GOVERNMENT: Last Word

• Share

A one-man Brain Trust is Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Augustus Berle Jr. Short, dapper, arrogant, well-heeled Berle is a child prodigy who still likes to head the class. He is all at once: 1) analyst-extraordinary of corporate finance (The Modern Corporation and Private Property, 1932), 2) intimate of New York Muckraker Samuel Seabury who is backer of Republican Tom Dewey, 3) adviser to Franklin Roosevelt (whom he calls "Caesar" to his face), on everything from railroads to Munich.

Most anonymous of Berle's recent coups was the President's last-minute appeal to Hitler during the Munich Crisis, which he coauthored. Most conspicuous coup was a "confidential" memo, which he issued two months before on the Monopoly Investigation (he called the village grocer as much of a monopolist as any trust). One motive behind the Monopoly memorandum was Berle Jr.'s private feud with competitive White House counsellor, hearty, pragmatic Tom Corcoran, who did not plan the Monopoly Investigation as just another outlet for Berle's talents.

Last week, Berle made another stab at ideological control of Senator O'Mahoney's Monopoly Committee. He appeared at its investment bank hearings to tell how to fix up the capital market. Erudite, as usual, he backed up his remarks by allusions to economic bigwigs like England's John Maynard Keynes, Brookings Institution's Harold Glenn Moulton. His program took over three much-hashed New Deal recovery inducers, pronounced them not-radical, stamped them with the Berle trademark.

The three lucky ideas: 1) Creation of a Public Works Finance Corp. to finance self-liquidating Federal, State, municipal public works "at any rate of interest . . . necessary to get the business done." 2) To insure loans to small business, FHA style, "to put the small man who cannot finance internally on a par with large corporations." 3) To appoint a special subcommittee, reporting to Congress, on the feasibility of organizing capital credit banks to make capital available alike to government (Federal & local) and to private enterprise. "No panacea," Berle pontificated, "with these three bills we should have the elements for a modern financial toolkit."