Mighty Atom

The Senate lost its mightiest atom last week. Washington's little (5 ft. 6 in., 135 lb.) Homer Truett Bone, 61, got a Presidential appointment as Federal Circuit Judge (seven Western states, Alaska, Hawaii, China). Two-Term Senator Bone had certain renomination and election within his grasp, could he but campaign for it. But a fall in his Tacoma home in 1939 left him crippled; repeated operations had further impaired his health. For a year his right leg has been massaged daily by the Senate doctor. (Said Senator Bone dryly : "After all these years of having my leg pulled by amateurs, I'm having it pulled by an expert at last.")

With the passing of George Norris, Homer Bone has been the Senate's leading public power advocate. He has an almost pathological hatred for private utilities; in his home State he has fought them as a candidate on the Socialist, Farmer-Labor, Triple Alliance, Republican and Democratic tickets. Most of the time he won, and gradually he set up Washington's famed Public Utility Districts.

In the Senate, he was a 90% New Dealer. An early and savage isolationist, he switched in 1941 to follow the Roosevelt policy down the line. Since the departure of Arizona's Henry Ashurst in 1941, he was the Senate's best exponent of lush oratory, combined with a delicate irony that was so unanswerably pat that it choked his opposition into helpless gurgles of rage. Fortnight ago, in bitter argument with Missouri's Bennett Clark, he cooed: "My remarks probably creep into his drab life like a gleam of supernal sunshine. I merely want to elevate him to higher planes of thought." When Clark battled it out with Kentucky's "Happy" Chandler, Homer Bone interrupted: "I have always found them bearing themselves in the brunt of battle with the true courtesy of Arthurian knights. It is something of a shock to learn that in the mind or the heart of either there was an impish impulse for fisticuffs. . . ."

Best guess was that Homer Bone would not resign from the Senate until after the November election, thus preventing Republican Governor Arthur Langlie from appointing an interim G.O.P. Senator. But with the hottest Democratic vote getter out, Washington GOPsters were hopeful. Best Republican bet: Eric Johnston, 47, of Spokane, the forceful president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

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