, Lewis H., 35, a Baltimore physicist, and three grandchildren.

Battle for the Bomb. A Reserve lieutenant commander, Strauss headed for Washington at the outbreak of World War II to do deskbound Navy duty. Bad eyesight, the result of a boyhood rock fight, kept him out of shooting war. In wartime Washington, he originated the morale-building idea of awarding an “E” (for Excellence) pennant to outstanding war plants, helped set up the Office of Naval Research, wound up with the rank of rear admiral and the top medals a chairborne warrior could win: Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit.

After the war, Democrat Harry Truman named Republican Strauss to the brand-new Atomic Energy Commission under Chairman David Lilienthal. Strauss soon started finding himself on the minority end of 4-to-1 AEC decisions. Unable to persuade his fellow AEC commissioners to set up a system to detect Soviet atomic tests, he sidestepped them by taking his case to friends at the Pentagon. When the detection system, set up at Strauss’s urging, picked up radiation from the Soviet Union’s first atomic explosion in September 1949, Strauss, proven man of scientific foresight, set off another minority campaign: the fight to get an H-bomb program started against the combined opposition of his fellow commissioners and the scientists of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, chaired by prestigious Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Strauss cannot claim sole credit for finally persuading Harry Truman to issue the order, early in 1950, to get going on an H-bomb program. Playing equally important roles were Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, and Connecticut’s late Democratic Senator Brien McMahon. But without Strauss’s lonely battling, the decision would have come much later, possibly too late. As it was, the U.S. tested its first H-bomb only nine months before the first Soviet H-bomb explosion in mid-1953.

Endless Rumble. Soon after President Truman announced his H-bomb decision, Lewis Strauss, his momentous fight won, resigned, to go back into the world of high finance as financial adviser to the Rockefellers. In June 1953, President Eisenhower tabbed Strauss (who had supported his longtime friend Bob Taft for the G.O.P. nomination) as AEC chairman.

Strauss’s five years as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission resounded with an endless rumble of controversy. The wounding wrangle that followed the suspension of Physicist Oppenheimer’s security clearance made Lewis Strauss many an unforgiving enemy among the nation’s scientists. Conservative Strauss angered champions of public power by insisting on confining AEC’s nuclear-power role to research and design, leaving the job of building reactors for commercial power to private enterprise. He drew much of the blame for AEC’s heavily attacked (and long since canceled) Dixon-Yates contract, under which a private utility firm was supposed to build a power plant at West Memphis, Ark., right in the jealously guarded public-power domain of the Tennessee Valley Authority. He outraged stop-the-tests advocates by urging continued nuclear tests, with emphasis on developing “clean” weapons.

The image of Lewis Strauss that emerged from the swirls of struggle and debate only roughly resembles the real Lewis Strauss. He is accused of being “vindictive” in the Oppenheimer case, but the proceedings against Oppenheimer were begun on orders from President Eisenhower, issued at the urging of the Defense Department, the Justice Department and the FBI. He was blamed for the Dixon-Yates contract, but in fact it had been arranged by the Budget Bureau and the White House. He has a widespread reputation as a man of war and big bombs, but devoutly religious Lewis Strauss, a longtime president of New York’s Congregation Emanu-El, is a man who opposed the decision to drop A-bombs on Japan in 1945, worked devotedly to promote the U.S.’s Atoms for Peace program, and says: “I look forward to the day when there won’t be any military use [for atomic energy]. It may not come in my lifetime, but it will come.”

The St. Joan Manner. But if Lewis Strauss’s reputation is unfair to him, it is in some degree his own fault. He has a remarkable talent for giving offense. Said the New Republic last week in an editorial on Strauss: “One is reminded of Shaw’s comment that St. Joan infuriated people not by being right but by the manner of her being right.” In his long public-service career, Strauss has fought his way to triumph after triumph. He has been proved right time after time. But in each instance he has, by his very skill and aggression in urging his views and in defending himself, left behind him enemies dedicated to his downfall. And of all these enemies, none is more unforgiving than New Mexico’s Clinton Anderson.

The Final Break. As senior Democratic Senator and sometime chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, Clint Anderson was thrown into close contact with AEC Chairman Strauss, and that contact ripened into a beautiful hatred. Today, neither Strauss nor Anderson can give any specific cause for their feud; indeed, each swears that he went out of his way to be friendly to the other, only to be rebuffed.

Yet almost from Strauss’s first days as head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Anderson complained that Strauss deliberately withheld information from the Joint Congressional Committee, thereby evading his responsibility under the Atomic Energy Act to keep the committee “fully and currently informed” about AEC matters. Anderson was openly annoyed on several occasions when Strauss released headline-making nuclear news, beating the congressional committee to the punch. But every time Anderson moved onto the offensive, Lewis Strauss, incapable of quietly accepting criticism or the hint of criticism, fought back with all his natural aggressiveness.

Even so, as late as 1955, after Anderson had bitterly criticized Strauss during the Dixon-Yates fight, there were attempts at reconciliation, and Anderson and his wife were guests at Strauss’s 1,560-acre cattle farm near Culpeper, Va. The final break came early in 1956, when Strauss, at Anderson’s request, made a speech on atomic-energy progress to a gathering of New Mexico newspaper executives in Albuquerque. Strauss remarked that “there have been complaints” about the AEC’s reluctance to release information about its research projects. Well, said Lewis Strauss, that was because the complainers had “a limited understanding of what is involved,” and therefore did not realize how fusion research bears on “our national defense and security.”

As one of the most determined critics of AEC secrecy, Clint Anderson took the “limited understanding” remark as a personal slap, all the more insulting because it was delivered on his own home grounds. If he was handicapped by “limited understanding,” wrote Anderson in an angry letter to Chairman Strauss, that was Strauss’s fault for holding back information. From that point on, Anderson was almost incoherent on anything to do with Lewis Strauss, even to the preposterous point of publicly charging, in April 1958, that “something which makes them dirtier” was being inserted into stockpiled nuclear bombs.

Myths and Thunderbolts. By 1958, his five-year term as chairman of the AEC nearing an end, Lewis Strauss was sadly aware of the magnitude of his feud with Anderson. He decided not to seek reappointment, but it required two or three visits to the White House and all his persuasiveness to convince Dwight Eisenhower that his withdrawal should be accepted. When it was, Lewis Strauss left Washington vowing never to return. But last October, with Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks resigning, the President again called upon Strauss, who, by reason of his massive pride and urge for service, agreed to return to Government.

When Strauss accepted a recess appointment as Weeks’s successor, it seemed hardly likely that Anderson’s vendetta against him would be a serious threat to Senate confirmation. The Secretary of Commerce presides over a bureaucratic domain with a payroll of 31,000, but his post is hardly a hurricane’s eye of controversy. Strauss’s 13 predecessors in the post won Senate confirmation in an average of eight days apiece from the time the nominations went to Capitol Hill. When Washington Democrat Warren Magnuson’s Senate Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee waited two months after receiving Strauss’s nomination before calling him to the Hill to testify, it seemed that the delay was only part of a pattern of Democratic foot dragging on Ike’s appointments.

Even Clint Anderson had little hope of defeating Strauss—but he determined that it would not be for lack of trying. Not himself a member of the Commerce Committee, he was notably present during most of the long, disputatious hearings. Appearing as a witness armed with a 42-page attack, Anderson accused Strauss of practicing “deception,” telling “unqualified falsehoods” and creating “myths” about his achievements. Having hurled his thunderbolts, Anderson took a seat close behind Wyoming’s Gale McGee, a committee member, fed him information and questions to use against Strauss. A liberal with an instinctive dislike for Hoover-Taft Republican Strauss, sometime History Professor McGee, 44, turned out to be Anderson’s most eager recruit to the anti-Strauss camp.

Rubber Facts. Even Lewis Strauss’s supporters agree that if he had been willing to admit to a few errors, he could have assured his confirmation. But by straining to defend every jot and tittle of his record, he got involved in intricate quibbles and rubber-fact evasions that turned several committee Democrats against him. The 9-to-8 committee vote on Strauss, after 16 days of hearings, was far from the 14-to-3 endorsement that an informal poll of committee members had indicated before Strauss appeared as a witness.

From the 1,128-page record of the hearings, Democrats extracted the main ammunition for attacking Strauss on the Senate floor. Gist of the Democratic charge: Strauss’s testimony is sprinkled with half truths and even lies. But the ammunition is small-bore stuff, proving only that under rough and hostile questioning, Strauss can be evasive, quibblesome and not above beclouding a point with big handfuls of debater’s dust. Example, one that Gale McGee considers especially damaging to Strauss:

While the hearings were going on, Strauss-hating Columnist Drew Pearson wrote that Strauss had obtained top-secret information from the AEC security file of a hostile witness, Physicist David Inglis. Questioned about the point, Strauss said flatly: “I have never asked for anything on Mr. Inglis in my life.” Then the committee put on record a letter from the AEC showing that Strauss had asked for information on Inglis. Strauss argued that by “anything” he meant any secret information, not the few nonconfidential facts he got from AEC; But Strauss stirred up trouble for himself by telling the committee that he asked AEC for these innocuous facts “after” the Pearson column appeared. Actually, the column came out on May 5, and according to the AEC, Strauss asked for data on Inglis “about April 20.”

Me or Him? Even before the Commerce Committee ended its hearings, Clint Anderson had gone to work behind the scenes at the job of defeating Strauss on the Senate floor. In search of voters, Anderson prowled tirelessly in cloakrooms and corridors, tally sheet in hand, circling and underlining names with a ballpoint pen. Anderson holds no great Senate power levers, but he is a popular and respected member of the club. When such a member asks a fellow Senator of the same party to vote with him on an issue of vital personal importance, it is hard to say no. As one Democratic Senator reported it, Anderson put his case in the bluntest terms: Are you going to vote for me, your friend and fellow Democrat, or are you going to vote for that Republican? Making use of the Senate’s hallowed you-vote-with-me-and-I’ll-vote-with-you principle, Anderson reminded fellow Democrats of past voting favors he had done them.

Working in Anderson’s favor were the heaped-up frustrations of the Senate’s big Democratic majority. The Democrats came to Washington last January full of hopes for their own programs. They found instead that President Eisenhower, dedicated to a balanced budget and armed both with his veto power and his immense personal popularity, was in control as rarely before. Balked at every turn, the Democratic 86th has taken out its unhappiness on Ike’s nominees for high office—and Lewis Strauss is made the chief sufferer.

Bursts of Backfire. By last week, as the tide of personal and political bitterness reached flood stage, the fight against Strauss became awesomely ugly. Rumors flew to the effect that Strauss was going around to Senators’ offices, trying to browbeat them, and claiming to be a victim of antiSemitism. The rumors were wildly exaggerated: Strauss actually visited eight Democratic Senators, did not mention antiSemitism, did nothing more aggressive than offer to answer questions about his record. Also harmful to Strauss were efforts by pro-Strauss businessmen to help him out by sending telegrams urging his confirmation. Some Senators got no telegrams, but others got scores and even hundreds, many of them from oil and textile executives who approve of Strauss’s stand in favor of curbing imports of residual oil and Japanese textiles.

Another burst of backfire sounded on the Senate floor when Florida Democrat George Smathers announced that two vote-for-Strauss telegrams he received were fakes. After getting 300 pro-Strauss telegrams, said Smathers, he wrote to the senders explaining his opposition to Strauss. Two of them notified him that they had not sent any telegrams backing Strauss, and that in fact they were flatly opposed to Strauss’s confirmation themselves.

Watching the Weather Vane. Working against Anderson, but for Strauss, were serious doubts in Democratic minds about how Senate rejection of Strauss would sit with the voters back home. Some responsible Democrats, convinced that refusal to confirm Strauss would seem spiteful and irresponsible, and would therefore hurt the Democratic Party, went to Wyoming’s McGee, urged him to halt his campaign against Strauss. Last week the specter of anti-Semitism charges hit Democrats when New York Republican Representative Steven B. Derounian obliquely charged on the floor of the House that the opposition to Strauss “is based on religious prejudice.” That same day, Pennsylvania’s Republican Senator Hugh Scott, one of Strauss’s most active backers, also raised the issue of antiSemitism.

Posture of Serenity. With such sensitive, potentially explosive issues hanging over the Strauss confirmation battle, many a Senator was waiting until the last moment to make his decision. If all 98 Senators either vote or pair off, Republican Leader Dirksen will need to muster 49 pro-Strauss votes, with Vice President Nixon standing by to break a 49-to-49 tie. Of the Senate’s 34 Republicans, only North Dakota’s eccentric William (“Wild Bill”) Langer has announced his intention to vote against Strauss. By week’s end, seven Democrats* had publicly declared for Strauss, while Strauss’s fellow Virginian, veteran Harry Flood Byrd, was working hard to round up others from conservative Southern ranks. In the final showdown, the key man seemed almost certain to be Democratic Leader Lyndon Johnson, shrewdest of his party’s political weather vanes, and last week Johnson, beyond warning that pressures on Senators might well defeat Strauss, was maintaining silence on his intentions.

As he awaited the outcome of his ordeal, Lewis Strauss himself assumed a posture of serenity. If his appointment is denied, said Strauss, he will “go down to my farm for four days a week instead of one. We have very good fishing down there. I will write a book I have been intending to do, and it will avoid personalities and controversies. Probably be very dull.” But anyone who knew Lewis Strauss or his record also knew that he cared deeply about his confirmation. He has served too long in public life and fought too hard for the things in which he believes to take defeat easily. As the man who fought for the H-bomb, Lewis Strauss deserves his nation’s gratitude. And that debt has been shabbily paid in the bickering, quibbling battle on Capitol Hill.

* The seven: Ohio’s Frank J. Lausche, Oklahoma’s Robert S. Kerr, Rhode Island’s John O. Pastore, South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, Virginia’s Harry F. Byrd and A. Willis Robertson, plus Dennis Chavez from Clint Anderson’s own New Mexico.