Kenneth McKellar

Kenneth McKellar, the aging Tennessee senator known as Old Mack, was a force in the Senate whose opposition made the reappointment of David Lilienthal a test of Harry S. Truman’s political resolve. As president of the Senate and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, McKellar could threaten a bruising confirmation battle; Truman chose to proceed anyway. Later hearings exposed both McKellar’s hostility to Lilienthal and his limited grasp of the scientific work he invoked in challenging him.

Position and Political Leverage

McKellar’s influence rested on seniority and institutional authority. The account describes him as the Senate’s craggy, slouched president and chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee. He was not simply one dissenting senator: his threat to lead what he called the biggest confirmation fight in memory gave him leverage over a president seeking congressional cooperation.

That leverage mattered because Lilienthal’s approach at the Tennessee Valley Authority conflicted with the patronage expectations of conservative Democrats. Lilienthal insisted on appointments based on merit rather than political favors. McKellar opposed his continuation in office, and his threatened fight represented an effort to prevent that principle from prevailing at the agency. The conflict therefore concerned more than one appointment: it placed the authority of a powerful senator against a public administrator whose personnel policy resisted patronage.

Truman Reappoints Lilienthal

With Lilienthal’s term as head of the Tennessee Valley Authority nearing its end, McKellar pressed Truman to remove him. Franklin D. Roosevelt had already discussed finding Lilienthal another position to avoid a clash with the senator. Truman, however, judged Lilienthal’s performance to be excellent and called him to the White House. He asked whether Lilienthal was willing to continue; when Lilienthal said yes, Truman reappointed him, acknowledging that McKellar would cause trouble but adding that he had tangled with him before.

The manner of the decision mattered to Lilienthal. He was incredulous and thrilled that Truman made the appointment without dramatizing the political risk or dwelling on the disruption McKellar might cause. Truman’s confidence was plain, but the choice did not end the contest: the nomination still required Senate confirmation. Before meeting Lilienthal, Truman had told his staff, with evident pleasure, that Old Mack was going to have a hemorrhage. The remark registered the anticipated collision; it did not mean McKellar had been neutralized.

McKellar’s opposition had little effect on the outcome. The Senate confirmed Lilienthal’s nomination on May 23. In this episode, McKellar’s considerable institutional standing is set against a president willing to use his own authority and accept a fight rather than yield the appointment preemptively.

The Confirmation Hearings

The hearings made the dispute public and sharpened its terms. McKellar called the Tennessee Valley Authority a hotbed of Communism and treated Lilienthal as suspect. His arguments also revealed confusion about atomic science: he believed General Leslie Groves had discovered the secret of splitting the atom and could not understand why Groves should not remain in command of that discovery. The narrative presents McKellar’s insistence as evidence that political suspicion and misunderstanding were shaping the inquiry into Lilienthal’s fitness.

McKellar questioned Lilienthal about where his parents had been born. When Lilienthal could not answer with certainty, the senator behaved as though he had scored a point. Pressed again on another day, Lilienthal said he had learned only that they came from somewhere in Austro-Hungary, near Pressburg, in what had since become Czechoslovakia. McKellar smiled toward the audience, treating the reference to a country then under Soviet influence as helpful to his case. The questioning made family origins part of an attack already framed around communism, though the episode does not establish that this tactic alone defined the entire opposition.

When McKellar abruptly asked Lilienthal to explain his views on communism, Lilienthal answered at length, with his hands folded on the table and his gaze fixed just above them. He argued that individual integrity and dignity were fundamental, and that communism wrongly made the state an end in itself, subjecting individuals to power without ethical limits. The account describes the room as spellbound; afterward, committee members and people in the audience crowded around to praise him. Truman then let Lilienthal know that he would stand behind the nomination, even if the fight took 150 years. McKellar’s attempt to make the hearing a demonstration of Lilienthal’s ideological unfitness had instead given the nominee an occasion to state his principles forcefully.

From Personal Opposition to a Partisan Crisis

The struggle widened when Robert Taft announced that he too would oppose the nomination, calling Lilienthal a power-hungry bureaucrat, temperamentally unfitted for the Atomic Energy Commission, and soft on Communism. The account distinguishes this escalation from McKellar’s earlier campaign: until Taft intervened, the contest had largely been McKellar’s personal and predictable show; Taft’s entry made it distinctly partisan and a major Capitol crisis. The phrase soft on Communism caught on, while the anti-Lilienthal opposition also showed an increasingly apparent strain of anti-Semitism. That description applies to the opposition as a developing political climate, not as a specific statement of McKellar’s personal motive.

Lilienthal feared that a Republican majority aligned against him made confirmation impossible, and Taft’s speech felt to him like a severe blow. Yet the nomination survived, and McKellar’s resistance did not prevent the Senate from confirming it. His role remains important not because he won the contest, but because his authority made Truman’s decision costly and the confirmation process exposed how patronage, suspicion of communism, and partisan pressure could converge around a single appointment.