The Inquisition

What was supposed to be a confirmation hearing on the qualifications of Lewis Strauss, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, to be Secretary of Commerce turned out last week to be an undisguised inquisition. To begin with, the Senate Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee took an unusual step in bringing in a special counsel for the hearing. Committee and counsel called only hostile witnesses, gave Strauss no notice of who would be appearing against him. With witnesses day after day pouring personal rancor into the headlines, the weird sessions added up to one of the bitterest attacks on a presidential Cabinet appointee in the nation's history.

"That Means a Liar." The trial of proud, brainy Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, 63, is the most glaring case in a campaign of delay and harassment that Senate Democrats are carrying on against President Eisenhower's appointees (TIME, May 4 et seq.). Fortnight ago Ike pointed out that 47 major appointments were still awaiting Senate confirmation. But Strauss is also a victim of a personal vendetta waged against him by New Mexico's Democratic Senator Clinton P. Anderson, Agriculture Secretary under Harry Truman and now chairman of Capitol Hill's Joint Atomic Energy Committee.

Last week Senator Anderson, who is not even a member of the commerce committee, appeared himself as a witness for two days, read a 42-page attack accusing Strauss of 1) withholding information from the congressional Joint Atomic Energy Committee when he was AEC chairman, 2) hindering U.S. nuclear-power progress, 3) practicing "deception" in the old (1954-55) row over the long-since-canceled Dixon-Yates private-power contract with AEC, and 4) creating "myths" about his achievements. When Anderson accused Strauss of "unqualified falsehoods," New Hampshire's Republican Senator Norris Cotton broke in: "That is a polite word, but where I come from that means a liar."

Anderson: "I didn't intend it to mean anything else."

Replied Strauss, who has been in Government service on and off since 1917: The hearing shows "a pattern of persecution through long-drawn-out attempts at defamation of a plain man who has done his best as he sees it for his country."

To build up its case, the committee called in two scientists, still bitter against Strauss for his part in getting the security clearance of Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lifted in 1954, in a sequel to the fierce battle in which Strauss urged--and Oppenheimer opposed--a program to develop an H-bomb. Argonne National Laboratory Physicist David R. Inglis, newly elected chairman of the politicking Federation of American Scientists, charged that Strauss, out of "personal vindictiveness," had dragged scientific freedom "into the dirt" in the Oppenheimer case. But Inglis threw considerable light on his own judgment when he remarked that Alger Hiss's "sterling character" outweighed the spy charges against him.

Impeached as a witness in a different way was Los Alamos Physicist David L. Hill, who accused Strauss of, among other things, distorting truth and usurping authority. Pennsylvania's Republican Senator Hugh Scott remarked that Hill's statement was "extremely well prepared." Did he get any help in preparing it from "anyone connected with the Senate or with any Senate Staff member?" An uneasy silence fell. Then the committee's Special Counsel Kenneth Cox, a Seattle lawyer, spoke up: "The witness discussed several matters with me, Senator Scott."

More Than All 13. Testifying at Strauss's request, two of the U.S.'s most eminent men of science quietly demolished the charges that Strauss is hostile to science and scientists.

Physicist Edward Teller pointed to

Strauss's "longstanding, warm and effective support of science," his "great respect for science and friendship for scientists." Physicist Detlev W. Bronk, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said that over the years he had found Strauss "completely cooperative" and "completely honest."

At week's end Washington Democrat Warren Magnuson, commerce committee chairman, announced that he hoped his committee would take action on the confirmation of Lewis Strauss this week. At that point, 111 days had passed since President Eisenhower had sent Strauss's nomination to the Senate--two days more than the total time it had taken the Senate to confirm all 13 of Lewis Strauss's predecessors as Secretary of Commerce.

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