Corporations: An Appetite for the Future

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On workdays, Thornton bounds out of bed at dawn without the aid of an alarm clock, after a glass of orange juice (and occasionally a swim in his pool) begins making phone calls to the East Coast, which is three hours ahead of California. Before 8 he is off in his 300-h.p. black Ford Galaxie to the office, ten minutes away. Even on his frequent trips to Washington to consult with Pentagon brass or Government procurement officers, he keeps the same farm-boy hours, sometimes showing up at fellow Whiz Kid McNamara's office as early as 6 a.m. "I often find them there just finishing breakfast when I get in at 7:20 a.m.," says Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell L. Gilpatric.

48-Hour Lieutenant. Though it often is only retrospect that sees in childhood the signs of future accomplishment, Tex Thornton certainly got early lessons in responsibility. Born in the tiny north-central Texas farm town of Haskell, he never enjoyed a normal family life. His restless, adventurous father, Word Augustus Thornton, ran off soon after Tex was born and built a small fortune (which he lost in the 1929 crash) blowing out oil-well fires with nitroglycerin. Tex grew up as the man of the family. He seldom saw his father, who was later murdered by a hitchhiking couple he befriended. Tex's firm mother, determined that he would not travel the same road as his father, stressed the need for responsibility until it enveloped him like a Sunday suit.

When he was twelve, his mother encouraged him to buy land and pay for it with money he earned doing odd jobs.

He accumulated nearly 40 acres, and by the time he was 14 every store in town would accept his personal check. At 19, he and a chum set up a successful gasoline station and dealership for Plymouth and Chrysler, but Tex left it after a few months to go to Texas Technological College in Lubbock. He switched from engineering to business administration, quit impatiently in his junior year and borrowed $50 to go to Washington, where in 1934 he landed a $1,440-a-year clerk's job at the Department of the Interior and continued his studies at night.

Thornton might have disappeared from sight and fame right there except for a single assignment: the job of writing a report on the financing of low-cost federal housing. He showed his ability for boiling down a massive amount of statistics and information into its bas ic essentials. The report he turned out was a minor masterpiece of clarity and vision that somehow got to the desk of Robert Lovett, Assistant Secretary of War for Air. Deeply impressed, Lovett talked Thornton, then 28, into joining the pre-Pearl Harbor Army as a second lieutenant charged with the unusually heavy responsibility of finding a way to put the Army's air arm on a businesslike basis.