The Chairman Steps Down

"Dear Mr. President," wrote Atomic Energy" Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss. "It is hard for me to write this letter [but] circumstances beyond the control of either of us make a change in the chairmanship of the commission advisable." Thus, after five effective and harassed years, Strauss last week announced his retirement from his job when his term expires at month's end. He turned down President Eisenhower's offer to reappoint him for a second five-year term (TIME, June 9), accepted instead a new post as special presidential assistant for atoms-for-peace. Replied Dwight Eisenhower in a letter of rare warmth accepting Strauss's resignation: "Thanks in large measure to your early awareness of the broadest military implications of nuclear science, the U.S. and other free nations are more secure against the threat of attack."

First Enemies. The contributions of Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, 62, courtly Virginian, onetime shoe salesman, onetime investment banker (Kuhn, Loeb & Co.), onetime Navy rear admiral (ordnance, naval research, atomic energy), were as basic as President Eisenhower said they were. In 1947, as a Truman-appointed AECommissioner, Lewis Strauss (rhymes with laws) pushed through the nuclear-detection system that in September 1949 spotted the first Communist atomic blast, put the free world on guard. In October 1949, against the objection of all four of his fellow AECommissioners and all eight of Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's General Advisory Committee, he recommended the development of the U.S. hydrogen bomb. He convinced AECommissioner Gordon Dean, while heavy support piled in from Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the Pentagon. After four agonizing months, on Jan. 31, 1950, President Truman announced that he had ordered work on the H-bomb begun. Lewis Strauss's key contributions as Dwight Eisenhower's AEC chairman: 1) pressing the role of private enterprise in atomic power, 2) fashioning the President's plan for atoms-for-peace, 3) arguing for continued nuclear-weapons tests until the U.S. could get an ironclad inspection system and Russian agreement to stop weapons production.

"For the first time in my life I have enemies," said Strauss, and he made plenty. He got inured, more or less, to gibes from public-power Democrats and from the pundits and scientists who resented his part in recommending the cancellation of the security clearance of Physicist Oppenheimer (TIME, April 19, 1954). But in recent months Strauss had come under attack of a sharp and intensely personal sort from New Mexico's Clinton P. Anderson, ranking Senate Democrat on the powerful and once circumspect Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.

Dirty Stockpile. Anderson's vendetta reached a new low during an NBC-TV-radio Meet the Press show in April, when he attacked the Administration's position that it needed nuclear tests to develop clean bombs. Said he: "The military is steadily stockpiling dirtier bombs and . . . they have pulled bombs out of the stockpile and inserted something in that makes them dirtier . . . They want dirty bombs, and that's the best evidence in the world of what we're trying to do. We talk clean on the one side and stockpile dirty on the other side."

Anderson's broadside, promptly reported around the world, was an attack on the integrity of the U.S. of a sort unequaled in the Western countries since a few French and British polemicists joined the Communists in their charge of germ warfare in Korea. But Strauss kept his reply in low key. Its net (in which the Pentagon joined): Not true. Pouted Anderson from his privileged sanctuary on the Senate floor: "He in effect four times calls me a liar."

Chosen Successor. In such "circumstances beyond the control" of either the President or Strauss, Strauss decided to step aside for the good of the program. But he did not make his decision final until he had virtually hand-picked his successor: Los Angeles Shipping Executive

John Alex McCone, 56, onetime Under Secretary of the Air Force and longtime advocate of deterrent air power (see box). McCone was appointed to fill Strauss's seat on the commission, is expected to be named chairman after Senate approval.

"Mr. Strauss," said the Washington Post and Times-Herald on behalf of the gleeful critics "came to symbolize a kind of Aunty-Knows-Bestism ... a mania on secrecy and security . . . vindictiveness . . . devious methods." But the New York Daily News blew a razzberry at the critics: ALL-AMERICAN STRAUSS. And the New

York Times, whose editorial board had long seen more in Lewis Strauss than its Washington reporters, hurled forth a weighty "WELL DONE! ... It is terrifying to think what the Soviets might have done with the hydrogen bomb if they had been the first to develop it."

Speaking for himself, Lewis Strauss left behind his own assessment of his job to guide his successor: "The atom is amoral. The only thing that makes it immoral is man. We are making bombs because we hope to discourage the use of bombs against us by a government that doesn't make any pretense of morals."

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