Topside Teammates

General Eisenhower got a new topside teammate last week: an American civilian to take charge of the whole kit & caboodle of the U.S. defense buildup in Europe outside Ike's field of military command. He is William Henry Draper Jr., 57, New York investment banker and professional troubleshooter. President Truman appointed Draper to a new omnibus post: 1) senior U.S. civilian official, with the rank of full ambassador, in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; and 2) head man in Europe of the new Mutual Security Agency, which has replaced the Marshall Plan. Draper will be the supreme civilian spokesman for the U.S. in Europe.

Answering Calls. Black-browed Bill Draper is one of that group of Wall Streeters--among them Forrestal, Stimson, Lovett, Patterson, McCloy and Har-riman--who, though usually Republican, have temporarily answered the call of Government whenever a problem needed a tough, practical administrator to straighten it out. Unlike some of them, Draper is no hereditary economic royalist. Born in New York City, the son of a dentist, he went to New York University (Class of '16), got his start in business at the National City Bank, later switched to Dillon, Read & Co., where his boss was Forrestal.

A major in World War I, he was active in the Reserves between the wars, and, in 1940, when most of his fellow Wall Streeters were moving to their first jobs in Washington, he was called to active duty as a colonel. Asking for combat duty, he was eventually sent to the Pacific in command of the 136th Infantry Regiment, but when he got to Hawaii, he was called back by the Pentagon to supervise the growing problem of contract terminations.

As Hitler's armies neared collapse, Draper was promoted to brigadier general, sent to Germany to become the U.S. member of the postwar four-power economics directorate there, where he proved fully as laconic as his Russian opposite number. In Germany, Draper, a widower, met

Eunice Barzynski, a WAC captain on his staff, later married her. After two years of occupation duty, Draper was called home to become Under Secretary of the Army. Then, before he could get deeply back in investment banking, New York's Governor Dewey asked him late in 1950 to take over the debt-ridden, wreck-ridden Long Island Rail Road. When he accepted, The New Yorker quipped: "He has a good head for aches."

Legs Without Heads. Draper's first headache in his new job will be combatting a misconception about him in Europe --and in the leftish reaches of U.S. politics. Because he was the man who in 1946 carried out the U.S.'s revised economic policy toward Germany--throwing out all traces of the Morgenthau Plan--he became tagged as "pro-German." He was accused of not doing enough to break up German industry; now that German industry is needed in the reconstruction of Western Europe, that criticism lacks its old force, but the prejudice against him persists.

Draper will inherit the duties and headaches of two men, Lawyer Charles M. Spofford, U.S. delegate to NATO's Council of Deputies, and William Batt, European administrator of MSA. It was because these headaches were multiplying, because NATO was sprouting legs and arms before it had a head, that some kind of change was called for. W. Averell Harriman, now the key U.S. man in such matters, proposed Troubleshooter Draper as his European representative. In effect, Draper becomes Mr. America in Western Europe, as Eisenhower, an American, is really Mr. Western Europe.

NATO itself is in for streamlining at the mid-February meeting of its unwieldy, 36-man top body, the North Atlantic Council, which consists of the foreign ministers, the defense ministers, and the finance ministers of the twelve NATO nations--a sort of cabinet of the West. Despite opposition of the British, who do not want to see London left out, NATO's affairs will probably be concentrated in Paris, close to Eisenhower, with only one deputy from each nation. That man for the Americans will be Draper, who also stands a good chance of being asked to head the whole group.

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