"It Makes a Difference"

To find a new commandant for the U.S. Marine Corps to succeed retiring General A. A. Vandegrift, President Truman last week delved down to the eighth name on the rank list. His man: Major General Clifton B. Gates, 54, one of the Pacific war's most brilliant island-hopping campaigners, now boss of the Marine school at Quantico, Va.

Cliff Gates, a lean, six-foot Tennessean, became a Marine lieutenant in 1917. In France, he fought through Belleau Wood, Chateau-Thierry, Soissons and the Argonne Forest. Once, pinned in a pocket with only two men left alive in his company, he held off the Germans until fresh forces arrived. He had so many close calls that fellow officers named him "Lucky" Cates. Even so, he was wounded six times and gassed once, came home with a Navy Cross, a D.S.C. (with oak leaf cluster), a Croix de Guerre (with two palms and a gold star).

Between wars, Cates served variously as a White House aide to Woodrow Wilson, recruiting officer and China hand. In May 1942, he was appointed commanding officer of the ist Marine Regiment. With the 1st, he helped seize Guadalcanal. After Guadalcanal, he moved to Saipan, took over command of the 4th Marine Division. Gates led the 4th in its famed assaults on Tinian and Iwo Jima. Military experts have since described the Tinian assault as "the perfect amphibious operation." To get ready for it, Cates personally did aerial reconnaissance over the island. Once ashore, he visited the front lines almost daily to study terrain and boost morale, often alarming his staff by the risks he took. His credo: "If the men know who their commander is, it makes a lot of difference."

To nobody's surprise, the President last week also appointed General Omar N. Bradley to succeed Ike Eisenhower as the Army's chief of staff. Bradley will move over from his civilian post as Veterans Administrator as soon as General Eisenhower goes to Columbia University.

But the President did have a surprise up his sleeve in his choice of a successor for Bradley. The man he named to head the Veterans Administration was Carl R. Gray Jr., 58, hearty, joke-loving vice president of the Chicago & North Western Railway Co. Railroader Gray, whose late father was president of the Union Pacific, is a crack organizer who, as a red-tape-hating general in World War II, won the high respect of both Eisenhower and Omar Bradley for his ability to push rail lines into one side of a European town almost before German forces could retreat out the other.

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