Past midnight, the bright white light atop the Capitol dome still shone over Washington, signaling that Congress was still in session. On the Senate floor, after six months of stalling, wrangling and maneuvering, U.S. history's bitterest battle over confirmation of a presidential appointment marched toward the showdown.
In the milling around just before the vote, New Mexico Democrat Clinton P. Anderson and Virginia Democrat Harry F. Byrd greeted each other with grins and back slaps. They had been fighting on opposite sides, but now the fighting was over. "Well, Clint," asked Byrd, "are you going to win?"
Anderson: "By three or four votes."
Byrd: "No, you're going to lose by three or four votes.'-'
Replied Anderson to the U.S.'s No. 1 apple-grower: "Harry, you really know how to grow good apples, but you sure don't know how to count votes."
Anderson had counted with painstaking, implacable care. By a cliffhanging, 49-10-46 roll-call vote that kept the crowded galleries breathless with suspense, Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, 63, the President's nominee for Secretary of Commerce, became the first Cabinet appointee to be rejected by the Senate since 1925, and the eighth in the nation's history.
Talent for Controversy. Sometime Wall Street banker, longtime member (1946-50) and chairman (1953-58) of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis L. Strauss made a lot of enemies during his AEC years in the controversies that swirled about him: his winning fight to get an H-bomb program started, the lifting of Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance, the Dixon-Yates electric-power contract with AEC. But weighed calmly against his long record of achievement, going back 42 years to his service as secretary to Food Administrator Herbert Hoover in World War I, Strauss's talent for controversy would hardly have cost him half a dozen votes in a normal confirmation test. What defeated Lewis Strauss was a combination of Dolitical disgruntlement and personal vendetta.
Strauss was a victim.of Senate Democrats' heaped-up frustration at their inability to use their 64-34 majority to achieve a Democratic record. He was also the victim of Clint Anderson's obsessive campaign against him (TIME, June 15). Nursing a violent dislike built up during his years as a member and chairman of Capitol Hill's Joint Atomic Energy Committee, Anderson, to collect anti-Strauss votes, drew on his personal popularity in the Senate, drummed up party loyalty, and cashed every IOU he had for past favors rendered fellow Democrats.