THE ADMINISTRATION: Dear Charlie

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Charles E. Wilson,* the strong man of WPB, went to the White House to resign, as he had twice before in the past nine months. He had a personal reconversion problem of his own: he wanted to get back to the presidency of General Electric. And he was sick & tired of months of WPB haggling and sniping. Once more Franklin Roosevelt begged him to stay on as WPB's executive vice chairman—at least until Germany fell.

"I left . . . with renewed inspiration," Charlie Wilson said later. The inspiration had a very practical basis: the same day Franklin Roosevelt announced that WPB Chairman Don Nelson was off to China "for several months." Two things seemed clear: Don Nelson had been exiled; Charlie Wilson was now in charge of WPB. The President had clearly taken Wilson's side in the long-smoldering Nelson-Wilson dispute.

What the fighting was about, besides a clash of personalities, was certainly not clear to the U.S. and did not seem to be clear even to Franklin Roosevelt. Nelson's friends pictured him as the friend of little business and reconversion, bravely battling the Army, the Navy, and Charlie Wilson. Wilson, however, insisted that it was he who eight months ago had drawn up WPB's only full-scale reconversion plans.

But Wilson was also the man in WPB that the Army & Navy went to, in order to get things done. He absorbed some of the Army & Navy's impatience at the growing talk of peace production when the battlefronts were short of many needed items. Like Lieut. General Brehon B. Somervell and others in the Army, Wilson had underestimated the strength of the national feeling that the European phase of the war is about over, that it is high time to think of peacetime readjustments.

Thus Charlie Wilson—despite the fact that he too wanted to quit his war job and reconvert G.E.—had come to seem the villain. And Donald Nelson, fumbling feebly with minuscule moves toward reconversion (he is called "Mr. Next Tuesday" by disgruntled WPBsters) had come to seem the hero of Reconversion Now,

Chinese Burial. By taking Wilson's side, the President set off a startlingly loud Washington uproar. Nelson's friends —who included a group of the New Deal's most expert hatchet men—called his Presidential mission a "Chinese burial." They charged that the man who was fighting for "the little fellow" was being "sent to Siberia," had been given a "kick in the teeth."

Hastily the President issued a statement dressing up the Nelson mission as of high importance, and saying such talk was "wrong . . . unjust ... a disservice" (TIME, Aug. 28).