No Hand on the Tiller

At Harry Truman's urging, Charlie Wilson took on the job of chief U.S. Defense Mobilizer in December 1950, confident that he knew a thing or two about wartime Washington. After two years on Franklin Roosevelt's mobilization staff, he was wise to the perils of palace politics and political hatchet work. But in Harry Truman's Washington he was soon completely at sea in leaderless confusion. Last week, in a blunt letter to the President (written the day before Truman bowed out as a candidate), Charlie Wilson abruptly quit his job.

The Reversal. Specifically, the blowup was over the steel case, but that was just the ingot that broke Wilson's back. After the Wage Stabilization Board approved a bright package of benefits and increases amounting to 26.1-c- an hour for the steelworkers (TIME, March 31), Wilson hustled down to Key West to talk to the President. "I advised you it was my best judgment that if steelworkers received the whole package . . . inevitably other unions would demand and probably have to be given like consideration," wrote Wilson in his letter of resignation, "and that I did not believe the resultant inflationary pressures could be resisted. You stressed the point that there must be no strike on account of our defense production requirements." Moreover, Wilson went on, Harry Truman agreed that an increase in the price of steel might prove necessary to prevent a strike.

But when the President came back to Washington, wrote Wilson, "you changed the plan we agreed upon," approving the WSB wage package but frowning on the idea of a compensating price increase for industry. Said Wilson: "This violates my sense of justice and disregards the principles of equity on which I understood our whole control program was based."

The steel strike was still set for April 8, unless the steelworkers' Phil Murray and industry negotiators manage to reach an agreement. During the week, both Charlie Wilson and Harry Truman helped to upset the labor-management negotiations just when-they began to show promise. Wilson, returning from Key West, infuriated Phil Murray by blurting that the proposed WSB package was "a serious threat in our year-old effort to stabilize the economy." Then Wilson telephoned the steelmakers to promise them that the President had agreed to a raise in steel prices if the wage settlement required one.

Later Harry Truman, in his answering letter to Wilson's blast, wrote: "I find that the proposed changes in wages and working conditions are by no means unreasonable . . . [while steel] profits are continuing at extraordinarily high levels." This was a clear change of signals and an invitation for labor to yield nothing. If negotiators reach an agreement this week, it will be a tribute to their own clearheadedness in the face of confused and contradictory Government policies.

Threatening Choice. Many another snafu had ensnared Wilson before the steel case. In theory, it was his job to i) get weapons rolling off U.S. production lines, and 2) keep down the inflation that might result from the vast arms expenditures. He discovered that the Pentagon--in the light of shifting Administration attitudes about foreign policy--could not even make up its mind what weapons it wanted, or how the priorities should be distributed among the three services.

On the inflation side, Wilson's Economic Stabilizer Roger Putnam was supposed to have control over wage stabilization (through the WSB) and prices (through the Office of Price Stabilization). Yet when Putnam telephoned WSB Chairman Nathan Feinsinger to find out how the steel hearings were going, Feinsinger told Putnam to let the board alone--as though the WSB were a grand jury which had just been propositioned by a suspect. It was typical of the prevailing chaos. The WSB demonstrated its independence of the Economic Stabilizer by a decision that was bound to confront the country with the choice between the threat of a steel strike or the threat of another long inflationary boost in the price of steel.

Management Man. A different type of man from Charlie Wilson might have moved into the confusion and become the directing brain of the whole U.S. defense effort--much as Dean Acheson, not Truman, makes foreign policy. But Wilson is not that kind of policymaker. >As president of General Electric, he was a brilliant executor of policy in an organization with a clear, strong administrative structure. In Washington he found neither policy nor clear-cut lines of administrative responsibility. He grew more & more frustrated and outraged in his job. A small but significant symbol: under Washington pressures, Wilson developed a devastating slice on his once-accurate golf drive.

Wilson followed up his resignation with a mobilization report boasting gigantic production gains during his term of office. But the resignation pointed up one ominous fact about the immediate future: there is no firm hand on the mobilization tiller. Neither the production side of the program nor the price-wage stabilization side is under control. Within the past month the Administration has ordered a slowdown in defense-production, allegedly to stave off inflation and lower the cost of defense. Now, with a fine disregard for the economy theory behind the stretch-out, Harry Truman had intervened in favor of an inflationary spiral which might well wipe out the savings of the stretch-out. Result: same cost, same inflation, less defense, greater risk.

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