ADMINISTRATION: The Miserable Truth

The miserable truth was coming out. U.S. production of war materials was still nowhere near enough.

Everybody blamed somebody else. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold blamed "monopoly." The pinko Nation and New Republic blamed capitalism in general. Columnist Westbrook Pegler blamed C.I.O. strikes, A.F. of L. racketeering. Columnist Walter Lippmann put the finger on U.S. industry, for its "disgraceful" commercial boom, chewing up vast quantities of precious strategic metals and rubber. Anti-New Dealers blamed New Dealers, and vice versa. Congressmen blamed the OPM, and vice versa. Little businessmen blamed the Army & Navy.

U.S. citizens—thinking of Marines on Wake Island fighting off the Japs with only four planes, of their soldiers in the Philippines defending bridges with rifles and hand grenades against machine guns—cried a pox on Thurman Arnold et al., a pox on blame-laying, a pox on alibis and confusion and red tape. Bottleneck had be come the most hated word in the language, "too little & too late" a phrase too deep for tears.

The Men Who. What the U.S. wanted was for the President to appoint one man to head the defense organization—and to be given power to hire & fire, to make and enforce decisions. Someone must make decisions—even wrong decisions. And no move had the President more consistently avoided than appointing such a head man.

Some of the defense chiefs the U.S. had come to respect. Respect had grown for Vice President Henry Wallace. He had no sparkle or drama in him, but he was steady, sure, solid, and growing all the time. Respect had grown for Price Boss Leon Henderson, "The Great Jawbone," who had shown himself the only man in the defense setup who was never afraid to stick out his neck; who fought always for production, and was a man without malice to ward industry, labor or his colleagues. And new men, better men, were streaming in, taking key jobs; the Army & Navy Munitions Board was now topped by a knowing civilian—Wall Street's Ferd Eberstadt (see p. 62).

Respect for many of the others had dimmed. The U.S. had hoped great things from Donald Nelson, executive director of SPAB, priorities director of OPM. But Nelson had pulled his punches, refused to fight his way to a showdown. He was shrewd and able; no top leader, but a good No. 2 man.

William S. Knudsen, the pink-cheeked, snow-haired Great Dane, was now generally regarded as unfit to be a policy maker, however able as an assembly-line troubleshooter. He had pigeonholed the Reuther plan a year ago (the program of C.I.O.'s bumptious, able Walter Reuther to convert automobile plants into defense industries), was now forced this week to bring it out again and fix it up to make it work. He was the father of the commercial boom, in the sense that he had opposed attempts to stop it.