Man for the Job

Harry Truman sat down at his desk with seven pens clutched in his left fist and, using them one after the other, painstakingly finished his signature on the National Security bill. After he had handed out the pens as souvenirs to the congressional leaders and service brass gathered about him, the President hailed the new law as "a major step toward more responsible and efficient administration of the military affairs of the nation."

With his signature, the National Military Establishment was rechristened the Department of Defense and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson became the first U.S. Secretary equipped with the power to unite effectively all U.S. armed forces.

Standing unobtrusively in the background at the signing ceremony was the man who next day became the first permanent chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Omar Nelson Bradley. Never before had the nation given one military man a post of such responsibility and influence.

The Greatness of Simplicity. Homely, homespun 56-year-old General Omar Bradley was the obvious choice for the job, and a happy one. Omar Bradley had taken the U.S. some time to know. At West Point, where he was a '15 classmate of Eisenhower's, he is remembered as the crack centerfielder who made the longest throw in Academy history. A stateside captain in World War I, he spent the "next 25 years trying to explain why I didn't get overseas." He began World War II as a division commander, ended up with four armies under him. His armies delivered the final knockout to the Nazis' Afrika Korps in three weeks, knifed through Sicily in jig time and had the Germans reeling out of France in less than a month. Ernie Pyle broke his own ban against writing about Army brass to eulogize this general with the schoolmasterish manner, "so unanimously loved and respected by the men around him and under him." One of his officers summed up Bradley to Pyle: "He has the greatness of simplicity and the simplicity of greatness."

Doughboys' General. After the war, the cumbersome, clique-ridden Veterans Administration was handed to him; he made sense out of its sprawling bureaucracy, returned to active military service and succeeded Dwight Eisenhower as Chief of Staff. Over the years Omar Bradley, the man who never raised his voice, never mixed in service feuds, had won the solid admiration of everybody from plain soldiers (who called him the doughboys' general) to Government bureaucrats, to his fellow generals. The Third Army's brilliant, fractious George Patton, one of his subordinates, once told him: "Between my screwy ideas and your brains, we certainly come up with some wonderful plans."

If anyone could translate unification from a revered cliche into an accomplished fact, Omar Nelson Bradley seemed the man.

Under Johnson and Bradley, a new team of top defense officials this week went to work. To succeed Bradley as Army Chief of Staff, the President named hardy, crisp-spoken 53-year-old General J. Lawton ("Lightning Joe") Collins, whose string of World War II campaigns stretched from Guadalcanal to the Rhine.

To do the detailed job of unifying overlapping services, Johnson named Air Force General Joseph T. McNarney, who, wielding the pruning shears in recent months, has already abolished 134 useless boards and committees. Called in to help McNarney were seven top officials from Robert Heller & Associates, whose efficiency experts for 17 years have worked minor wonders for such clients as U.S. Steel and International Harvester. Their goal: to slash defense costs from $1 billion to $3 billion in two years.

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