A Baltimore woman wrote to Bernard Mannes Baruch last week: "I was in a market the other day and a, lot of women were complaining about the OPA and all its rationing rules, and finally the proprietor said: 'Well, I agree with you, but this fellow Baruch has been appointed to a job in Washington and he'll straighten everything out.'"

Bernie Baruch will not be such a miracle man. No one could be. But that is the kind of confidence, amounting to a fervent faith, that the U.S. has learned to place in Bernie Baruch, multimillionaire stock speculator, brilliant generalissimo of the World War I Industries Board, adviser to five Presidents, and a private citizen who has been a public servant for a quarter of a century.

Elder Statesman Baruch, finally become an official member of the Administration, did not have to change his working habits. He still drew a salary of nothing a year, which is all he needs. In his new job as consultant to Czar of Czars James F. Byrnes, he still operated from his rainy-day office in a Carlton Hotel suite, from his sunny-day office on a Lafayette Park bench, prodigally dispensing his wisdom, always counseling hope, always sticking to the fundamentals, talking torrentially in a rich mixture of Broadway words and the jargon of high finance. It is this talk, almost as much as his demonstrated ability, that has created the Baruch legend. No man can hear him and go away poorer, for the tall old man has a Lincolnian sense of the humanities, a tolerance enriched with wit.

Now Bernie Baruch was in a position where his voice would be heard. His first official act was to sit down and pen a statement.

"In taking on this work," he wrote, "I am assuming that the Office of War Mobilization will be effective, and that it is to be the final expression of the Commander in Chief, and therefore, it will not be bypassed or sidetracked. Justice Byrnes, if not blocked, will improve things by more clearly defining the work of each administrator and stopping all of this infernal bickering. . . ."

Mornings for the Biceps. At 72, Bernie Baruch is still eminently fit to serve his country. He holds his 6-ft.-3 1/2-in. frame so erect that he always seems to tower. He weighs only about 20 lb. more than his best fighting weight (175). His clear blue eyes twinkle behind his pince-nez; his lean, patrician face is less wrinkled than the faces of many men 20 years younger; he has a healthy thatch of snow-white hair.

In his bedroom at the Shoreham Hotel where he has moved to be close to Jimmy Byrnes, he picks up a set of dumbbells every morning and goes through a vigorous bout of shadow boxing, shuffling over the carpet, tossing left hooks and right crosses.

His biceps are nearly as firm as in his favorite photograph. A few years ago, in the midst of the interventionist-isolationist debate, he knocked down a husky 40-year-old who cursed him on a Manhattan street.

After he has subdued his shadow, Bernie Baruch shaves himself with an old-fashioned straight razor. Then he climbs into old-fashioned long underwear (winter or summer), high-laced shoes with pull-straps at the back, and the suit his man Lacey has picked out for the day.

Afternoons for Work. On the way to his Carlton-Lafayette Park offices, Baruch always shares a cab, always strikes up a conversation, always gives the cabby a dollar.

At the Carlton, he always stops to make a few jokes with the girl at the cigar counter. Then he takes on the long round of visitors and telephone calls. (It is not unusual for three Administration czars, the White House, a horse owner and a suppliant hostess to phone him, all inside 20 minutes.) The sound of a buzzer, announcing a new caller, is stimulating to Bernie Baruch. He adjusts his hearing device, turns the battery in his vest pocket to full volume, and goes to work. He has a way of making all visitors, even the low liest, feel as if they are doing him a personal favor.

Recently Bernie Baruch had an 8:30 a.m. appointment with a Washington official, talked to him again that midnight. "How can you take it?" the visitor asked. Said Baruch: "As long as there's a German or a Jap left, and a pretty woman to look at, I can stand the pace."

Actually, Baruch now puts in few 16-hour days. Always fond of sleep, he likes better than ever to go to bed early, has an air-conditioning unit in his bedroom to help him drop off. When he has trouble going to sleep he takes a bath, as cold as he can stand it. In the mornings, he some times lolls in striped pajamas and red bathrobe as late as 10 a.m.

One idiosyncrasy to which Baruch feels entitled is dinner on the dot at 7:30. If guests are late, he starts to eat by himself. He seldom goes to Washington parties. "They sit around drinking cocktails when I want to eat." he growls.

Weekends for Home. On weekends, Baruch goes back to his home at 1055 Fifth Avenue, a regal Manhattan brownstone. This five-story house, which Baruch has owned for 17 years, is a composite of his cosmopolitan tastes.

Over the living-room mantle, as in a shrine, hangs a portrait of Woodrow Wil son, by Sir William Orpen, perhaps the best portrait of Wilson ever made. In the ballroom, in pre-rationing days, he some times dined as many as 96 people, to the accompaniment of footmen in bright blue livery.

In Baruch's blue-&-gold sitting room stand autographed photographs of Orlando, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson at Versailles; another Versailles picture of Louis Loucheur, Lloyd George and Baruch, with Winston Churchill standing behind, like the freshman he was; of Clemenceau in 1922; of William Gibbs McAdoo; Cordell Hull; Lord Cecil; the War Industries Board.

In his bathroom are photographs of old prize fighters, wrestlers, race horses. The house is filled with old English hunting prints of horses and hounds.

On Saturdays in New York Baruch still likes to go to the races--as he did last fortnight, with his close friend, Herbert Bayard Swope, to watch the Carter Handicap, once won by his colt Happy Argo. But he has given up his big Kershaw Stable and now makes only "nominal" .bets of $20-$50.

He still likes to go to prize fights, and swears he could tell, from the way Joe Louis was sweating the night he entered the ring against Billy Conn, that the champion was in poor shape and would have trouble winning. And he correctly guessed that Joe Louis would torpedo Lou Nova in the sixth round. Baruch watches all human affairs with his speculator's eye, studying the form, trying to guess the result. And when he is sure, he plunges, with the audacity and icy conviction of a big-time speculator.

Simple Arithmetic. Such conviction is sometimes tiresome, even oppressive to vaguer men. Once Baruch's old friend, Senator Carter Glass, was told by a colleague: "Baruch is too dogmatic." Said Senator Glass: "Yes. Especially on a proposition like two plus two equals four. Bernie can be dogmatic as hell about that."

To Baruch, many of the problems of organizing a nation for war are as simple as two plus two. He has firm convictions about this war, as well he might--his eyes have seen the panics and follies of two wars, and both times from a central vantage point denied most men.

In his old days on Wall Street, he used to say: "I am a speculator and make no apologies for it. The word comes from the Latin speculari--to observe. I observe." As mobilizer in World War I, he observed enough to prepare a report on mobilization (American Industry in the War) which might well serve as a text for all future wartime officials.

The Pirates. Bernard Mannes Baruch was born in South Carolina, of aristocratic, but not wealthy, Spanish-Portuguese-Jewish stock. His father was a Confederate surgeon in the Civil War: his middle name is in honor of a friend who gave his father a uniform and a sword.

After the carpetbag era, the family moved to Manhattan. Young Bernie went to City College, acquired a Phi Beta Kappa key, a reputation as an amateur boxer and ballplayer, and a deaf left ear as the result of a blow with a baseball bat. That deaf ear kept him out of West Point, his first choice for a career; and it has also enabled him, at crucial times, to hear only the questions he cares to answer.

A glimpse of the elder J. P. Morgan's imperious bulk convinced Graduate Bernie that he wanted to be a financier. He went to work in Wall Street as an unpaid apprentice.

He was extraordinarily successful. He studied and memorized corporation balance sheets; he courted his wife, Annie Griffen, the daughter of an Irish manufacturer, by reading railroad folders with her on a Central Park bench. He also picked up a pirate's knowledge of the shoals and reefs, the rich plunder and the dangers of the stockmarket from the tough crew who dominated Wall Street then: Thomas Fortune Ryan, James Keene, Henry Huddleston Rogers.

Big Operator. By the time he was 27, Bernie Baruch was a big-time operator himself. He earned his first big commission by buying control of Liggett & Myers for Ryan's Tobacco Trust. He bought a seat on the Exchange, made a spectacular killing by selling Amalgamated Copper short. (The stock dropped from 130 to 33 3/8). He met a few sickening reverses: he once said, "I've had some losses that would make an ordinary married man go out and shoot himself." But in 1916, just before Woodrow Wilson called him to serve in World War I, his taxable income was $2,300,000.

Baruch always operated alone, always held high his reputation for personal integrity. Twice unfriendly Congressional committees tried to spear him; each time he emerged without a scratch.

When he joined the World War I Industries Board, Baruch liquidated his market holdings and put $5,000,000 into Liberty Bonds: his taxable income dropped from its prewar $2,300,000 to $617,000 in 1917 and a loss in 1918. He spent $85,000 of his own money to send a government mission to England, and many more thousands to transport his board's 4,000 women workers back to their homes after the Armistice. (In the last 25 years, he has probably spent $2,500,000 on public service. Once in the '30s, alarmed by U.S. unpreparedness, he offered the Army $3,300,000 to buy machinery to make smokeless powder.)

Wartime Czar. Baruch was one of the few advisers who remained close to Woodrow Wilson throughout the war and the bitter days that followed. Woodrow Wilson called him "Dr. Facts"; he still refers to the President as "the most Christlike man who ever lived."

In wartime Washington, Baruch--with his stockmarket millions and his undisguised taste for race horses, horse trainers and prizefight managers--was a distinctly gaudy character. One excited White House caller shuddered: "Why, this man is nothing but a speculator!" Said Woodrow Wilson: "I thought he was a good speculator."

On the War Industries Board, Baruch surpassed Wilson's faith in him. In many ways, he wielded more power than Wilson himself. The military was dependent on his board for all munitions, as civilians were for their sustenance.

His record, in a battle of economies uncharted in previous U.S. history, was brilliant. His first job was to provide raw materials. With a speculator's foresight, he bought up a supply of toluol (for TNT) before the Army was fully aware of its importance. By adroit bluffing, he got the Chilean Government to help knock the price of nitrates from 7 1/2-c- to 4 1/8-c- a lb. He got jute from India at his price by threatening to withhold the silver shipments that stabilized India's rupee. He got iron ore from Sweden, wangled mules from Spain. In effect, he invented modern economic warfare.

Blueprinter. Baruch's master blueprint for industrial mobilization brought order out of the war's early confusion. As all-powerful chairman of the War Industries Board, he established the first wartime priorities system for materials and labor, set up production schedules, cut down civilian industries.

By 1943 standards, U.S. mobilization in 1918 was far from total war: the nation spent $35,000,000,000 in all of World War I v. an estimated $106,000,000,000 this year alone. Yet the industrial achievements under Baruch were near-miracles at the time. They awed the Germans, as the Junkers confessed in postwar memoirs.

After the war, Bernie Baruch went back to finance--this time as a creative investor. He made money during the '20s, quietly liquidated his investments before the 1929 crash. He went on serving as unofficial adviser to Presidents: Harding, Coolidge, Hoover. Under Franklin Roosevelt he has been a mother lode of fact and theory to the Administration--as well as its severest friendly critic.

Yet Baruch's blueprint has never been put into effect in World War II. Few of Washington's present-day officials have even read his report on World War I. The Administration did not heed the signs posted by Baruch, nor even the plans of other students of total war and industrial mobilization (e.g., the War Department).

This generation learned all over again by trial and error; the evidence is that U.S. war production is miraculous (except for May's poor record) despite a composite of Administration mistakes that, one by one, rocked the boat dangerously.

The learning period is about over. The job henceforth should be one of adjusting the war machine to new stresses and strains, to new demands, new strategies. In helping to make these adjustments, Bernie Baruch will be fully employed for a long time to come. But he will not truckle: his note accepting the job--with its apparent contempt for Franklin Roosevelt's previous czardoms--was his own personal declaration of independence. And yet he has a human weakness; he loves the glamor of it all--his old place at the ear of Presidents, even when the ear is turned away. He long ago developed a strong taste for lunching at the White House regularly. But it somehow does not affect his independence.

Baruch can afford, as few men in all the world, to be independent. Financially, he earned the right to retire some 40 years ago. As a public servant he had enough laurels 25 years ago. All he can hope for now, from his Washington job, is the satisfaction of a task well done.

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