THE SENATOR FROM NEW MEXICO

"My implacable enemy," says embattled Lewis Strauss, "is a good Senator." The Senator's career:

Early Days. Born Oct. 23, 1895, son of a Swedish immigrant who stubbornly scratched an existence out of 80 South Dakota acres near Parker (pop. 1,148), Clinton Presba Anderson had made his way through his third year in college (Dakota Wesleyan, University of Michigan) by 1917. Then, after an Army doctor rejected him for officers' training camp upon finding a tubercular infection (Anderson has since suffered from diabetes, shingles in 1949, and a coronary in 1950), he went to New Mexico, spent nine months in a sanatorium, stayed on in the Southwest.

Landing a job as a reporter for the Albuquerque Herald, Anderson switched to the Albuquerque Journal, became managing editor in 1922. When a recurrence of his tuberculosis forced him out of doors, he sold insurance, in 1925 founded his own Clinton P. Anderson agency.

Public Career. Solid (6 ft. 2 in., 185 Ibs.), curly-haired Clint Anderson took early to Democratic politics. He handled several Depression-era state and federal jobs, dealing mostly with unemployment and relief in New Mexico, in 1940 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first of three terms. He made a House name for himself in hard-digging committee investigations, e.g., of Race-Baiter Gerald L. K. Smith, of food-rationing abuses during World War II. In 1945 President Harry Truman, a poker companion of Anderson's, named him Secretary of Agriculture, succeeding Henry A. Wallace. Serving at that post until 1948, Anderson was a staunch advocate of flexible farm supports, has stuck steadfastly to that position ever since, won the gratitude of the Eisenhower Administration for his support of Ezra Taft Benson. Elected to the Senate in 1948, Anderson stands in the front ranks of Democratic liberals working for civil rights legislation, has chaired the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy in 1955, 1956 and 1959 (the committee's chairmanship alternates between the House and the Senate).

Personal Life. What Clint Anderson sets out to do, he does with single-minded determination. A first-rate bridge player, he competed in the Grand National Championship matches of 1933 and 1934. A determined Rotarian, he was president of Rotary International in 1932-33. In Washington, he and his wife Henrietta (the Andersons have a married daughter and son, three grandchildren) avoid the canape circuit, spend their evenings at home, reading from one of the nation's finest libraries on the history of the West.

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