The New Administration: Secretary of Defense

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Personality: White-haired and warmly blue-eyed, Wilson (5 ft. 10 in.) is quiet and reserved, speaks slowly (with a Midwestern twang), thinks fast, although he is not given to snap decisions. He once accepted a challenge by fast-talking Walter Reuther to a public debate, argued him to a draw. In his office he works between two desks with several briefcases at his feet and a couple of phones at his elbow. Wilson knows every part of the G.M. empire, often unexpectedly calls a junior executive in outlying plants. He works around the clock, forgetting the time, goes home to his house near Detroit only two or three nights a week, spends many a night in an apartment at Detroit's G.M. Building, working alone in front of a fireplace. He is an Episcopalian.

Recreation: Poker, bridge, cattle-raising (he has the largest privately owned herd of Ayrshires in Michigan), swimming, occasionally hunting & fishing. He gave up ice skating and fox hunting reluctantly after a couple of spills. Married for 40 years, three sons and three daughters, all married. His favorite food: chipped beef and salted peanuts.

* Not to be confused with Charles E. (for Edward) Wilson, former president of General Electric, who resigned last March as Director of Defense Mobilization, after a row with Harry Truman, or with Charles E. (for Eben) Wilson, onetime vice president of Worthington Pump & Machinery Corp. Only common complaint of the Charles E. Wilsons: the mailman often mixed up their dividend checks.

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BOB MEYERS, whose 53-year-old brother, Dean, was shot dead in the 2002 Washington sniper attacks, on forgiving John Allen Muhammad, the mastermind behind the attacks, who was executed on Nov. 10 for his crimes

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