[twoodfin]

Who was arguing for 128-bit DES? Wikipedia says IBM wanted 64.

[EthanHeilman]

The original version of DES was called Lucifer and used a 128 bit key. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer_(cipher)

The NSA choose the key size of DES since they were running the process (making DES 256 times weaker than a 64 bit key).