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When the voting was over, Republicans sat in stunned dismay. Democrats clustered around Anderson to pat his back and shake his hand. But there was no real joy in it. Democrats were too aware that the Strauss fight, as a top White House aide grimly put it, "will leave an awfully deep scar."
"The Best I Know." Lewis Strauss sat out the session with a friend in his cavernous Commerce Department office. When he got news of the vote by phone, his eyes reddened, he bit hard on his pipe, then he said quietly: "We have to be able to take things like this." Next morning, summoned to the White House for a 20-minute talk with the President, Strauss genially told reporters that he was going to spend some time on his Virginia cattle farm and write a book, tentatively entitled Men and Decisions, about his Washington years. "It has been a privilege to have served our country for so many years," said he. "I have done the best I know how to do to protect and defend the national security, even when that was not the recognized, or easy, or popular course of action at the time. I leave with confidence that history will be just."
For the second time* in his 6½ years in the White House, President Eisenhower called newsmen to a special conference in his oval, green-walled office. Lewis Strauss, said Ike, reading a statement that he had scrawled out in black ink shortly before, is "a man who in war and in peace has served his nation loyally, honorably and effectively under four different Presidents. I am losing a truly valuable associate in the business of government. More than this—if the nation is to be denied the right to have as public servants in responsible positions men of his proven character, ability and integrity, then indeed it is the American people who are the losers through this sad episode."
* The first time: in August 1957, to fight against a threatened congressional slash in foreign aid.