CONNECTICUT: Fighting Senator

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Ever since the death of Connecticut's able Democratic Senator Francis Maloney (TIME, Jan. 29), Republicans & Democrats have wrangled over his successor. In Connecticut's Legislature, Republicans control the House, Democrats the Senate. To obviate holding a special election, the House passed a bill giving Republican Governor Raymond Baldwin power to appoint a successor. Democrats balked, said they would not pass the bill until they knew the name of the Governor's choice.

This week Governor Baldwin found a statesmanlike way out of the wrangle. On his weekly radio report to the people, he announced that he would appoint short, tough, salty Admiral Thomas Charles Hart, onetime commander of the Asiatic Fleet. Registered as neither Republican nor Democrat, Tommy Hart will presumably be satisfactory to both sides.

A blunt-spoken man who knows the Far East well, Tommy Hart gave up his fleet command in February 1942. Since then he has been living at his Sharon (Conn.) dairy farm, commuting to Washington for sessions of the Navy General Board. Last year he gathered evidence on the Pearl Harbor disaster for the Secretary of the Navy. A classmate of Admiral Leahy's at Annapolis (1897), a friend of Franklin Roosevelt's, Tommy Hart would be the first top-rank officer of World War II to go to Congress.