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Above Suspicion. The President, says the U.S. Constitution, shall appoint officials "by and with the advice and consent of the Senate." But over the years, even when a President faced an opposition-controlled Congress, the Senate has generally granted him the right to appoint to his Cabinet anybody he wants. Only four Presidents in U.S. history have felt the sting of a Senate refusal to confirm a Cabinet appointment.
In 1834, in the thick of Andrew Jackson's fight with Congress over Treasury policy, the Senate rejected Treasury Secretary-designate Roger B. Taney, later (by appointment of President Jackson) Chief Justice of the United States. During a short, hectic span in 1843-44, the Senate turned down four nominees of President
John Tyler after he enraged the Whig majority by breaking with the Whig Party. In 1868, under embattled Andrew Johnson, the Senate refused to confirm Henry Stanbery as Attorney General. And, in 1925, the Senate balked at Corporation Lawyer Charles B. Warren. Calvin Coolidge's nominee for Attorney General, on the ground that he might be suspected of softness toward big business: after the scandals of the Harding Administration, the Republican-controlled Senate felt that the Attorney General had to be above suspicion.
All seven of the Cabinet rejects from 1834 to 1925 were victims of special circumstances. If Lewis Strauss is turned down by the Senate, he will hold the bleak distinction of being the first Cabinet appointee in U.S. history rejected because of his personality.
Differences of Opinion. For it is the personality, and not the competence, of Lewis Strauss that is clearly at issue as he nears the crisis of his career. Strauss, by the extraordinary ingredients of his makeup, is one to arouse superlatives of praise and blame, admiration and dislike. In the eyes of friends, he is brilliant, devoted, courageous and, in his more relaxed moments, exceedingly charming. His enemies regard him as arrogant, evasive, suspicious-minded, pride-ridden, and an excessively rough battler. ("He has more elbows than an octopus.") President Eisenhower has called Strauss "a man of the highest type of character" and "one of the finest public servants I have ever known." The majority report of the Senate Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, submitted last week, 16 days after the committee had approved Strauss's nomination by a breathless 9-to-8 vote, said that he should be confirmed because of his "honesty and integrity, competence, and his long record of cordial and willing cooperation with the Congress."
But the committee's minority report, released at the same time, accused Strauss of "misstatements of fact . . . half truths . . . untruths." On the Senate floor, Wyoming's freshman Democratic Senator Gale McGee charged him with "a brazen attempt to hoodwink" the committee. His implacable enemy, Clinton Anderson, tells frankly why he worked to stretch out Strauss's committee hearings for weeks: "I thought if the committee members saw enough of him, he would begin to irritate them, just as he has me."