The Happy Private

Private Gordon Gray had been in the Army only a week when he had a gripe. Bedbugs, he complained to the supply sergeant at Fort Bragg, were making his life miserable. The sergeant met the problem with soldierly calm, promptly issued Private Gray a special weapon: one Flit gun, loaded. That was Gordon Gray's first lesson in military supply. He went on learning, first as a wartime infantry captain, then as Assistant Secretary, and later as Under Secretary of the Army in charge of procurement of everything from Flit guns to tanks. Last week, President Truman decided that at 40, slim, sandy-haired Gordon Gray had learned enough to run the whole show. He nominated Gray to succeed fellow North Carolinian Kenneth C. Royall as Secretary of the Army.

Gray, who had been made Under Secretary only two weeks earlier, was the President's second choice for Secretary. Harry Truman's first candidate, Curtis Calder, the $75,000 board chairman of Electric Bond & Share Co. and a Truman campaign contributor, turned the job down.

The Trustee. A second choice but a first-rate man, Gordon Gray is an heir to part of the ripe, golden R. J. Reynolds tobacco (Camels) fortune. His father put young Gordon to work in the leaf houses and at the cigarette machines, but Gordon didn't like the tobacco business. At the University of North Carolina he was No. 1 in his class, and president of Phi Beta Kappa. At Yale he was an editor of the Law Journal. After a few years of practice as a lawyer in New York and Winston-Salem, he headed a group which bought the city's two lackluster newspapers (Winston-Salem Journal and Twin-City Sentinel), became publisher and made them successful. A self-deprecating, earnest man, Gordon Gray is the rare publisher who can say, and sound convincing, "I consider myself a trustee for the community." He was 32 and the father of three boys when war began. He turned down a Navy commission, joined the Army as an officer candidate, served nearly a year as an enlisted man. Though he eventually saw service overseas in G-2 of General Omar Bradley's Twelfth Army Group, he considers his Army career "utterly undistinguished."

Guard Fight. As the principal Assistant Secretary of the Army, Gray has won a Pentagon reputation as a man who knows how the Army works, and gets along with the big brass without being overwhelmed by them. Gray's only brush with trouble in the feud-ridden Pentagon came when a special committee he headed, the so-called Gray Board, recommended that the National Guard be taken out of state hands--and state politics--and put under federal control. The politically powerful National Guard, which spiked the project, may be called on to fight it again: another board is studying the same project.

From his new post, Secretary Gray, unruffled by his row with the National Guard, looks back longingly on his first Army assignment. "The life of a private is a happy one, one of the happiest periods of my life," he remembers. "I never was called upon to make a decision."

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