Vandenberg's Successor

In the living room of his newly purchased "mansion" in Lansing one evening last week Michigan's Governor G. Mennen ("Soapy") Williams played host to a couple of important callers. His guests and good friends: Walter Reuther, president of the politically potent C.I.O. United Auto Workers, and Gus Scholle, president of Michigan's C.I.O. Council. They had gathered to choose a Democrat to send to the U.S. Senate, to replace the late Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican. The union boys wanted one of their own men--an ex-union functionary named George Edwards, who ran in 1949 for mayor of Detroit and lost. Williams, already worried because many Michiganders regard him as too beholden to labor, balked. Finally Reuther and Scholle gave in, conceded that Soapy's own choice would be "acceptable."

On a Limb. The governor's man is, like the Senator he succeeds, a newspaperman. He is Arthur Edson Blair Moody, Washington correspondent for the Detroit News. Long on familiar terms with both Washington's and Michigan's politics and politicians, 49-year-old Blair Moody is a pal of Soapy's, and on a fence-riding, independent newspaper, files Washington dispatches that are generally pro-labor and pro-Truman. When, during the Democrats' darkest days in 1948, he wrote a story touting Harry Truman's chances, his editor sent him a telegram which said: "That was a nice long limb you just crawled out on." That wire, autographed by the President, is now framed in Moody's Washington home.

Moody went to work for the News (whose owner, William E. Scripps, is his uncle) soon after graduating from Brown University in 1922 with an A.B. degree in economics and a Phi Beta Kappa key. He moved up quickly, went to Washington in 1933 as No. 2 man in the News bureau. A nervously energetic man, who dresses smoothly and looks younger than his age, Moody is regarded as the probable successor to 66-year-old Editor W. S. Gilmore. Moody is a man who could do a lot to talk up Soapy's own Washington ambition, which is to get the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1952. At his swearing-in this week, the new Senator indicated that he might like to run for a full six-year term next year.

Up Two. Moody's appointment boosted the Democrats' slim majority in the U.S. Senate by two votes, changing the line-up to 50 Democrats and 46 Republicans. The increase gives them the right to bump one Republican off a major committee. Possible choice: Wisconsin's noisy Joe McCarthy off the Appropriations Committee, where he can make trouble on State Department requests for money. Probable Republican choice to succeed Vandenberg on the powerful Foreign Relations Committee: Owen Brewster of Maine, no isolationist but an outspoken enemy of the Administration and of Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

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