THE PRESIDENCY: Help Wanted

After two months of hunting, Harry S. Truman was still looking for a man—any man—to be his price stabilizer. The qualifications he set up for the $17,500-a-year job were modest enough. The President stipulated only that the candidate have the "guts" to take the job.

But though the job had been offered to more than a dozen men, there were no takers. The few who nibbled got away, well aware that the probable rewards of becoming price stabilizer were a set of ulcers and a head start towards becoming the most disliked man in the U.S.

The Unemployed. The President had also failed to hook a full-time civilian defense director, or someone to be Assistant Attorney General in charge of antitrust prosecutions. At the end of the lame-duck session of the 81st Congress he would have eleven Democratic ex-Senators and 47 ex-Congressmen to pick from. But what he really needed were some able men from industry, and they wouldn't come.

Taking advantage of a new law, the burgeoning defense agencies had been solving their manpower troubles by offering applicants the top civil service pay scales—from $11,200 to $14,000 a year. Last year Congress provided for 400 such jobs in the entire federal service. This year the lid was lifted for the defense agencies, whereupon an estimated 500 candidates in these agencies alone were clamoring for such pay. Last week the President issued an executive order limiting the agencies to 150 such jobs.

He also reluctantly took a further step that ran counter to everything that liberals—and Harry Truman himself—had long stood for. Few businessmen, however patriotic, he concluded, would willingly leave the security of their jobs, their pension rights and their privacy for the modest pay and the hazards of reputation that go with Government jobs.

Nothing-a-Year. So he decided to revive that much-maligned character, the dollar-a-year man—withone difference: he would be paid, not a dollar a year, but nothing. As a Senator, heading his famed war investigating committee, Harry Truman in 1942 had declared forthrightly: "No man can honestly serve two masters . . . The committee is opposed to taking free services from people with axes to grind . . ." Now necessity had changed his mind. He announced that henceforth the Government may employ persons of "outstanding experience and ability, without compensation," allowing them to keep drawing salaries from private sources while working for the Government.

The "nothing-a-year" men would be forbidden to negotiate or sign contracts with any company in which they had a "direct or indirect interest." As another precaution, the names of all such men and their private employers were to be published in the Federal Register for inspection. The President made it clear, however, that he was unhappy about the whole thing.