Pike & Pique

The other Atomic Energy Commissioners were astonished when they heard the rumor. Iowa's Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper, the erratic sparkplug of last summer's investigation of AEC's "incredible mismanagement," was threatening to hold up the renomination of AEC's acting chairman, a white-shocked, plain-talking New England Republican named Sumner Pike. Apparently, Hickenlooper's pique at former Chairman David Lilienthal extended also to Pike, as the last member of the original Lilienthal commission.

Princeton Physicist Henry D. Smyth (rhymes with blithe), author of the Smyth Report and now an AECommissioner, hustled up to the Capitol to explain that chairmanless AEC was already having trouble enough trying to plan an H-bomb. Pike's rejection would leave the five-man commission shy two men--and, Smyth argued, make it doubly difficult to find replacements. "There is no doubt in my mind of Mr. Pike's intelligence, integrity, and complete devotion to the national welfare," said Smyth. In the strange world of the atom, Pike--a retired Manhattan mining and utilities financier--had shown "a remarkable capacity to grasp the scientific and technical features," added Smyth.* His two fellow commissioners backed him up.

The Senate committee summoned Pike himself, cleared reporters out of the room, then left Pike sitting in silence without asking him a single question or telling him why they objected to him. When he left, they turned him down 5-4, with Colorado's Democrat Ed Johnson joining the four

Republicans on the committee (Hicken-looper, Millikin, Knowland and Bricker) in voting no.

Their explanations were vague. Hickenlooper mumbled that Pike was a "square peg in a round hole," added later that Pike had always been opposed to the H-bomb. "I don't know what their gripe is," Pike declared. "Whatever the reason was, it wasn't stated either directly or by innuendo." Last year, because "we didn't have the dope in front of us as to what we would be getting for what we were spending," he had been doubtful about the H-bomb, he added. But "as the facts came in, my attitude did change." One guess on the turndown was that Pike, a liberal Republican, had piqued the Senators in a speech last summer when he suggested that political patronage sometimes influenced their dealings with AEC. He had also made a wry comment last May after Ed Johnson's blurting, on a television quiz show, of the first authoritative public reference to hydrogen bomb plans.

Administration leaders announced that they would take Pike's nomination to the Senate floor, hoping that the Senate would reverse its own committee--something that happens only rarely.

-For further Smyth opinions, see SCIENCE.

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