A Big Job for a Big Man

THE CONGRESS Job for a Big Man

One of the men who can do most to help or hamper the progress of U.S. defense is the chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. Last week the Senate's No. i clown got the job.

The Senate steering committee had stalled about filling the job left vacant by the death of Morris Sheppard of Texas for several weeks, casting a longing eye toward Military Affairs' next to senior member, Elbert Duncan Thomas of Utah, who Is an all-out-aid-to-Britain man and an industrious student of military needs. But the rule of seniority is dear to the Senate: historians could count only two contemporary occasions when it has been upset. Now the Senators could not bring themselves to break the rule again.

So they decided henceforth the job of guiding military bills through the Senate should be filled by North Carolina's strapping Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, who in his ten years in the Senate has sponsored no important piece of legislation.

Some of "Roaring Robert's" distinctions:

> He is the most-traveled man in the Senate, having spent more time on junkets than any other Senator.

>He can speak glibly and interminably on any subject, and does.

>He spends perhaps less time in the arduous and useful tasks of committee work than any other Senator.

>When not seeking re-election he is the Senate's fanciest-dressed man, with a pas sion for bow ties, double-breasted suits and colored shirts.

>He is the Senator who always has time to escort movie actresses about the Capitol.

> He is the Senate's master of the large hello, a flag-waving, gladhanding, back-patting, butter-spreading statesman.

> In his ten years he has constantly harped on one subject: exclusion of all immigrants.

> Although criticized publicly many times for his supposed Axis sympathies, he has been completely consistent in his isolationism, voting to delay conscription, against the Lend-Lease Act and all revisions of the Neutrality Act.

Shortly before Hitler attacked Poland, Military Expert Reynolds prophesied flatly: "Of course there'll be no war." Day before the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway, he declared that the Scandinavian countries were going to keep out of the war.

Last week the proud possessor of a new importance, he ejaculated: "I want to take this opportunity to thank the Hearst newspapers. ... I shall always do what I think best."

New Senator

One day last week one Joseph Rosier climbed into his car, said good-by to Fairmont, West Va., where he had lived for 44 of his 71 years, and drove to Washington. There, behind a walnut desk, he gingerly sat himself down, pulled up his black pants and plunked his feet on a drawer. For the next two years he was to be addressed as "Senator."

Behind this homely American trans formation was a homelier story of American politics. When West Virginia's overdressed, cadaverous Matthew Mansfield Neely quit the Senate to become Governor of the State last Jan. 12 at midnight, he exercised his new gubernatorial power to appoint as his successor his old friend Dr. Joseph Rosier, president of Fairmont State Teachers College. But Homer Adams Holt, who retired as Governor that same night, likewise claimed the right to make the appointment, naming his old friend Clarence Eugene Martin, ex-president of the American Bar Association.

Still arguing as the clock struck 12, outgoing Holt and quick-change artist Neely made their separate, solemn appointments for the Senate seat that was not vacant until the instant Neely vacated it. Long and wearily Senate legal pundits debated who should get the decision. Four months passed.

Of no help to Neely's Rosier was the unfortunate discovery in Neely's old Rules Committee files of many a personal note he had jotted down on former colleagues.

One Senator was "the biggest hog on Capitol Hill," another "a total loss--without insurance," another a "smart aleck." Libeled Senators breathed fire, whetted their knives for Neely's appointee.

But fire, knives, legalistic arguments were of no avail in the face of a bigger issue. Ex-Senator Matt Neely was a friend of the Administration, and last week the Administration could still dig up enough political debtors, scrape together enough votes to run the Senate. The president of Fairmont State Teachers College got his job by just two votes--40-to-38.

Said he, looking comfortably around the bare walls of his new office in Washington: "I'm not taking this job too seriously."

Starter's Gun

From the moment the President signs a bill which the Senate passed last week, he will be armed with legal powers never before held by anyone in U.S. history.

That measure is the Priorities Bill, creating powers which the World War I Congress would never grant the War Industries Board--power to do legally things which Bernard M. Baruch had to wangle by what he called "buttering and honey-fuggling." Only Army and Navy contracts now have mandatory priorities in the U.S.

The new bill will grant absolute priorities to all Government-agency contracts or private industry contracts deemed vital to the defense program. These priorities would obtain all the way down through subcontracts and sub-orders for parts, supplies and raw materials. The bill also grants the President full control over the distribution and allocation of all products and materials whose shortages affect the armament program.

The Administration had won a quick victory during the week over the House-approved Cox amendment, which would have set up the Priorities Division separately from the defense bureaus, would have frozen into place as Priorities Director snow-crested, urbane Edward R. Stettinius Jr., and would have subjected all priorities to the final veto rulings of the Army and Navy Munitions Board.

Under pressure from 0PM the Senate killed the amendment as unanimously as the House had passed it. Main reason: general agreement that the military must have only powers of specification, not of full priorities. Speaker Sam Rayburn busied himself with ways & means to save the House's red face when the matter came up in conference.

Besides extending the President's powers, the Senate performed the almost impossible feat of further expanding those of Secretary of Commerce Jesse H. Jones. To the House the Senate sent a bill increasing RFC's note-issuing powers by $1,500,000,000 and authorizing RFC: 1) to create corporations to produce, sell, acquire, carry or otherwise deal in strategic and critical materials; 2) to purchase and lease land, plants, machinery, etc., for such production; 3) to produce or purchase railroad equipment.

Within a week, probably, the President will have his priorities powers fully legalized. There will then remain the all-important problem of delegating those powers so that finally, a year late but better than never, the U.S. defense effort can be centralized. Washington believed that the President was about ready to act; that he was near the end of his long search for a single administrator to manage the defense program; that industry committees (see p. 83) which are central to the functioning of priorities, will be announced shortly. Along with indications that the Army's Ordnance Department and the Office of Production Management were at long last showing signs of significant activity, this belief was the most hopeful defense news since World War II began.

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