Old Hand, New Job

"You look just like a Secretary of Commerce," joked Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks to a visitor last week. The comment was fitting: the courtly, well-tailored caller had an aura of dignity and success suitable to a Commerce Secretary, and furthermore he was soon to become Commerce Secretary. After nearly six years in the post, "Sinny" Weeks, 65, had decided to step down, and, to replace him, President Eisenhower had tabbed longtime (1953 to last June) Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss.

In the original Eisenhower Cabinet,* Massachusetts Manufacturer Sinclair Weeks was a voice of oldfashioned, pre-Eisenhower Republicanism. But he grew in the job. A deep-dyed member of the old school that considered tariff protectionism a fundamental GOPrinciple, he became Washington's most improbable convert to freer trade, led this year's winning Administration fight to wring a broadened reciprocal-trade bill out of a reluctant Congress.

Like Weeks, Lewis Strauss, 62, is a millionaire, but his origins were radically different. Weeks was born to money and status, went to Harvard. Brainy, West Virginia-born Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss (pronounced straws) never went to college, started out as a traveling shoe salesman. As secretary to Food Administrator Herbert Hoover during World War I, Strauss noted with satisfaction last week that as Commerce Secretary he will be serving in a post once held by his onetime boss and longtime friend.

Between World Wars, Strauss prospered in the Wall Street investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Named an AECommissioner by Harry Truman in 1946 after serving as a deskbound rear admiral in World War II, he won a reputation for independent hardheadedness by pushing for an H-bomb program in 1949 against the combined opposition of his fellow AECommissioners and the physicists of the General Advisory Committee. Strauss won that bitter fight (with invaluable help from Physicist Edward Teller) just in time to keep the Soviet Union from gaining an H-bomb monopoly. After 1953, as Eisenhower's AEChairman, Strauss worsened his standing with liberals by arguing for continuation of nuclear tests until the Russians agreed to 1) a halt in nuclear-arms production and 2) a villainproof inspection system. This battle he half lost when the President agreed to a year's uninspected trial suspension provided that the Russians agree, too (TIME, Sept. 1).

Wounded by the barbs of controversy, sensitive Lewis Strauss vowed never to accept another Government post once he stepped down as AEChairman. Big reasons why he took on the Commerce job despite that vow: 1) a conviction that much can be done on the international economic front to help the West win the cold war and 2) a desire to overcome his reputation as a man of war and big bombs --a reputation that devoutly religious Lewis Strauss thoroughly detests.

* Only remaining members: Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson, Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield.

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