DEFENSE: The Organization Man

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As president, McElroy still wanted the facts. "Just as he remembers names and faces," says a P. & G. executive, "Mac remembers facts, and woe be to anyone in the Pentagon who doesn't remember that Mac can remember every damn thing he ever saw. He can look at a page with hundreds of figures on it and get to the source of any error. He has the same ability to detect a flaw in an argument."

Procter & Gamble's organization existed to give its president the facts—and McElroy used them to make his top-level decisions. When a scientist wrote P. & G. suggesting that fluorine in toothpaste might prevent tooth decay, the company hired the scientist, launched an intensive research project which came up with the information that enabled McElroy to give the go-ahead on Crest.

Largely because of the impetus Neil McElroy gave to research and development, about 70% of Procter & Gamble's income last year came from products that did not exist a dozen years before. Overall results of the McElroy regime: Procter & Gamble's net sales doubled, moving over the billion-a-year mark, and P. & G. twice won awards from the American Institute of Management as the best-run company in the U.S.

"I'll Nail It Together." One of P. & G.'s traditions is that its executives should be active in the life of their community, and

Neil McElroy became Cincinnati's No. 1 civic participant, belonging to everything from the Community Chest to the opera association (as well as the Rookwood Historical and Philosophical Society, a bigwig, poker-playing group). In 1950 McElroy's public spirit took him to a luncheon for the president of Columbia University, who needed $25,000 to help finance Columbia's American Assembly, a series of conferences on public issues. After Columbia's president explained the project, McElroy asked him to "wait around for a few moments while I nail this thing together." On the spot he raised the $25,000, and Columbia's Dwight D Eisenhower was most impressed.

In 1952 Cincinnatian McElroy contributed to the preconvention campaign of Cincinnatian Robert A. Taft, but supported Ike in the general election. As a Harvard overseer and an adviser to the University of Cincinnati, McElroy had long been a lay educational leader, and in 1954 President Eisenhower tapped him for a big educational assignment: chairmanship of the White House Conference on Education. Before taking the job McElroy first pondered whether it would "be good for P. & G." Then he bluntly asked Ike: "Are you genuinely interested in this problem, or are you doing this for window dressing?" Ike liked the frankness, assured McElroy that he was interested, and McElroy started on his 18-month task. Working with a group of rugged individualists, he came out with a hard-hitting, unified report recommending that expenditures for education be doubled. The President was again impressed. Last July, seeking a successor to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, he sent the call to McElroy.