THE ADMINISTRATION: Di Gates Goes Home

Three weeks after Japan quit fighting, Under Secretary of the Navy Artemus L. ("Di") Gates sent his resignation to Harry Truman. The President asked him to help out a little longer. Big, quiet, forceful Di Gates had left the presidency of Manhattan's New York Trust Co. as soon as the nation seemed to be getting into trouble, had served the Navy for four years and three months, first as Assistant Secretary for Air, then as the No. 2 man in the secretariat. Last week Di Gates finally began clearing up his desk—the President had agreed to let him go at the end of the year.

When he goes home, Di Gates will have finished his second big job for the Navy. A Cedar Rapids, Iowa boy who had starred on Yale football teams in 1915 and '16, he was one of the early U.S. naval aviators of World War I. Thrice decorated, he was shot down by the Germans in France. Captured, he escaped, made his way toward the Swiss frontier and then, three days before the Armistice, was captured again. His peacetime career was equally spectacular—he became the New York Trust's president at 33. He went to Washington, D.C. in August 1941 at Franklin Roosevelt's request, dived into the vast job of organizing an expanded naval air arm, managed to fly some 300,000 miles to and from war zones and war plants before V-J day.

Wrote President Truman, in accepting his resignation:

"You have earned the right to return to private pursuits ... it was under your direction that the naval air arm played a major role ... in the Atlantic . . . and in driving to ultimate victory in the Pacific. . . ."