New Administration: Parade of Talent

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For weeks the Great Kennedy Recruiting Drive turned out better than one draftee a day for the New Frontier—and not even an occasional conscientious objector slowed the parade of talent into front-line jobs. But last week the recruiters stepped on a booby trap, with everybody watching.

Thanks largely to a speculative story in the New York Times, Georgia's Governor Ernest Vandiver suddenly found himself pegged as a likely choice for Secretary of the Army. The reports said that two powerful Georgians, Senator Richard Russell and Congressman Carl Vinson, were pressuring Kennedy on Vandiver's behalf. The news was as much a surprise to Vandiver, who wants to finish out his two remaining years in the statehouse, as it was to Kennedy himself, who had no intention of naming a segregationist to the sensitive Army job. To avoid embarrassment all round, Kennedy at first allowed that Vandiver was "under consideration," then went through the motions of calling the Governor to ask if he would like the job —but let him understand that the right answer was no.* Vandiver agreeably begged off; just as agreeably, Kennedy wrote that when Vandiver finishes his term, "I hope it will be possible for you to join the Administration in a position of responsibility."

At week's end, Kennedy still did not have his Army Secretary, but the recruiting drive had filled up nearly 50 other top jobs beneath Cabinet level, left another 50 to 100 to go before Inauguration Day. Among the happier choices:

John Jay McCloy, 65, director of the U.S. Disarmament Administration. Bald, brusque Banker-Lawyer McCloy, a Republican, has a flair for doing the almost impossible—a characteristic that suits his new job of supervising the new Administration's disarmament policy. A graduate of Amherst ('16) and Harvard Law School, McCloy began his Government life at the edge of World War II. After resigning from his Manhattan law practice, he became a troubleshooting assistant to the Secretary of War, worked in the distinguished circle that included General George C. Marshall, Robert A. Lovett, James Forrestal, Robert Patterson. His war duties done, McCloy went briefly back to law, but in 1946 he agreed to place the disorganized International Bank for Reconstruction and Development on its financial feet. McCloy's dictatorial methods won no friends among his fellow bank directors, but when Harry Truman drafted him for High Commissioner to Occupied Germany (1949-52), the bank had an operational profit. In Germany, he helped an ex-mayor named Konrad Adenauer lead West Germany toward its new prosperity. McCloy then returned to private life as chairman of the Chase National (later Chase Manhattan) Bank but served as an unofficial, unpaid adviser on disarmament problems to the late John Foster Dulles.