THE CAPITAL: Savage Illogic

In swiftly confirming Secretary of State Christian Herter, the Senate acted with flawless logic: delay and quibbling might damage Herter's effectiveness as Secretary and thus damage the U.S. too. With a savage lack of the same logic, some Democratic Senators have dawdled with other presidential appointments far beyond the point of legitimate fact-finding—at the risk of damaging the appointee's effectiveness. Classic case: the President's nomination of Lewis Strauss, onetime (1953-58) Atomic Energy Commission chairman, to be Secretary of Commerce.

The nomination of Lewis Strauss went before the Senate's Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee more than three months ago—but the committee did not call Strauss up for questioning until mid-March. Chairman Warren Magnuson hinted at what lay ahead. "There are many, many questions," said Washington Democrat Magnuson, "and many subjects to go into." Last week the committee was still picking away at Strauss, had further hearings scheduled for this week.

Damaged Morale. Doubtless the Senate will eventually confirm Strauss in his post; not since 1925 has the Senate refused to approve a presidential Cabinet appointment.* But meanwhile, the delay is damaging morale at the Commerce Department (where Strauss has been serving under a recess appointment since last November) and harshly punishing a man whom the U.S. has reason to remember with gratitude for his 1949 fight, as a member of the AEC, to get an H-bomb program under way. Strauss won the fight—against the opposition of his fellow AECommissioners and the physicists of the AEC's General Advisory Committee—just in time to keep the U.S.S.R. from gaining an H-bomb monopoly.

Mainly responsible for Strauss's ordeal are two Democratic Senators: Tennessee's Estes Kefauver and New Mexico's Clinton Anderson. Kefauver's apparent motive is a desire to press one more drop of personal advantage out of a withered old political melon: the controversial (and long since canceled) Dixon-Yates private-power contract with the AEC (TIME, June 28, 1954 et seq.). Anderson seems to be merely carrying on his longtime personal vendetta with Strauss. Also working against Strauss: scientists who have never forgiven him for crowbarring Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who fought hard against the H-bomb program in 1949, out of the General Advisory Committee chairmanship.

Editorial Thunder. But the stalling has backfired. In newspapers across the U.S., angry and disgusted editorials have blasted the delay as, among other things, "frivolous," "base," "petty," "foolish," "spiteful," "senseless," "inexcusable" and "unconscionable." Even the liberal Washington Post, no friend of conservative Lewis Strauss, protested the Senate's dillydallying. "It ill becomes the Senate," said the Post, "to use its power of confirmation as an instrument of harassment."

After much dawdling and harassment, the Senate committees in charge last week got around to confirming two other Eisenhower appointees: