A Friendly Favor

For six months, President Truman had been unsuccessfully trying to land a man of stature as chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. All the time, Connecticut's Senator Brien McMahon kept nudging the presidential ribs and pointing admiringly at McMahon's friend and former law partner, Gordon Dean. Last week Mr. Truman gave in to McMahon's rib-poking. The White House announced that friendly, freckled Gordon Dean, a member of AEC since May 1949, would be the new $17,500-a-year chief of the nation's billion-dollar atomic energy program.

As chairman of Congress' Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Brien McMahon was in a fine spot to do a friend a favor. Dean was appointed to AEC in the first place at McMahon's urging, was reappointed this year to a fresh three-year term. Seattle-born Gordon Dean, 44, began his public career under McMahon's wing. In 1934, he quit teaching law at Duke University to become assistant to McMahon in the Justice Department's Criminal Division; there the two became friends. Dean spent six years at Justice, quit to join McMahon's Washington law firm. After the war, in which he served as a lieutenant in Naval Intelligence, Dean went back to teaching law (at the University of Southern California) until McMahon got him his job in AEC.

An assiduous and thoughtful workman who shuns the babble of Washington party going (he plows through a briefcase full of documents every night at his Chevy Chase home), Dean is well-liked in the capital and on good terms with the powerful and ofttimes crotchety congressional Atomic Energy Committee. But as an administrator and a long-range policymaker, he is not regarded as the equal of David E. Lilienthal, who resigned the chairmanship in February after guiding AEC through its first tough three years. Nor is he considered as competent as outspoken Commissioner Sumner T. Pike, a Republican, who was renominated last week only after Brien McMahon assured the Senate that the President would not name Pike as chairman.

Under Lilienthal and the acting chairmanship of Pike, AEC had withstood political pressures fairly well, worked as the ally rather than the captive of McMahon's congressional committee. Now it might find its independence harder to keep.

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