THE ADMINISTRATION: CARTER TAKES HIS LUMPS

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In the Senate Caucus Room, both sides were poised for battle. At stake was the confirmation of Jimmy Carter's nominee as CIA director: Theodore Sorensen, 48. Ready to bear witness against him were representatives of assorted conservative and right-wing groups, including the Liberty Lobby and the John Birch Society. Prepared to defend him were some of the ornaments of the Eastern liberal Establishment such as Averell Harriman and Clark Clifford.

After Senator Pat Moynihan introduced his fellow New Yorker as a man by whom the CIA "will be well served," the slender, bespectacled Sorensen took over. Looking grim and even more somber than usual, he read a vigorous ten-page rebuttal of what he called "scurrilous and personal attacks." When he had finished, he picked up another piece of paper and began reading from it. "It is now clear," he said, "that a substantial portion of the U.S. Senate and the intelligence community is not yet ready to accept as director of Central Intelligence an outsider who believes as I believe." As the 15 members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence visibly stiffened, Sorensen went on to announce that he was withdrawing his nomination. The battle was over before it had really been joined.

Surprised Senators tried clumsily to soften the blow. Utah Republican Jake Garn assured Sorensen that his integrity had not been in question. Said the Senator: "I thought you were the wrong man for the wrong position." Indiana Democrat Birch Bayh told Sorensen that some people were out to get him "because they don't want a clean broom at the CIA." Senator George McGovern emerged from the audience to remark that the episode showed that the "ghost of Joe McCarthy still stalks the land." Committee Chairman Dan Inouye, who opposed the nomination, said that he hoped Sorensen would leave with no "bitterness."

That was undoubtedly asking too much. With gallows wit, Sorensen remarked: "Well, Gary Gilmore and I..." He told TIME New York Bureau Chief Laurence Barrett: "As someone said to me this morning, a lot of dirty little streams flowed together to make this flood. There was the extreme right, the Kennedy haters, the Carter haters. The smokescreen reasons—outright lies and falsehoods—masked the real opposition. To boil it down to one sentence, people felt that an outsider with my beliefs should not head that agency."

The withdrawal was a rebuke not only to Sorensen but to Carter. Only eight presidential Cabinet appointees have been rejected by the Senate in U.S. history. It is even rarer for a nominee to be turned down by a Congress controlled by the President's own party. The last time that happened was in 1925, when Charles Warren, Calvin Coolidge's choice for Attorney General, was rejected because he was too closely identified with the Sugar Trust.

In a narrow sense, Sorensen was not actually rejected, but if his nomination had come to a vote, it probably would have been defeated. On the eve of his Inauguration, Carter was thus given clear warning that he cannot take the heavily Democratic Congress for granted.