National Affairs: The General's Successor

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"Let's Get Out of the Trap." After the war he tried a year of law at Harvard, then switched to business administration. In 1919 he married Adele Brown, the daughter of Manhattan Financier James Brown. Father-in-law Brown gave Lovett the up-from-messenger treatment in Brown Brothers (later Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.), finally made him a full partner and sent him abroad to survey the world with a banker's cool eye. In the 1930s, the eye spotted trouble in Germany, and Lovett warned the firm to get its investments out. In early 1940, from Switzerland, he wrote a penetrating report of the phony war, and accurately predicted the fall of France.

A man with a long history of stomach trouble, Republican Bob Lovett has saved himself from total frustration in Democratic Washington by exercising a deft sense of humor. (Once, after a long pounding by a congressional committee, he told a friend: "It was like getting a shave and having your appendix out at the same time.") He likes movies, painting and jive, detests physical exercise, and reads everything from Thomas Mann to whodunits.

To his new job Bob Lovett brings a thoroughgoing realism much like that of his good friend and predecessor, Jim Forrestal. "This is a severe emergency," said he a year ago. "This is perhaps the last clear chance to get ourselves in shape for the unknown future . . . We tried peace through weakness for generations, with no profit in it, and it seems to me as a matter of conviction that peace through strength might be an enlightening experience."

Or, as he likes to say privately, "To hell with the cheese. Let's get out of the trap."

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For his Deputy Secretary of Defense, Lovett picked ECAdministrator William C. Foster, 54, one of the ablest desk men in Washington. Foster's deputy, Economist Richard Bissell, moved up to be acting boss of ECA, which will probably shrink to a shadow of its former self under congressional insistence that military aid to Europe is a substitute for (not an addition to) economic aid.