PPB

Hacking through the tangled jungle of purchasing, priorities and production, U. S. defense workers, from OPM down to field buyers, see plenty of trees, fallen trunks, clogged footpaths. Great danger to defense and to the future economy of the U. S. is that they are too busy with the trees to see the forest. And inevitably they cannot see beyond into the economic swamps and highlands that lie ahead, after the U. S. has passed through World War II's overshadowing emergency.

Last week OPM acquired a new agency with one job: to get a hilltop perspective of the present and future, advise the U. S. how to avoid crooked paths and hopelessly blocked roads. Announced by OPM's production director, John David Biggers, was a nine-man agency to be called the Production Planning Board. Its function: centralized planning of the defense program, long-range planning for the sag that must inevitably come when the U. S. has more swords than plowshares.

Head of the new agency was a newcomer to OPM's staff of $1-a-yearlings who have patriotically left big jobs to help with the bigger job of U. S. defense. Yet no novice to wartime hurlyburly is PPB's chubby, good-natured Samuel Richard Fuller. Mr. Fuller, who looks like Cinemactor Eugene Pallette with spectacles, joined the Navy (at 37) in World War I, was soon working under Assistant Secretary Franklin Delano Roosevelt as boss of steel-buying for the Navy. After the war Commander Fuller went from steel to cotton, silk substitutes, today is president of North American Rayon Corp. and American Bemberg Corp. (synthetic yarns and fabrics).

No. 2 man on the board is the President's fidus Achates, Harry Hopkins. Ostensibly appointed to give the Fullermen the benefit of his observations in Britain, he is also Franklin Roosevelt's outward sign of the board's inward grace and potency. PPB will be no bull-session board, in time may well supplant OPM as No.11 planning agency, keeping OPM busy doing the tasks PPB lays out for it.

The committee's personnel spanned the breadth of the defense effort--armed forces, capital, labor, education. Other members:

> Grey-haired, spectacled Admiral William Harrison Standley (retired), Chief of Naval Operations from 1933 to 1937, who thinks "it is our war as much as Britain's."

> Major General James Henry Burns, an ordnance officer of the A. E. F. and now executive officer in the office of the Under Secretary of War, where Army's buying is done.

> Swarthy, energetic George Meany, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor.

> James Barren Carey, youthful (29) national secretary of C. I. O. and apostle of labor as a cooperative and producing group.

> John Lee Pratt, retired executive vice president of General Motors. Still consulted in General Motors policy, John Pratt loves facts, hates fancy, would probably sell his Virginia dairy farm in a minute if it didn't pay its way.

> William Edward Levis, board chairman of Owens-Illinois Glass Co., who inherited his business (the old Illinois Glass Co.), made it grow and prosper mightily.

> Robert Ernest Doherty, president of Carnegie Tech, good bowler, golfer and mathematician who, besides knowing the inside of U. S. manufacturing technology, is a crack public relations man.

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