The Hobgoblin

In the midst of reassuring everyone else last week, President Truman popped a hobgoblin on U.S. businessmen. With an offhand gesture he appointed 42-year-old Leon Keyserling his chief seer on economic affairs.

Ever since Dr. Edwin G. Nourse threw up his hands and quit as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers ("I'm too old for such nonsense"), moon-faced Vice Chairman Keyserling had been hungering for the job. It was the nourishing climax to a 17-year Government career.

The career had followed a somewhat familiar path. Born in South Carolina, educated at Columbia University, Keyserling went to Harvard Law School. From there he entered the murky Washington labyrinth by way of Henry Wallace's AAA. He helped frame the Wagner Act. He worked his way onward & upward through the Housing agencies. He mastered the gobbledygook of economic language and the fast footwork needed for intramural debate. He learned to jump out from behind corners, making Keynesian faces at businessmen. In 1946, with a boost from Harry Truman, he landed on the newly constituted CEA.

Thermometer or Tool? He and Chairman Nourse were constantly at loggerheads. Nourse, onetime vice president of Brookings Institution, who thought of himself as an economist and nothing else, stuck pretty close to economic orthodoxy. Keyserling, an avid Government planner, was further to the left. The council's third member, John D. Clark, skittered around vaguely somewhere in between. The chief difference between Nourse and Keyserling was in their interpretations of CEA's job. Nourse thought it was chiefly to hold a thermometer under the nation's tongue and dispassionately report the results. Keyserling thought of the CEA as a tool of the Fair Deal, to be used in promoting Harry Truman's political philosophy and economic schemes.

Planner Keyserling could find plenty of pat reasons for assuring the President that there was nothing to worry about in the staggering $255 billion national debt. He could find fair-sounding reasons for supporting Harry Truman's threat to break into the steel industry with Government-run plants, reasons why the President should demand new curbs over business. Such glib reasoning was too much for Dr. Nourse, but judging from last week's appointment, it was just right with Mr. Truman. Businessmen, whom Keyserling recently had been trying to win over by soft words, kept their fingers crossed when they heard that he had succeeded Nourse. To them he was still the No. 1 woodpile character in the Fair Deal.

Yeoman at Work. To fill the third spot on the CEA, Harry Truman named 48-year-old Dr. Roy Blough (rhymes with how), Pittsburgh-born son of a Church of the Brethren minister. President Truman got him from the University of Chicago, where he taught economics and political science.

Boyish-faced Dr. Blough is no stranger to Washington. He worked for Harry Hopkins in the early days of the relief program, later served Henry Morgenthau as a tax adviser when Morgenthau was Secretary of the Treasury. He did quiet, yeoman's work in both departments, has a national reputation as a tax expert.

Keyserling pronounced Blough's a "fine appointment." Senator Taft snorted: "The President now has three leftfielders" on his team. The consensus was that Blough, for whatever consolation it might be, plays a mite closer to center field.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.