National Affairs: Men & Jobs

Hoping to finish selecting the general staff of his Administration before he took off for Korea, Dwight Eisenhower spent long hours last week matching men and jobs. He talked it over with most of the candidates himself, conferred frequently with an impromptu personnel selection board headed by Herbert Brownell, who is to be Ike's Attorney General. Out of their deliberations came a dozen more appointments, which underscored the whole character of Ike's team: internationally minded and progressive in foreign affairs, middle-of-the-road to conservative on domestic issues, with a heavy leavening of businessmen, who are likely to concentrate on efficient management rather than new social and economic changes.

By this week Ike had rounded out his full Cabinet. The three final appointments: Michigan's Arthur Summerfield, chairman of the "Republican National Committee, to be Postmaster General; Boston's Sinclair Weeks, Republican finance chairman, to be Secretary of Commerce; President Martin Durkin of the A.F.L. Plumbers and Pipe Fitters Union to be Secretary of Labor (see THE NEW ADMINISTRATION).

Another appointment of near-Cabinet rank helped repay Ike's political debts to two important groups of supporters: 1) the women; 2) Southern Democrats for Ike. For Federal Security Administrator he picked Mrs. Oveta Gulp Hobby, Houston publisher and first commander of the WAC, and invited her to sit in on Cabinet meetings because of the "vital importance of her position"—supervising the Social Security program and a clutch of welfare offices including the Public Health Service, the Office of Education and the Food and Drug Administration.

A poised and handsome 47, with a flair for wearing clothes and a brisk, aloof air of success, Oveta Hobby first took to politics at the age of ten when she began reading the Congressional Record aloud to her father, a lawyer and state legislator. At 20, she was parliamentarian for the Texas legislature, later went to work as a clerk on the Houston Post. She married its publisher, ex-Governor William Pettus Hobby (she was 26, he was 52) in 1931, soon became a power on the newspaper (this fall she formally became its editor & publisher). She has two children, William Pettus Jr., 20, and Jessica, 15.

Of her new job she says only: "I'm in favor of people having security and I hope I can help." One Washington big shot tried his hand at a capsule characterization last week by comparing Mrs. Hobby to the Truman Administration's No. 1 woman executive, Anna Rosenberg. "Where Anna is earthy, Oveta is aristocratic; where Anna is agitated and hell bent for infighting, Oveta is cool and superior; where Anna sparkles and jangles with brain work, Oveta maintains authority simply by acting as if it were her right."

Other appointments of the week: