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For years, North Dakota's clangorous Republican Senator "Wild Bill" Langer has thumped loud & long as a one-man lobby against new federal appointments. His complaint: North Dakotans are the finest people in the U.S., yet not since statehood (1889) has any native Dakotan been appointed to an uppercrust federal job. Last week Bill Langer was happy. The President nominated, and the Senate quickly confirmed, a wealthy North Dakota grain buyer and farmer as ambassador to Nicaragua.

Tom Whelan, the new ambassador, is a staunch Republican, and onetime Republican state committeeman, in a state where Democrats are as rare as Republicans in Alabama. He opposed Langer in the Republican primary for the Senate in 1940, but it proved to be a friendly act: Whelan's candidacy split the anti-Langer vote, and Wild Bill won easily. But why should Harry Truman be interested in such Republican matters? The fact is that unpredictable Bill Langer votes with the Administration more than half the time, and has never been paid off for his "big one." The "big one" was the deciding vote Langer cast in committee during the 80th Congress. By voting with the Democrats, Langer blocked all plans for a full-dress investigation of the Kansas City vote frauds, which Republicans had hoped to make a major 1948 election issue.

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