National Affairs: Selective Service

After the Senate voted to send the Flanders resolution to a special bipartisan committee, South Dakota’s Karl Mundt spoke for himself and the other Senators who sat through the bitter Army-McCarthy hearings last spring. “They can’t take us,” said Mundt. “We were drafted for the last war.”

No one wanted to be drafted for the new battle. Democratic Senators began ducking into hiding places whenever Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson came into sight. Majority Leader William Knowland found he had almost no names left after he crossed off those of G.O.P. Senators who are openly for or against McCarthy. Knowland and Johnson hoped to get Colorado’s Eugene Millikin and Georgia’s

Walter George, among the most respected men in the Senate, to serve. Both begged off. Knowland finally named Utah’s Arthur Watkins, Kansas’ Frank Carlson and South Dakota’s Francis Case. Johnson named Colorado’s Edwin Johnson, Mississippi’s John Stennis and North Carolina’s Samuel J. Ervin Jr.

Except for Case, every member is from an area where McCarthy is not the burning issue he is in the East and upper Midwest. All of the Senators are able and sin gularly individualistic. Stennis and Ervin have both had experience as judges.*

As the committee met to organize last week, Joe McCarthy tried to take the offensive by asking to attend their meetings. He was rebuffed. The committee selected Watkins, the senior Republican, chairman, and decided to bar TV, radio and photographers from its hearings. Watkins snorted, “Certainly not,” when asked if the committee might delay a report until after the November elections. But he said that the committee would not begin hearings until after the Senate had acted on remaining “must” legislation.

Evidently, this meant that Knowland can recess the Senate when its work is done. The committee will stay in Washington to study the Flanders motion and sift charges against McCarthy. When the committee is ready to report, the Senate can be called back to Washington to vote on the conduct of the junior Senator from Wisconsin.

* Ervin, appointed only last June to fill the vacancy left by the death of Clyde Hoey, is a graduate of Harvard Law School, but does not know many other graduates because he went through the famed school “backwards.” Ervin explained that he was admitted to the North Carolina bar before he decided to go to Harvard. He was in love with a North Carolina girl named Margaret Bell and was afraid a long absence might ruin his romance, so he elected to take only the third-year course. He finished the course, found that Margaret was still true, and began the second-year course. Another check with his sweetheart gave him courage to take the first year. “My classmates were moving up as I was moving down,” said Ervin. “I didn’t get to know ’em too well.” After completing, in his third year, the first year of Harvard Law School, he married Margaret Bell.