The Business Side

When the new National Military Establishment was rushed into being, a fortnight ago, several top-level jobs were still unmanned. Last week, President Truman filled all the vacancies. To nobody's surprise, the man he named Chief of Staff of the newly independent U.S. Air Force was General Carl Spaatz, commander of the Army Air Forces since early 1946. His new title put jet-driven "Tooey" Spaatz, 56, on an equal footing with Army Chief of Staff Dwight Eisenhower and Naval Chief of Operations Chester Nimitz.

Most of the other Truman appointments were a laudable effort to staff the "business side" of the defense establishment with tried and tested businessmen. The appointments:

Dr. Vannevar Bush, 57, to the $14,000-a-year chairmanship of the Research & Development Board, charged with keeping the U.S. out front in the development of new weapons. A lean and salty Yankee who likes to quote Kipling, play a flute and weave baskets, Vannevar Bush mobilized U.S. scientists in World War II and coordinated their work on the atom bomb.

Arthur M. Hill, 55, onetime president of Atlantic Greyhound Corp., to the chairmanship of the National Security Resources Board, charged with preparing plans for coordinating civilian with military mobilization. In World War II, Hill worked for the Navy Department, variously bossing its Transportation Branch, its Rubber Survey Committee, its Public Works Division.

Arthur S. Barrows, 63, a newcomer to Washington, to be Under Secretary of the Air Force. A squarejawed, hot-tempered protege of squarejawed, hot-tempered Sears, Roebuck Board Chairman General Robert E. Wood, Barrows became president of Sears in 1942, then vice chairman of the board in 1946. He left Sears last winter. His forte: administration and management.

Eugene M. Zuckert, 35, lawyer and onetime assistant dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, to be an Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, along with Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney (TIME, Sept. 29). Zuckert started doing legal and administrative work for the War Department in 1946, after a brief stint in the Surplus Property Administration.

Gordon Gray, 38, redheaded scion of North Carolina's tobacco aristocracy and publisher of two newspapers at Winston-Salem, to be Assistant Secretary of the Army. Gray's father, the late Bowman Gray, was president of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. (Camels), a job also once held by his Uncle James. Young Gray made dazzling scholastic records at Virginia's swank Woodberry Forest School, the University of North Carolina and Yale Law School. He practiced law briefly in Manhattan and Winston-Salem before he bought his way into the newspaper business in 1937.

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