How to Swing a Vote

After ten bitter weeks of hearings and debate, the Senate finally came to grips with the Lilienthal appointment. Ohio's John Bricker provided the opportunity. He had offered a motion to send the nomination of David E. Lilienthal as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission back to committee. If the motion carried, the chances were that Lilienthal would never be confirmed. If the motion was lost, he was in.

Individual Senators knew most of the pros & cons by heart; perhaps most of them had their minds made up.

Then Senate President pro tempore Arthur Vandenberg, who had made careful notes, asked the Senate for 30 minutes of its time. He strode down from the dais and began to speak.

"I have been driven to the belief that logic, equity, fair play and a just regard to urgent public welfare combine to recommend Mr. Lilienthal's confirmation," he said. "On the other hand, I must summarily reject the frequently quoted doctrine that no nominee is eligible if he is attacked. . . .

"[Mr. Lilienthal] is charged with either sympathy for Communism or too easy toleration of it. After weeks of testimony, I find no basis for this charge. I hope my own record, plus the fact that I am in the top bracket of all Communist blacklists all around the world, demonstrates that I am not calculated to be soft on such a subject. . . ."

No Bayonets. Ohio's Senator Taft, Lilienthal's most potent opponent, had moved to the side of the chamber, away from Senator Vandenberg; New Hampshire's Styles Bridges riffled through a newspaper. Vandenberg continued with a blast at Senators and people outside the Senate who want to return the whole problem of atomic energy to military control: "Mr. President, if we found out one thing truer than another, it is that in peacetime we cannot drive science into its laboratories with bayonets.

"The charge is made that this nominee's connection with the Acheson-Lilienthal report, covering the problem of physical, atomic controls, disclosed a flaw in his reliability as a guardian of our atomic secrets because this report did not go to a finality in prescribing the ultimate security system demanded by the later Baruch report. It seems to me that this criticism is irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial. . . ."

No Enthusiasm. No one interrupted Vandenberg during his speech; at its conclusion the gallery was in a forbidden uproar of handclapping, and Senators from both sides of the aisle were wringing Vandenberg's hand. Rarely in history has a speech changed votes; but most Senators agreed that this was one such historic occasion.

The vote against recommittal of the nomination was 52-to-38. Still, the Senators had not voted for Lilienthal out of enthusiasm for him, but because a majority could not honestly find anything against him.

After his speech, even Vandenberg seemed anxious to set himself straight on that point. Said he to a friend: "If anybody had told me a year ago that I would be making an all-out effort in behalf of David Lilienthal, I would have thought him crazy. But it was a political lynching that was going on."

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