Business: Fizz & Vinegar

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When 26-year-old Donald Cook joined the SEC as a lowly financial examiner in 1935, he "wanted some day to be a commissioner and if the fates were kind . . . chairman." Last week the fates, in the form of Harry Truman, were kind. The President named Cook SEC Chairman to succeed Harry A. McDonald, who took over as RFC boss. Cook is a tough-talking, fast-moving bureaucrat with a sharp legal and financial mind and the desire to "get up some of the old fizz and vinegar that SEC had in the '30s."

Cook has fizz to spare. As a youngster in Escanaba, Mich., he started peddling papers, helped work his way through the University of Michigan with a job in the library and with bridge winnings, and started at the bottom in SEC. He got a law degree at night school, moved up to assistant director, then spent two years in the Justice Department before he left Government service in June 1947 to enter private law practice.

Small Job. Before long, he was making close to $100,000 a year, made another chunk playing the market. In 1949, when he was worth $250,000, he felt he "could afford" to go back to SEC as a commissioner. But the job wasn't big enough to keep him busy. So in 1950 he became chief counsel to Senator Lyndon Johnson's "watchdog" committee on preparedness, even though he had to do most of his work at night. He was largely responsible for the committee's reports on wasteful military spending, tin, etc.

In his new job, Cook will step right into the middle of a red-hot fight between his agency and the nation's stock exchanges and brokers. The SEC has been collecting about $1,000,000 a year in fees from stock exchanges and registrants of new issues and for minor SEC chores. A month ago, in line with a congressional command to make itself more selfsupporting, SEC announced that it would levy seven new types of fees. Among them: an annual registration fee of $50 for brokers and dealers, plus $10 for each partner, employee, etc. engaged in selling securities or supervising the sale; a registration fee of from $30 to $2,500 for investment companies and a registration fee ranging from $500 to $25,000 for public-utility companies. All told, SEC expects to raise $1,225,000 a year in the new fees, which would still leave it operating $3,600,000 in the red next year.

Big Uproar. Last week, New York Stock Exchange President G. Keith Funston charged that the fees were not fees at all, but a tax: "If the [SEC] can impose this type of tax, so could every other Government agency . . . the Department of Agriculture might place a tax of so much per acre upon every farmer."

Cook snapped right back that the new assessments were fees and he intended to collect them. He added: "These boys are tough and they play rough ... They know legally we are right. If this is unconstitutional, they can take it to court."