MAN WITH A HARD GAVEL: National Affairs, Sep. 13, 1954

The U.S. public has noted several styles in Senate committee chairmen, from the forceful intelligence with which Georgia’s Richard Russell conducted the MacArthur hearings to the good-natured bumbling of Karl Mundt at the Army-McCarthy hearings. Last week came a chairman with a different style. Utah’s Republican Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins, 67, began presiding over the special Senate committee on whether to recommend censure of Senator Joe McCarthy. He was quiet, polite, clearheaded—and very stubborn when pushed.

No one who knew Arthur Watkins’ career in Washington was surprised at those qualities. But few knew his career. He first ran for Senator in 1946, accepting the nomination as a party duty when few thought he had a chance to beat the incumbent, Abe Murdock, a New Deal Democrat. Watkins won by 4,885 votes. He served a quiet but hard-working term, during which he was mainly noted as an admirer of Robert Taft and a foe of executive encroachment on the legislative branch. In 1952 he was re-elected (after not taking up a McCarthy offer to campaign for him in Utah).

Party leaders looking for a Senator with judicial experience, forced the job of committee chairman on the reluctant Watkins by telling him that it was his duty to take it. No other argument would have moved him: he is that kind of man, reared in a strict Mormon tradition of service to his community.