Armed Forces: Engine Charlie

"The price of progress is trouble," said Charles Erwin Wilson, "and I must be making lots of progress." Wilson knew what he was talking about: a bulky man with cowlicked white hair and a round, mobile face, he had a habit of blurting out whatever was on his mind. That habit got him into plenty of trouble—and sometimes diverted attention from abilities that Wilson brought to the presidency of the world's greatest industrial corporation and to the post of Secretary of Defense as the U.S. entered the missile age. Last week at Richland, his showplace plantation in Louisiana, Charlie Wilson, 71, died in his sleep of a heart attack.

"You Talk More." Charlie Wilson had an inventive mind. The son of Ohio schoolteacher parents, he went to work for the Westinghouse Electric & Mfg. Co. in Pittsburgh as an 18¢-an-hour apprentice engineer, by the time he was 22 had designed Westinghouse's first auto starter and was on his way up. He also had a touch for labor-management relations. Having moved to General Motors and become its youngest vice president, at 38, he was assigned by G.M. President William Knudsen to take charge of the corporation's dealings with labor. "You have more patience than I have," said Knudsen, "and you talk more." Wilson steered General Motors through the labor conflicts of the late '30s and won the respect of organized labor. Once, when he was recovering from a hip fracture suffered during an impetuous attempt at ice skating, Wilson got an idea for inspiring the labor force by giving raises based on increased production. Wilson coupled his "productivity clause" with the famed cost-of-living "escalator clause" in a package that has become a basic provision in auto industry labor contracts.

When Knudsen resigned to go to Washington just before World War II, Charlie Wilson took over as president of G.M. Under his presidency, General Motors became the greatest cornucopia of war materiel in human history. From its production lines flowed a quarter of the tanks and armored cars, nearly half of the machine guns and carbines, three-quarters of the diesel engines used by the U.S. armed forces during the war. Dwight Eisenhower first encountered Wilson while serving as the Army's Chief of Staff in the postwar years; in 1952, after Ike was elected Pres ident, Wilson was his choice for the job of Secretary of Defense.

"You Men." Washington, although it eventually became quite fond of him, never understood Charlie Wilson—and Detroit's Wilson certainly never understood Washington. The Wilson remarks that would have passed for wry banter in a General Motors boardroom became mat ters of controversy in the capital's political climate. During the closed hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee on his confirmation, Wilson made a comment that was widely misquoted and was to dog him throughout his governmental years. According to the press, Wilson told the Senators: "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." What he actually said: "For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."