The Senate seldom vetoes the nominations of a new President for top-level posts. There is a general understanding that the incoming Chief Executive has the right to pick the people he wants to help him run his office.
It was something of a shock, then— and a considerable shock, by all indications, to Jimmy Carter—when rising Senate opposition forced cancellation of Theodore Sorensen’s nomination as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Why was Sorensen the one goat among the sheep? He was not the most stupid nor the least experienced in relevant matters; his politics are pretty much the same as several of the others. It seems plausible that the explanation is not so much something about Sorensen as something about the post to which he was nominated— something about CIA.
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