Savage Illogic

In swiftly confirming Secretary of State Christian Herter, the Senate acted with flawless logic: delay and quibbling might damage Herter's effectiveness as Secretary and thus damage the U.S. too. With a savage lack of the same logic, some Democratic Senators have dawdled with other presidential appointments far beyond the point of legitimate fact-finding--at the risk of damaging the appointee's effectiveness. Classic case: the President's nomination of Lewis Strauss, onetime (1953-58) Atomic Energy Commission chairman, to be Secretary of Commerce.

The nomination of Lewis Strauss went before the Senate's Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee more than three months ago--but the committee did not call Strauss up for questioning until mid-March. Chairman Warren Magnuson hinted at what lay ahead. "There are many, many questions," said Washington Democrat Magnuson, "and many subjects to go into." Last week the committee was still picking away at Strauss, had further hearings scheduled for this week.

Damaged Morale. Doubtless the Senate will eventually confirm Strauss in his post; not since 1925 has the Senate refused to approve a presidential Cabinet appointment.* But meanwhile, the delay is damaging morale at the Commerce Department (where Strauss has been serving under a recess appointment since last November) and harshly punishing a man whom the U.S. has reason to remember with gratitude for his 1949 fight, as a member of the AEC, to get an H-bomb program under way. Strauss won the fight--against the opposition of his fellow AECommissioners and the physicists of the AEC's General Advisory Committee--just in time to keep the U.S.S.R. from gaining an H-bomb monopoly.

Mainly responsible for Strauss's ordeal are two Democratic Senators: Tennessee's Estes Kefauver and New Mexico's Clinton Anderson. Kefauver's apparent motive is a desire to press one more drop of personal advantage out of a withered old political melon: the controversial (and long since canceled) Dixon-Yates private-power contract with the AEC (TIME, June 28, 1954 et seq.). Anderson seems to be merely carrying on his longtime personal vendetta with Strauss. Also working against Strauss: scientists who have never forgiven him for crowbarring Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who fought hard against the H-bomb program in 1949, out of the General Advisory Committee chairmanship.

Editorial Thunder. But the stalling has backfired. In newspapers across the U.S., angry and disgusted editorials have blasted the delay as, among other things, "frivolous," "base," "petty," "foolish," "spiteful," "senseless," "inexcusable" and "unconscionable." Even the liberal Washington Post, no friend of conservative Lewis Strauss, protested the Senate's dillydallying. "It ill becomes the Senate," said the Post, "to use its power of confirmation as an instrument of harassment."

After much dawdling and harassment, the Senate committees in charge last week got around to confirming two other Eisenhower appointees:

Ohio's Judge Potter Stewart, 44, to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Three Judiciary Committee Democrats--Mississippi's James O. Eastland, South Carolina's Olin D. Johnston, Arkansas' John L. McClellan--voted against Stewart in committee (the vote: 12-3) because he refused to quarrel with the high court's desegregation decisions. During the hearings (TIME, April 20), Eastland and McClellan badgered Stewart so mercilessly about his segregation views that he declined to answer on the ground that he might have to disqualify himself in future Supreme Court cases.

Clare Boothe Luce, 56, sometime G.O.P. Congresswoman from Connecticut (1943-47) and Ambassador to Italy (1953-57), to be Ambassador to Brazil. Lone dissenter in the 16-to-1 vote by the Foreign Relations Committee: Oregon's ex-Republican Wayne Morse, whose airing of old political speeches and charges provoked Rio de Janeiro's O Globo into a front-page editorial: "While we have absolutely no desire to intervene in an entirely internal issue, we cannot avoid interpreting the sentiments of the Brazilian people in expressing our wishes that the attack end."

* In 1925 Lawyer Charles B. Warren, Calvin Coolidge's choice for Attorney General, was turned down on the ground that his past services for big business firms might restrain his enthusiasm for the antitrust laws.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.