Dissension in the Aec

The Atomic Energy Commission is one of the most highly charged units now operating in the Capital. It is so today under the chairmanship of Admiral Lewis Strauss just as it was under the chairmanship of David E. Lilienthal when Strauss himself was often a dissenting voice. The Commission spends $2 billion annually, and its decisions may well be a matter of life and death. Under the circumstances, we need the combined wisdom, even including the disagreement, of the five Commissioners, not decisions enforced by the Chairman. WARREN UNNAof the Washington Post has been covering the AEC for the past three years.

by WARREN UNNA

1

WHILE the Atomic Energy Commission has been most successful in controlling nuclear fission for weapons, it has been somewhat less than successful in controlling the human fission within its own ranks: that of AEC Chairman Lewis L. S. Strauss (pronounced Straws) and Commissioner Thomas E. Murray.

Both men, with markedly similar ways of life and, in some respects, markedly similar philosophies, have been at opposite poles of the atomic orbit since the beginning of the Eisenhower Administration. Now, with Murray’s term as Commissioner due to expire June 30, and Strauss’ certain to continue for at least another year, the Commission’s personality polarization may be coming to an end. This is not necessarily a good thing.

The Atomic Energy Commission watches over a $15 billion public investment. Its major efforts are devoted to the design and manufacture of weapons, the bulwark of our defense against potential and actual enemies. But beyond the preparation of weapons, the AEC is vitally concerned with the peaceful applications of atomic energy: the use of radioactive isotopes in industry, agriculture, and medicine; the use of atomic fuel in generating electricity.

Murray, the last of the Truman appointees to the AEC, is the only one of the five Commissioners who lists himself as a Democrat. Strauss is a HooverTaft Republican; retired Studebaker chairman Harold S. Vance is also a Republican; University of Chicago chemist Willard F. Libby usually votes Republican; the late John von Neumann, of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, kept his political preference to himself.

Although Murray is anxious to remain on the Commission, few people in Washington think that President Eisenhower will reappoint him to another five-year term, or that Strauss would tolerate it even if the President should get such a notion. Murray has been the only Commissioner to speak out whenever he is persuaded that something alien to the public interest is going on behind the AEC’s secrecy-protected doors.

It is ironic that these two Commissioners who have so much in common should hold opposing views. Both are in their sixties. Both are multimillionaires and highly successful financiers. Strauss started out by drumming up business for his father and uncle’s wholesale shoe shop in Richmond, Virginia, and rose to become an investment banking partner with Kuhn, Loeb & Company. Just before joining the Eisenhower Administration, he served as financial adviser to the Rockefellers.

Murray is the son of the man who built the giant power-generating stations in New York State which eventually became the nucleus of the Consolidated Edison network. The father left a $12 million estate. The son, a mechanical engineer with more than two hundred electrical and welding patents to his credit, has carried on and augmented the family’s electrical manufacturing business.

Both Strauss and Murray are extremely devout. Strauss, a member of the Reformed Jewish congregation, once taught Sunday School, once was president of New York City’s Temple Emanu-El, conducts Friday night and Saturday morning Sabbath services in his home for his family and his guests, and once prepared a beautifully written Bible with his son, so anxious was he for young Lewis to learn to love and appreciate Biblical lore as he did.

Murray, a Roman Catholic with three knighthoods from the Pope and honorary degrees from fifteen Catholic colleges and universities, has a private chapel in both his Long Island home and his Park Avenue apartment, attends Mass at 7:30 each morning, and takes more than fatherly pride in the fact that two of his eleven children are Jesuit priests.

Despite the current involvement of the AEC’s atomic power program in the public versus private power issue, Strauss and Murray are essentially private power men. It was Strauss who, out of loyalty to the White House team if not blind faith in big business, first allowed the Commission to become involved in the notorious and now defunct Dixon-Yates contract for steam-generated power in the Tennessee Valley Authority area. It was Murray who first suggested that the AEC farm out its power needs to private utilities — in the Electric Energy, Inc., plant at Joppa, Illinois, and the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation plant at Portsmouth, Ohio. Murray made both proposals during the last year of the Truman Administration.

Both Strauss and Murray are humanitarians and take enormous pride in the good the atom promises when it is not being devoted to war. Strauss helped to devise President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” proposal before the United Nations General Assembly in December, 1953, the main good will plank in the Administration’s foreign policy. And he also helped to conceive the “Atoms for Peace” conference in Geneva in August, 1955, which for the first time brought the world’s nuclear physicists together to discuss the benefits of the atom. Murray’s every speech is in essence a prayer, a plea to make atomic warfare impossible, a plea for world harmony that atomic energy may be devoted to improving the way people live.

Strauss is bald, bespectacled, rather owlish-faced; he has a ramrod posture and a superbly tailored figure. He has fluidity of thought and tongue and an Old World courtliness, but when he is piqued the Strauss expression varies between childish indignation and pouting martyrdom. Strauss claims he never had enemies before coming to Washington. And even his enemies concede his executive brilliance and mastership as a tactician.

At his mother’s instigation, Strauss volunteered his services to Herbert Hoover during the Belgian War Relief days and later became Mr. Hoover’s private secretary. He was with Mr. Hoover in his Palo Alto, California, home in 1928 the night he was elected President; and with him again in the White House in 1932 when Mr. Hoover learned he was defeated for re-election. Strauss’ attraction to science began early when he read a physics primer. When both his parents died of cancer in quick succession, Strauss became interested in an accelerator to develop radioactive isotopes for cancer treatment. As a rear admiral during A World War II, he represented Navy interests in the Manhattan Project, the program which produced the A-bomb.

Murray is frail in appearance, bashful in voice and manner. He has a sort of pug face, a friendly twinkle, and his double chin is his one concession to obesity. Unlike Strauss, Murray did go to college, to Yale’s Sheffield School of Engineering. But he is proud that he is a second-generation Irishman. He can be as stubborn as he is gentle, and when he is, this Irish comes out and the frail frame throws all its energy into the scrap for God and Country. He frequently has declared, “I won’t give up unless they fire me.”

Murray’s experience has made him well aware of the needs of private enterprise. For ten years he was receiver for New York City’s Interborough Rapid Transit subway. Prior to joining the Commission, he was president of the Metropolitan Engineering Company and a director of its parent which makes welding devices and electric switches, the Murray Manufacturing Company. He has been a director of the Chrysler Corporation and a member of its finance committee, a director of the Bank of New York, a trustee of the United Mine Workers welfare fund. His niece married Henry Ford II.

2

THE first great, storm which followed Strauss’ appointment as AEC Chairman was the dismissal of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, when he was ruled to be a security risk. Murray, a member of the four-toone majority against Oppenheimer, went even further than Strauss and his colleagues by branding the scientist “disloyal.” Strauss dismissed Murray’s zeal as “Jesuitic reasoning” — an opinion shared by a good many others involved in the case. Strauss has particular pride in his academic connections, and some describe the Oppenheimer case as his Achilles’ heel. Strauss took what might be termed the rap for the case and describes it as “a tragic thing—I shall have to live with it as long as I live.” Yet the case did not originate with Strauss, but with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., who went to the President and demanded that the physicist be ousted from his position as a consultant to the AEC and that his “Q” clearance be revoked.

Through the misadvice of AEC General Counsel William Mitchell, Strauss was reluctantly persuaded that Oppenheimer’s “Q” clearance could be revoked only after a formal hearing. Actually, the mere termination of Oppenheimer’s consultant’s contract would have accomplished the same thing. Once the hearing was under way, however, Strauss, with his usual precision, vigor, and no-st.one-unturned thoroughness, coöperated with Hoover and Brownell in seeing to it that the government’s case could not fail.

Then, as president of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, Strauss not only voted to retain Oppenheimer as the Institute’s director, but also to raise his salary. He also saw to it that Oppenheimer had a say in the $15,000 Strauss award given to a promising scientist every three years in memory of Strauss’ parents. Strauss thus displayed another facet of his personality: mercy, generosity, even solicitude — once the enemy is on his knees. Many scientists have never forgiven Strauss for the Oppenheimer case, however, and to appease them he saw to it that the Commission, for the first time in its ten-year history, had two of their representatives on it at the same time: Libby and von Neumann.

In some ways, Murray is now no more of a lone dissenter on an AEC headed by Strauss than Strauss himself was when he served on an AEC headed by David E. Lilienthal. President Truman appointed Strauss to the first Commission when it began in 1946. Three years later, Strauss was before the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy complaining of what he considered to be Lilienthal’s one-man rule. A year later, Strauss resigned — partly because of a long scrap with Lilienthal, who opposed going ahead with the development of the H-bomb (Strauss took the matter to Truman and Congress and won); partly because of his firm belief that sending isotopes to Norway for testing jet plane engines would endanger the nation’s security (Strauss took the matter to Congress and lost). Looking back upon his record during the first Commission, Strauss is particularly proud of his plea for the H-bomb and his insistence that this country set up a weapons detection system. Because of the latter, the United States was able to pick up the first Russian A-bomb detonation in 1949 and alert itself to the atomic weapons race.

Similarly Murray, during his term, has pushed establishment of the nation’s huge weapons stockpile and seen to it that there is a uranium procurement program with enough incentive behind it to ensure the United States a practically limitless supply of fissionable fuel.

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WHY, in the light of the many things they have in common, arc Strauss and Murray at swords’ points so much of the time? Although they live within almost wall-to-wall proximity of each other on the eighth floor of Washington’s Shoreham Hotel, they take separate elevators. And not too long ago Strauss had Commission personnel bring him Murray’s long-distance phone call record so that he might learn with whom Murray had been talking.

The trouble began when Murray sensed that Strauss had come to conceive of himself as the Commission and had very little use for the services of the AEC’s other four members, Strauss had been made the President’s assistant for atomic energy matters as soon as Eisenhower took office. A few months later he was given his “second hat,” that of AEC Chairman.

The Strauss-Marray differences grew during the hearings on the 1954 Atomic Energy Act in which Strauss, anxious to have complete authority over AEC security cases, asked Congress to make him “principal officer” of the five heretofore coequal Commissioners. Strauss argued that some of the secrets he picked up in the White House as the President’s atomic energy assistant with a side seat on the National Security Council could not always be passed along to the boys on the Commission. Strauss declared there might come a future time when a majority of the Commission would decide that one of its members should not be granted full access to the nation’s top atomic secrets.

Congress, which had established the commission system to gain the advantage of five men’s thoughts, rather than one, compromised on Strauss’ “principal officer” request and allowed the AEC Chairman instead to become “official spokesman” for his colleagues. Commissioner Eugene M. Zuckert, who once declared, “We ought to get ballet slippers,” allowed his term to expire and quietly returned to his Washington management consultancy. Commissioner Henry D. Smyth, weary of learning what the Commission had done through his morning newspaper, resigned and returned to the academic life at Princeton. Commissioner Joseph Campbell resigned to become Comptroller General.

This left only Murray of the pre-Strauss appointees, and Murray declared: “I am accused of not playing on the team. I’ve worked on a team all my life; but when something comes up and I don’t agree, I’m not going to take it blindly just because the Chairman (through his other offices) tells me it’s what the President wants.”

Strauss’ personal public relations assistant, Everett Holles, counters: “Murray hasn’t been just one against Lewis L. Strauss; he’s been one against the Commission. He has taken a completely ‘anti’ attitude.” Among AEC employees, Murray is now referred to as the “enemy” and it has been made clear to them that they must have nothing to do with his camp if they mean to get on.

In 1955, when the Democrats had replaced the Republican majority in Congress, the so-called “Murray Amendment” was tacked on as a rider to the AEC’s appropriation bill. It compelled Strauss, as Chairman, to give his fellow Commissioners “full access” to all information involving AEC business. Murray had submitted a long list to the Joint Committee detailing those AEC matters Strauss had not informed him of. The list included everything from the Dixon-Yates contract, which Strauss presented to the Commission as a fait accompli, to the atomic peace ship, which Murray earlier had refused to testify on since he had yet to be told what it was all about. Again last year, Murray disclosed AEC matters which Strauss had still not filled him in on. But with the “Murray Amendment” already on the books, the Joint Committee could only ruefully conclude that it had no police powers— and had to let it go at that.

The Commission meetings where Strauss and Murray confront each other sometimes are so bitter that a stenographer has to be summoned to be sure the charges and countercharges are recorded verbatim.

One particularly acrid series of meetings involved security. Strauss, ordinarily extremely securityconscious, has had a different attitude toward the British. After a red-carpet reception in England in 1955, including family lunch with the Queen, Strauss came home and helped smother a combined FBIAEC report questioning the adequacy of British atomic security. Last year, in what Congressman Cole, former Republican Chairman of the Joint Committee and a friend of Strauss, termed a direct violation of the intent of Congress, Strauss quietly put through an amendment to our bilateral agreement with Britain regarding the peaceful uses of atomic energy. The amendment permits exchange of military information, specifically regarding the atomic propulsion mechanism on the submarine Nautilus. Because of the fury from both sides of the political aisle on this one, Strauss held up the actual exchange of information. And Her Majesty’s First Sea Lord, Admiral Mountbatten, did not take the trip on the Nautilus which he had been booked for.

Declassification is another big point of contention between Strauss and Murray. Strauss, under frequent goading from Senator Anderson, the Democratic Joint Committee Chairman during the 84th Congress, appointed a special team of declassifiers and periodically announced that so many thousands of secret atomic documents had now been gone through, of which so many thousand could now be declassified. A great many secrets involving the peaceful uses of atomic energy were declassified at the 1955 “Atoms for Peace" conference in Geneva. But the totals of items still held secret are never given in the Strauss declassification announcements.

Anyway, Murray has no toleration of what some call the Strauss “numbers game.”Murray is for declassifying all peaceful aspects of atomic energy, leaving only the military secrets in the combination safes, He firmly believes that the enemy, and even our allies, have most of the information anyway He thinks the only ones kept from it are the American citizens who paid for the discoveries and might well be making use of them in the medical, industrial, and agricultural applications of the atom. On the other hand, Strauss feels there are areas where military and peaceful atomic secrets overlap and for this reason the peaceful secrets have to be kept locked up.

Strauss was hard put to it, however, in explaining why the University of Indiana’s Hermann J. Muller, a Nobel Prize geneticist, was prevented by the AEC from appearing in person at the Geneva conference and giving a reading of his paper on the dangerous effects of radioactivity, The AEC tried to make it appear that the United Nations had suppressed Muller. But the UN would have none of this and pointed its accusation right back at the AEC. Murray stayed on the sidelines in this one.

By all odds the most dramatic Strauss-Murray clash in open view occurred during the more than year-long arguments in 1954 and 1955 over the Dixon-Yates contract. Dixon-Yates called for a $107,250,000 steam-generating (non-atomic) power plant to be built and owned by private enterprise on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River, across from Memphis. It was to feed power into the TVA system to “replace" power TVA was supplying AEC installations some 180 miles upriver. TVA people saw it as a clever move by the Administration to break up the government’s biggest public power system.

The contract was finally canceled when congressional Democrats found that one of the key advisers to both the AEC and the Bureau of the Budget on the matter was at the same time vice president of the First Boston Corporation, a Wall Street investment house which had a considerable financial stake in seeing that the contract went through. DixonYates and the Oppenheimer ease, by Strauss’ own admission, have been the sources of his greatest grief as Chairman. Yet Dixon-Yates was actually started by the Bureau of the Budget and the White House, just as Oppenheimer had been started by the FBI and Justice Department.

At any event, Murray was furious with Strauss for embroiling the AEC in politics for the first time in its history — and said so. Murray thought the AEC’s serious responsibilities in developing weapons were being sidetracked — and also said so. Strauss avowed otherwise, and at one memorable point the Chairman paraded into the Capitol’s Old Supreme Court Chamber followed by an entourage of department heads, attorneys, public relations men, and workmen in overalls bearing wooden crates and grocery boxes full of top-secret folders.

“Who ordered this physical display?" demanded Senator Anderson, then the Joint Committee Chairman.

“I did,” said Strauss, flushing. He then proceeded to point to a six-inch pile of documents on the witness table before him. This, he explained, represented the Commission’s preoccupation with Dixon-Yates matters during the first few months of 1955. And that, he said, pointing at the crates and grocery boxes, represented the Commission’s preoccupation with its regular business.

During another round in the Dixon-Yates fight, Murray in his turn followed Strauss to the witness table and bluntly stated that the Chairman had taken it upon himself to make changes in the AEC’s proposed contract with the TVA without consulting the rest of the Commission. Chairman Strauss, his dark eyes flashing fire, came running up from his corner of the Old Supreme Court Chamber, grabbed a microphone at the other end of the witness table, anti outshouting Murray declared he couldn’t allow such testimony to go into the record unchallenged. At the end of the session, Mrs. Strauss followed the Chairman from the hearing room whispering, “ You were too much of a gentleman. You shouldn’t have been so nice to him.”

Strauss’ difficulties over Dixon-Yates weren’t all with Murray. When the Joint Committee learned that the Commission had voted on DixonYates matters the very morning of the day Strauss testified that the contract hadn’t been discussed for months, Senator Gore mused: “It’s rather remarkable that a discussion was held, a motion made and a vote taken, and yet that very afternoon Mr. Strauss couldn’t recall it.” Strauss then went into a nit-picking argument that he had only testified he couldn’t “recall any discussions” on Dixon-Yates matters being held.

4

DURING the past year and a half, Murray has made three major public proposals on atomic matters, all of which have been just as publicly opposed by Strauss and the rest of the Commission.

In November, 1955, Murray proposed a midPacific “meeting at the atomic summit” in the hope that a firsthand sight of an exploding superbomb would deter policy makers, both in this country and abroad, from thinking in terms of future war. The morning preceding Murray’s evening speech, Strauss called the other Commissioners into emergency session. He then issued a statement to the effect that Murray’s proposal had been considered and voted down months ago as “contrary to the best judgment of the AEC.” And anyway, he declared, the Russians had witnessed this country’s 1946 (baby bomb) tests in the Pacific without any noticeable deterrence. All this rebuttal to Marray’s speech was given the public before the Murray speech had actually been delivered.

The next day, Air Force Secretary Donald A. Quarles, who had not been taken into Strauss’ counsel, generally endorsed the Murray proposal at a National Press Club lunch. Quarles later got the word and hastily announced he had been giving only his private opinion and wouldn’t have made any statement at all had he known it was the subject of an intra-AEC dispute.

In February and April, 1956, first in executive session before the Joint Committee and then in public, Murray formulated the ban on superbomb tests which later in the year was to be given a somewhat garbled endorsement by Adlai E. Stevenson. Although the Strauss camp suspected Murray of planting his ideas with the Democratic candidate, Murray actually was quite annoyed with Stevenson for taking on something he didn’t understand.

Murray’s proposal, unlike the various Stevenson versions, was not fuzzy. The Commissioner said the l nited States, unilaterally, should call a halt to its superbomb tests since the superbombs in the stockpile were already big enough and we couldn’t, with a humanitarian conscience, drop them on civilian population centers anyway. Then Murray called for a “rational armament,” one in which the United States would develop and test small — tactical— atomic warheads. These, he said, would prove sufficiently powerful to deter any enemy from thinking it could push around this country and its allies.

When questioned by the Joint Committee on whether our military policy didn’t already include such small-scale armament, Murray testified: “I know of no policy.”He told Congress that as far as he, an Atomic Commissioner, knew, the Pentagon was merely shouting to make the bombs bigger and bigger and the AEC was dutifully filling out the orders in its bomb factories.

Strauss, in the President’s name, later issued a White House statement declaring the tests an “indispensable part of our defense program.” But the statement did not face up to Murray’s proposition for cutting down on the big tests (which produce the harmful radioactive fall-out) and increasing the development and tests of smaller weapons.

Subsequent to the Murray proposal, Strauss, and then the President, tried to sell Congress and the public on the idea of a “clean" bomb, a term which Eisenhower once carelessly used but which Strauss has scrupulously never used. This is a bomb whose internal make-up is not so disposed to producing strontium-90 and the other deadly radioactive fission elements. It is also one which, when dropped high enough, tends to cut down on purely local fallout. Murray was unimpressed with the “clean” bomb. As the first member of the Commission to warn of the cancer-producing qualities of strontium90, once it finds its way into the human bone, he has also been the only member of the Commission to footnote his dissent in the AEC’s semiannual report on the fall-out danger.

The AEC has failed to indicate how it would rid the superbomb of its A-bomb trigger and thus make the “clean" bomb really clean of fission products. The Joint Committee knows of no way this could be done. Nor has there been any sign from the Pentagon that it would order any of these “clean” bombs. From a military point of view, the dirtier the bomb the more economically valuable it becomes as a strategic weapon. Overriding all “clean" bomb skepticism is the argument, “What if the enemy won’t play according to the same rules?”

Murray’s third major proposal came in February, 1956. As a professional power engineer, he declared the AEC’s atomic power program was pretty much a figment of its own imagination and would continue to be so until the government stepped in to build the first commercial-scale plants itself and showed private industry the way. Murray called for a billion-dollar five-year program. He particularly stressed the need for this country to develop atomic power as an instrument of foreign policy. He urged that the United States bring this power source and the assurance of better living conditions to its friends abroad, in the developed and the underdeveloped countries. And he warned that if this country didn’t, Russia and Britain surely would.

The Murray proposal was later wrapped up in a bill sponsored in the Senate by Gore of Tennessee and in the House by Holifield of California. To remove it from the private versus public power issue, the bill’s sponsors specified that the AEC should spend $400 million to build and operate the first commercial-scale atomic power plants on its own installations, to satisfy its own governmental power needs. This was to differentiate it from TVA, which, as a public-sponsored power network, supplies both public and private users and in this way outcompetes the private utilities.

Strauss would have none of it — neither the Murray proposal nor the Gore-Holifield bill. He argued there was no need for a government “subsidy” program; that private industry was perfectly capable of developing atomic power —with the AEC standing by as a research partner; that this approach would produce the most economical and efficient atomic power in the long run; and that the government had no business at all becoming an atomic power producer. Strauss told the Joint Committee he particularly didn’t like the way the Gore-Holifield measure “directed” the AEC to proceed. This, said the Chairman, was the kind of wording “you use to your valet.”

The Gore-Holifield bill was passed by the Senate, but with Strauss’ vigorous opposition it met defeat in the House. Now, with Britain, Russia, and soon France going ahead in the atomic power business and American industry still discussing blueprints, Strauss recently indicated he may consider having government do some of the first power plant construction— if private industry really decides it can’t.

Before Congress adjourned last summer, Strauss and Murray had a final conflict. So far the United States has only one commercial-scale atomic power plant under way. This plant, started at Murray’s instigation and largely financed by the AEC, goes into operation at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, later this year under the aegis of the Duquesne Light Company. Strauss, to counter the Gore-Holifield bill, had to do better than merely point to a single commercial-scale atomic power plant, largely government-financed. The nearest one off the drawing boards was that of the Power Reactor Development Company, which was to be financed by a group of private utilities and manufacturing concerns under the leadership of Walker L. Cisler and the Detroit Edison Company. The design is the most advanced known, a “fast-neutron, breedertype” reactor which promises to produce more fissionable material than it consumes in making power.

Strauss, in testifying before the House Appropriations Committee in early August, expressed such confidence in the Cisler reactor that he said he would be leaving for the shores of Lake Erie within the next few days to turn the first shovelful of earth on the site. Murray, out of town during the Strauss testimony, rushed back the next day to tell the Appropriations Committee the AEC’s own highlevel Reactor Safeguards Committee had given the Cisler proposal an adverse safely report. Chairman Cannon of Missouri, furious at Strauss for not having come clean, wrote in his report that the AEC Chairman either was “deceiving the Committee as to the actual progress of the Detroit Edison project, or he intended to force the AEC licensing of this project in disregard of public safety.”

At about the same time, Strauss was asked by the Joint Committee why he hadn’t informed them that Detroit Edison’s Cisler was acting as the International Cooperation Administration’s power consultant abroad while he was in the power business in the United States. Snapped Strauss at Senator Anderson: “I assume that you would not care to have us run a clipping service.”

Subsequently Strauss and a Commission majority, in an extraordinary action, overruled the AEC Reactor Safeguards Committee’s adverse report. Murray again dissented. Strauss turned the first shovelful of earth last August. But the consternation is far from over. The United Auto Workers and two other unions currently are challenging the Cisler group’s right to have a construction license — both on safety and financial grounds. And should the Commission rule against them, the unions intend to take the matter to Federal Court.

What issues lie ahead for Strauss and his Commission—amicable and not so amicable — can only be unraveled with time. But it seems apparent that once dissenter Murray passes from the atomic scene, the healthy give-and-take in determining AEC policy will pass with him. Something of Strauss and something of Murray are essential to both the success and the failure of the AEC. That is why any forthcoming harmony in the AEC may have dubious value.