Bennett, Hodel, Herrington Get OK in Senate for Cabinet Posts

The Senate confirmed three members of President Reagan’s second-term Cabinet Wednesday--overwhelmingly approving William J. Bennett as education secretary, Donald P. Hodel as Interior secretary and John S. Herrington as energy secretary.

Bennett, Hodel and Herrington join James A. Baker III, the new Treasury secretary, in having won Senate confirmation. Atty. Gen.-designate Edwin Meese III, who was confirmed by a Senate panel on Tuesday, still faces a full Senate vote later this month.

Bennett was confirmed 93 to 0. Herrington and Hodel were approved 93 to 1, with Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.) casting the lone vote against each.

Lack of Experience Cited

Proxmire said that Herrington lacked any experience in the field of energy and said, like his predecessors at the agency, the nominee was “grossly, pitifully unqualified.”

Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) called Herrington “eminently qualified” and the “right man for the right job at the right time.”

Proxmire was even harsher in his attack on Hodel, warning that the new Interior secretary’s “tenure will be a disaster” and calling him a “hatchet man” for James A. Watt, the Interior secretary under whom Hodel worked for 21 months.

“If you liked Watt, you’ll love Hodel,” Proxmire said. “I did not like Watt so I cannot go for the son of Watt.”

Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.) defended Hodel and said he had done “an outstanding job” as energy secretary.

He said Hodel would take over Interior with better background “than perhaps any secretary nominee since I’ve been in Congress and perhaps in the whole history of the department.”

There was no attack on Bennett, a 41-year-old former philosophy professor, although Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) said he was concerned whether Bennett would fight for education funds and his “record is not strong in the area of civil rights.”

Doubt Remains

“There is some question whether he is going to have the backbone to contribute a great deal,” Simon said.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, said: “The times demand that we really have the best.” He called on Bennett to “spell out for the American people where the responsibilities for strengthening American education lie at the federal, state and local levels.”

He said Reagan’s plan to deny guaranteed student loans to all students from families with adjusted gross incomes above $32,500 would nail “the dollar sign back on the doors of schools and colleges in this country.”