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One explanation for the Senate’s delay in confirming Lewis Strauss evaporated last week: the possibility that Strauss’ opponents had needed the time to prepare their briefs. Another received dramatic though largely unnoticed corroboration: the possibility that the Senate Committee entrusted with the job of reviewing the Secretary of Commerce-designates qualifications had been working handing love with the forces that were trying to cut him down.

By the time Senators Kefauver and Anderson, and their allies from the Federation of American Scientists, had finally said their pieces, it was clear that the Case Against Strauss was a case that had been made a hundred times before—the same curious combination of spiteful pettifoggery on the one hand, and, on the other, principled opposition to a view of public affairs that regards the Soviet Union as an implacable enemy. At times, and with disastrous consequences for orderly minds, the two attacks focused on a single subjectmatter. “Admiral Strauss tries to take all the credit for the hydrogen bomb,” Senator Anderson complained. And his most grievous sin, the scientists added, was “to insist that we produce the H-bomb” when we should have been making peace overtures to the Soviets. On the whole, however, the two streams of argument flowed their separate ways, converging only in a common rhetoric of personal abuse.

LB

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L. Brent Bozell Jr.

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One explanation for the Senate’s delay in confirming Lewis Strauss evaporated last week: the possibility that Strauss’ opponents had needed the time to prepare their briefs. Another received dramatic though largely unnoticed corroboration: the possibility that the Senate Committee entrusted with the job of reviewing the Secretary of Commerce-designates qualifications had been working handing love with the forces that were trying to cut him down.

By the time Senators Kefauver and Anderson, and their allies from the Federation of American Scientists, had finally said their pieces, it was clear that the Case Against Strauss was a case that had been made a hundred times before—the same curious combination of spiteful pettifoggery on the one hand, and, on the other, principled opposition to a view of public affairs that regards the Soviet Union as an implacable enemy. At times, and with disastrous consequences for orderly minds, the two attacks focused on a single subjectmatter. “Admiral Strauss tries to take all the credit for the hydrogen bomb,” Senator Anderson complained. And his most grievous sin, the scientists added, was “to insist that we produce the H-bomb” when we should have been making peace overtures to the Soviets. On the whole, however, the two streams of argument flowed their separate ways, converging only in a common rhetoric of personal abuse.