The Nation: Four New Men in Nixon's Second Cabinet

I. Fearless Fosdick Faces the Pentagon

FEW officials in Richard Nixon's Washington are held in higher esteem as masters of governmental management than is Elliot Lee Richardson, 52, the next Secretary of Defense—even though almost no one can adequately explain just why. The public Richardson is stuffily Bostonian, serenely confident, vaguely remote. His set speeches are bloodless and dull. His ad-lib language is so convoluted, yet grammatically correct, that one questioner at a Senate committee hearing jokingly confessed that he could not quite tell from a Richardson answer whether he was for, or...