We’ll never know whether the late U.S. Sen. Margaret Chase Smith would have prioritized seeing “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer” when the blockbuster films open on Friday.
But the Maine senator was linked to the nuclear scientist examined in the latter film from director Christopher Nolan, both through common enemies in the era of McCarthyism and Smith’s 1959 swing vote against the man who drove J. Robert Oppenheimer from the government.
Smith, a Republican who was first woman elected to both houses of Congress after being sent to the Senate in 1948, is most remembered now for her “Declaration of Conscience” speech in 1950 against efforts by U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin, to persecute left-wing Americans and raise fears about communism here.
She was an ardent anti-communist who thought McCarthy was setting back that movement by smearing people who could not adequately defend themselves, but her stand won her no favor with that more aligned with McCarthy , something that was exemplified in the 1952 book “U.S.A. Confidential” by journalists Lee Mortimer and Jack Lait.
A chapter in the book titled “Reds in Clover” described Smith as a “left-wing apologist” and insinuated she was in league with communists. The charges infuriated her, and she filed a $1 million libel lawsuit against the authors and publisher that languished for years until the sides came together on a $15,000 settlement that included an apology to Smith in Maine newspapers.
At the same time, Oppenheimer, who is known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the Manhattan Project during World War II, was fighting for his career. He has been watched since before the war by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI for left-wing sympathies and associations with people who had been members of the Communist Party, including his wife and brother.
In 1953, an official claimed Oppenheimer was likely “an agent of the Soviet Union,” leading Lewis Strauss, the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, to revoke his security clearance. That move was upheld in secret hearings that President Joe Biden’s energy department symbolically overturned late last year.
Oppenheimer’s reputation recovered before his 1967 death. Five years earlier, President John F. Kennedy had Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson presented the scientist with an award as a political gesture. By then, Strauss had gotten some political comeuppance.
That was in 1959, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower nominated Strauss to be his commerce secretary. Democrats were opposed to the nomination, in large part due to Strauss’ treatment of Oppenheimer. Smith’s normal process was to not announce how she would vote until the end of confirmation processes.
In the end, she was one of two Republicans to vote against him in a 49-46 vote that sank the nomination. It shocked her colleagues and led conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Arizona, to angrily pound his desk and say he would never give to Smith’s campaigns. She said she voted that way because of Strauss’ defiant confirmation hearing at which he challenged official transcripts and “defeated himself.”
“I like integrity and I like others to be honest,” she said, according to a 1995 biography. “I could not vote for that man.”
Smith faced backlash for this vote, too. A New York Daily News editorial defending Strauss was sent to the senator along with a written comment saying she should “go to Maine and pick potatoes” and that she was a “disgrace to the Senate.”
Even though the libel settlement made him apologize to Smith a few years earlier, Mortimer piled on in his column, insinuating that her vote came because Strauss “fired Red contributor Oppenheimer.”
