The U.S. public has noted several styles in Senate committee chairmen, from the forceful intelligence with which Georgia's Richard Russell conducted the MacArthur hearings to the good-natured bumbling of Karl Mundt at the Army-McCarthy hearings. Last week came a chairman with a different style. Utah's Republican Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins, 67, began presiding over the special Senate committee on whether to recommend censure of Senator Joe McCarthy. He was quiet, polite, clearheaded—and very stubborn when pushed.
No one who knew Arthur Watkins' career in Washington was surprised at those qualities. But...