Sentence for Anna

It took Anna Marie Lederer Rosenberg, Manhattan's famed labor and public-relations expert and political insider, a week to make up her mind to accept her biggest job yet: chief assistant to Brigadier General Frank T. Hines, 64, the new director of Retraining and Reemployment. This week she stipulated that her acceptance was only for a very limited period--not more, she hopes, than two months. Even so short a Washington assignment she regards as "the longest sentence of my life."

"SmallTown Girl." Except when it is the most effective way to get things done, Anna Rosenberg is never coy. Dynamic small (5 ft. 3 in., 115 lb.), dark and 43, she has always stayed away from Washington jobs -- except at the weekly visit-to-the-President level. She is reluctant to go to Washington because: 1) "I work best in the field. . . . I'm just a small-town girl"; 2) "I still think the war is nowhere near over"; 3) her husband Julius, a well-known rug dealer, and all her roots are firmly embedded in Manhattan concrete.

Some of Anna's fame as an expert on labor relations comes from her exploits: she loves to put on overalls and hip boots to crawl into a subway tunnel or down an Adirondack iron mine 3,000 ft. But as regional War Manpower commissioner, she has done a first-rate job in New York. There she evolved the "Buffalo Plan" that became the national model for the manipulation of manpower shortages, from Connecticut to California (TIME, Sept. 27). She is an old hand at soft-soaping labor and management into agreements; a 1038 New Yorker profile said, "She is ... a kind of switchboard through which enemies can make connections." In all such operations she has managed to earn the trust of the unions at the same time that she was earning large fees from their employers. Said one businessman who learned his labor lesson a harder way: "Half an hour of her time would have been worth $10,000 to me."*

Political Sophisticate. But intense, Hungarian-born Anna Rosenberg is on her way as a master politician. She began politicking at 17 at Wadleigh High, a girls' school where she managed to head up--and off--a strictly masculine rebellion against compulsory military training for high-school students. But she later learned the trade all the way from Tammany ward heeling to the Governor's mansion. Years ago she learned that high-sounding central Government jobs may involve more politics than production--or praise.

The job that finally sucked Mrs. Rosenberg into Washington is highly charged politically. She will have umpteen Washington agencies plus 20,000,000 servicemen and warworkers to cope with. Her boss, Brigadier General Hines, will retain his 21-year-old job as Veterans Administrator. The General is not quite what Bernard Baruch prescribed in his Reconversion Report, "of such outstanding caliber as to command the immediate confidence of the country," but he is an iron-willed, Army-trained administrator of the Old School. The gap between their social philosophies is at least as wide as the difference between their ages (21 years).

* When she was New York State Social Security director in 1942, Congress dug up the fact that, besides her $7,500 Government salary, she was drawing $28,500 for advising R. H. Macy, I. Miller and Nelson Rockefeller (in his private capacity). She cut short Congressional objections by proving that she got all of this private income in return for six Macy-Bamberger visits on Saturday afternoons, three Miller meetings (two of them at lunch) and an occasional after-hours call on Rockefeller.

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