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The galleries murmured again when Texas Democrat Lloyd Bentsen, a freshman widely viewed as a conservative, uttered his no—even though Fellow Texan John Connally had been assigned to coax a yes from him. Heads bowed over their tally sheets, Jackson and Washington's other SST proponent, Democrat Warren Magnuson, looked glum. Proxmire's fist shot up again when Cooper showed that Nixon's appeal had not influenced him; he voted against the SST. Minnesota Democrat Hubert Humphrey, who owes a huge debt to labor for its support in his presidential race, nevertheless cast his vote against the funds.
By the time Mrs. Smith, who was either unmoved by Nixon's letter or angered at its timing, offered her barely audible no,-the outcome was clear. The final vote was 51 to 46 against spending any more money to develop the aircraft. Colleagues rushed to congratulate Proxmire. Jackson, too, shook his hand. Magnuson remained seated.
Party Indifference. For Nixon, the defeat was as sharp a rebuke to his leadership as were the Senate's earlier rejections of his Haynsworth and Carswell nominations to the Supreme Court. On the SST, he lost 17 Republicans—more than a third of his party's membership —in the Senate. The "ideological gain" he claimed to have made in the 1970 election did not materialize. Of the 11 new Senators, seven voted against the SST—providing exactly the same margin by which their 11 predecessors had opposed the plane last year.
Even more ominous to Nixon's future legislative success: when the House rejected the SST a week earlier, he had lost almost half of the Republican Representatives on that issue—including three who hold leadership posts. This happened despite the fact that party loyalty, especially among Republicans, has traditionally been much stronger in the House than in the Senate.
Beyond the often repeated arguments against the SST—that it would be a multibillion dollar gamble, represented an unrealistic ordering of national priorities and would endanger the environment—the congressional decision to kill the aircraft demonstrated a surprising indifference to presidential pressure. Representatives, especially, are attuned to political currents at home, and it is obvious that, at least at the moment, they do not fear the grass-roots political clout of Richard Nixon.
-White House aides had mishandled Mrs. Smith, to their regret, once before. On the Carswell Supreme Court nomination last year, they circulated word that she was planning to vote for him. Angered at that use of her name, she voted against him.