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Even so, as late as 1955, after Anderson had bitterly criticized Strauss during the Dixon-Yates fight, there were attempts at reconciliation, and Anderson and his wife were guests at Strauss's 1,560-acre cattle farm near Culpeper, Va. The final break came early in 1956, when Strauss, at Anderson's request, made a speech on atomic-energy progress to a gathering of New Mexico newspaper executives in Albuquerque. Strauss remarked that "there have been complaints" about the AEC's reluctance to release information about its research projects. Well, said Lewis Strauss, that was because the complainers had "a limited understanding of what is involved," and therefore did not realize how fusion research bears on "our national defense and security."
As one of the most determined critics of AEC secrecy, Clint Anderson took the "limited understanding" remark as a personal slap, all the more insulting because it was delivered on his own home grounds. If he was handicapped by "limited understanding," wrote Anderson in an angry letter to Chairman Strauss, that was Strauss's fault for holding back information. From that point on, Anderson was almost incoherent on anything to do with Lewis Strauss, even to the preposterous point of publicly charging, in April 1958, that "something which makes them dirtier" was being inserted into stockpiled nuclear bombs.
Myths and Thunderbolts. By 1958, his five-year term as chairman of the AEC nearing an end, Lewis Strauss was sadly aware of the magnitude of his feud with Anderson. He decided not to seek reappointment, but it required two or three visits to the White House and all his persuasiveness to convince Dwight Eisenhower that his withdrawal should be accepted. When it was, Lewis Strauss left Washington vowing never to return. But last October, with Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks resigning, the President again called upon Strauss, who, by reason of his massive pride and urge for service, agreed to return to Government.
When Strauss accepted a recess appointment as Weeks's successor, it seemed hardly likely that Anderson's vendetta against him would be a serious threat to Senate confirmation. The Secretary of Commerce presides over a bureaucratic domain with a payroll of 31,000, but his post is hardly a hurricane's eye of controversy. Strauss's 13 predecessors in the post won Senate confirmation in an average of eight days apiece from the time the nominations went to Capitol Hill. When Washington Democrat Warren Magnuson's Senate Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee waited two months after receiving Strauss's nomination before calling him to the Hill to testify, it seemed that the delay was only part of a pattern of Democratic foot dragging on Ike's appointments.