Man from Detroit

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Last January the Eisenhower Administration dawned with a muttering of thunder which no prophet had foretold. Charles Erwin Wilson, the 62-year-old president of the General Motors Corp., flew into Washington to accept the job as Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense, and promptly got into a free-for-all headline row with his colleagues and the U.S. Senate. With a stubbornness new to Washington, Wilson fought the law which unequivocally required that he get rid of his 39,470 shares of General Motors stock before taking office. Cartoonists had a field day with his unruly grey thatch and his round, heavy-jowled face--which, at the time, generally bore an expression of outrage. From a public relations point of view, no U.S. Cabinet officer ever got off to a worse start. When Wilson, under an Eisenhower ultimatum, agreed to dispose of his stock, the Senate confirmed his nomination as the fifth U.S. Secretary of Defense, and the public turned its mind to other things. For Engine Charlie Wilson, however, the story had only begun.

"Nulle Bastardo Carborundum." Less than half an hour after his brief swearing-in ceremony, Wilson walked with assurance into his vast, flag-draped Pentagon office looking out over the Potomac River. Sitting down behind a walnut desk that once belonged to General "Black Jack" Pershing, he stared around at the pale blue walls and deep blue leather furniture selected by the first Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal. Behind his special, direct-line White House telephone, the man from Detroit propped a framed motto which read, "Nulle Bastardo Carborundum"--assembly-line Latin for "Don't let the bastards wear you down." Then, draping a cigarette out of the corner of his mouth, he rang a buzzer twice and an aide, Marine Colonel Carey Randall, appeared in the office doorway. Said Charlie Wilson, looking up over the plastic rims of his glasses: "Let's get to work."

By last week it was clearer than ever, in the flashes of congressional lightning over the defense budget, that Charlie Wilson and his staff had got a lot of work done. In their first 17 weeks, they were responsible for:

P:Cutting nearly 40,000 civilian employees from the staff of the Defense Department (partly by the simple device of not hiring replacements for the normal retirements, etc.), with more cuts to come.

P:Canceling or holding up most U.S. military building programs, pending a re-evaluation of the necessity for each major item.

P:Radically changing the overall approach to mobilization of U.S. defense plants from ex-Secretary Robert Lovett's "broad base" (widespread sources of supply, including many small manufacturers) to Wilson's cherished concept of a "narrow base" (restricted sources of supply, mainly to big, highly skilled corporations).

P:Sending to Congress a Defense Department reorganization plan which, barring a congressional veto, will become law July 1. The plan straightens out the chain of command within the Defense Department, increases the authority of the civilian directors of the Department, and gives added power to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

P:Tossing Congress a defense budget slashing $5.2 billion from armed-forces appropriations for fiscal 1954, the biggest bone of contention on Capitol Hill (see above).

P:Selecting a complete new Joint Chiefs of Staff, scheduled to take over in midsummer.

These were sweeping decisions, some of which will continue to affect the U.S. people and their allies for years to come. In many ways they proved an organizational grasp of the workings of the Pentagon which none of Engine Charlie's predecessors in office had ever shown. To all appearances, Wilson had established more effective control than James Forrestal (September 1947 to March 1949), more cooperation than ham-handed Louis Johnson (April 1949 to September 1950), better discipline than Old Soldier George Marshall (September 1950 to September 1951), and greater loyalty from his top civilian assistants than even affable Robert Lovett (September 1951 to January 1953). Through it all, Engine Charlie remained soft-spoken and relaxed, with an inclination to lean back and look at the ceiling while cigarette ashes dropped on to the lapel of his coat. Within his Pentagon office, he was the picture of a man enjoying his job.

Faith & Method. Production Man Wilson was different from his predecessors because he brought to the Pentagon the essence of large-scale management, the faith and methods of Detroit. To the Pentagon bureaucracy, ignorant of Detroit and instinctively hostile to its methods of command, much of the Wilson approach was new and surprising. For example: where many Washington executives like to inflict upon their subordinates the unsettling experience of hearing the boss's voice come out of empty air, one of Wilson's first acts was to order the "squawk box" moved out of his office so that he could do business face to face.

He quickly spotted the weakness inherent in the Pentagon's 950 committees, i.e., their responsibility was spread so thin--through years of contriving to that end--that rarely could a single individual be held accountable for any decision. He had an industrialist's instinct for the fine line where research must stop and production must begin, e.g., in the field of guided-missile development, he found the scientists in top command prone to work a missile to the ultimate stage of perfection before releasing it for production. To remedy these administrative weaknesses, Wilson began pruning out semi-independent committees and boards, e.g., the Munitions Board and Research & Development Board, and asked Congress to allow him six new Assistant Secretaries ("General Motors vice presidents," quipped a critic) to do the same work and bear direct responsibility.

Where previous Defense Secretaries had tolerated, and suffered from, dissension among the Army, Navy and Air Force Secretaries, Wilson put a businessman's emphasis on cooperation. Determined to weld them into a unified team, Wilson made Army Secretary Robert Stevens, Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott and Navy Secretary Robert Anderson his most frequent luncheon companions, kept his door open for them at other times.

Perhaps the most startling innovation, and one which doubled Engine Charlie's value as an executive, was his introduction of a faithful, trusted alter ego. This was Deputy Secretary Roger Kyes, a hard-featured giant brought along from General Motors, where Wilson had originally hired him to get G.M.'s truck division out of the red. Wilson was boss and Kyes understood the boss. In the Pentagon, Wilson gave Kyes a free hand and Kyes, making no effort to build a personal empire, devoted his great competence to making Charlie Wilson a successful Secretary of Defense. Pentagonians were surprised to discover that Kyes could make major decisions without consulting Wilson. They discovered, too, that Kyes's normally affable manner covered a single-minded ruthlessness which, also, is frequently a characteristic of valuable alter egos. On one occasion, when a general persisted in arguing an issue which Kyes considered closed, "Jolly Roger" reached out and flicked the four stars on the officer's shoulder straps with his fingertips. "Look," he said, "I didn't come down here to shovel snow. I came down here to pluck stars."

Skills & Shortfalls. Engine Charlie Wilson was bringing to Washington precisely what Dwight Eisenhower had asked for: the core of the philosophy of U.S. business, to be adapted to management of "the largest business in the world." It was not a saintly code, but it did combine the world's greatest managerial skill with patriotism, unpretentiousness, and the kind of dogged self-confidence necessary to practical achievement. But, in walking with the firm tread of a successful industrialist, Charlie Wilson exposed an Achilles' heel which Eisenhower had hardly bargained for: Wilson did not understand the motives or workings of the political world. He knew little about basic U.S. defense policies, or the strategic and historical considerations behind them. His unwavering refusal to change his mind, once he thought an issue through to a decision, had been one of the foundations of his success. In Washington's unfamiliar situations, it sometimes emerged as arrogance and bullheadedness.

It was characteristic that Wilson's confirmation troubles, and the forced sale of his G.M. stock, fired Engine Charlie with a great, angry determination to be a successful Secretary of Defense. Said he, last January, to the Senate Armed Services Committee: "To some degree, I am now risking a failure in my old age . . . I am either going to make good on this job or get sick."

Sorcerer & Apprentice. There is no precedent for failure in Charles Erwin Wilson's career. Born in Minerva, Ohio, where his father, Thomas Wilson, was principal of the local public school, Erwin Wilson (as his friends called him) had a traditional boyhood: the swimming hole, a pony, stolen rides on railroad handcars, improvised shows in a neighbor's barn (with Erwin Wilson as the magician). The Wilson family moved to Pittsburgh in 1904. At Pittsburgh's Bellevue High and later at Carnegie Tech, Erwin was a fair to middling athlete (basketball and football), and a bright and dogged student.

At 18, he had his electrical engineering degree (he was the youngest man to graduate from Carnegie up to that time), and he went to work at Westinghouse Electric Co. as an 18-c--an-hour student apprentice. At 22, Wilson designed the first Westinghouse auto starter. He fell in love with Jessie Ann Curtis, an $8-a-week stenographer, and they married in September 1912. At 28, he was hired away from Westinghouse by Remy Electric Co., a General Motors subsidiary, to become chief engineer and sales manager of its auto division. Wilson got major credit for an engineering-design program which put Remy (later Delco-Remy) back on its financial feet. In 1928 he was brought to Detroit as G.M.'s youngest (38) vice president. In 1941, after the late William Knudsen went to Washington as the nation's defense-production expediter, Wilson became, at 50, president of General Motors.

Top Job. G.M.'s directors had every reason to be satisfied with their choice. Wilson did an impressive job of converting the nation's largest corporation to military production during World War II, and sparkplugged its huge, postwar expansion program. Production and raw-materials procurement flourished under his regime, and the tense, postwar labor situation was greatly eased when he sold the U.A.W. a five-year contract gearing hourly wages to the cost-of-living index.*

The auto business had never ceased to excite him, and his job gave him both financial success (his 1952 salary and bonus: $581,100) and great power, the use of which he understood and enjoyed. "After all," he told a Senate committee, "I probably have one of the top jobs in the U.S." When he retired, which he was scheduled to do in 1955, a pleasant personal life awaited him. His six children (three sons, three daughters) and 14 grandchildren were almost all within easy reach of Longmeadow, the Wilson's big fieldstone home on Island Lake, near Detroit. Also, he anticipated more time for Windrow Farms, where he raises prizewinning Ayrshire cattle (whose vital statistics he always carried with him in a notebook).

Dwight Eisenhower got to know Charlie Wilson while Eisenhower was Chief of Staff in postwar Washington, and frequently called on him for help in production and supply problems. Eisenhower remembered sharply that Wilson had two clear attributes: he knew production and he was anything but a "yes man." After the election, Eisenhower's chief talent scout, General Lucius Clay, agreed with Ike that Wilson was the man to make sense out of the Pentagon. Wilson at first was reluctant, but after an Eisenhower pep talk, agreed to become Secretary of Defense.

Peanuts on the Table. At General Motors, Charlie Wilson usually got to work about 9 in the morning. Nowadays, having turned out early to skim the morning papers, he is at the Pentagon at 8:15, and by 8:30 has had a conference with Roger Kyes. To keep informed on current problems, he relies on oral briefings, principally from his aide, Colonel Randall, or from Ralph Moore, a personal secretary brought along from Detroit. Early in his Pentagon career, Engine Charlie learned, he once reported, that "the people around here are always briefing you. They do it for at least eight hours a day. You listen to memos being read about how much of this or how much of that, but so far very little of it contains the information I seek."

At 12:30 Wilson moves into his blue-and gold-painted private dining room for the long staff luncheon. The food is plain--there are always salted peanuts on the table for Wilson--and talk, all business, is plentiful. At these informal meetings, Wilson's guests get an opportunity to feel him out on policy questions, and Wilson, in turn, gets posted on current problems in the services. On Tuesdays he has a standing appointment with the President and a meeting with the Armed Forces Policy Council, made up of the Pentagon's top civilian brass. On Wednesdays he meets with the National Security Council. On Thursdays he has a formal session with the service secretaries, and Fridays he attends Cabinet meetings.

Elaborately Circumspect. Although Wilson was seldom seen in Detroit society, it is now his duty to spend four or five evenings a week at official functions. Possessed of an immense amount of secret information, he is elaborately circumspect about his party talk. If he is asked an embarrassing question, he launches into what his family calls "the goony-bird routine"--a lengthy discussion of the goony birds he saw on Midway Island during his trip to Korea with Ike.

Unpretentious Jessie Wilson, who did not expect to enjoy the social whirl when she came to Washington, has found her constant round of luncheons, teas and dinners arduous but fascinating. Says she: "Sometimes I feel as though my face will crack." The Wilsons also try to get home early, and generally succeed. Their most notable failure in this respect occurred in February, at a party in honor of Admiral Arthur Radford. At 11 o'clock Jessie Wilson wearily told Mrs. Radford that she wished "somebody would do something" about going home. Confided Mrs. Radford: "Nobody can do anything until you do." The Wilsons, as they came to learn, were the highest-ranking guests at the party; Washington protocol forbade anyone's leaving before them.

Suspenders Exposed. In mid-April Charlie Wilson set off to attend the NATO meetings in Paris and to look over U.S. military installations in Europe. At one NATO meeting, he cheerily suggested that everybody take off coats and get down to work, much to the embarrassment of the French representative, who was thereby forced to expose loud, scarlet suspenders.

He also wore out his traveling companions by giving U.S. bases the same tireless and detailed inspection he had once given his G.M. plants. Aboard the U.S.S. Midway in the Mediterranean, he led his party up & down an endless series of ladders, finally stopped to stick his head into the ship's machine shop. In an industrial machine shop, the filings always fly when the boss comes through, but on the Midway, well-disciplined sailors were standing at attention by idle machines carefully shined up for inspection. Boomed Engine Charlie: "Where are the chips?"

Navy Outcry. When Wilson got home, he discovered that the chips were flying in the corridors and outer-ring offices of the Pentagon. One of his principal organizational recommendations--which he persuaded the Rockefeller committee to insert in the Defense Department reorganization plan--involved straightening out lines of authority in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To date, the Joint Chiefs have operated like a loose federation, capable of interservice horse-trading, but seldom of clear-cut decision. Wilson bought the plea of retiring JCS Chairman Omar Bradley for additional authority for the chairman. This touched off a Navy outcry. The U.S., said the Navy's loyal spokesmen, is headed for the "Prussian system" of a single, supreme chief of staff. The spokesmen argued that the Prussian system is too inflexible to produce sound strategy; their real fear was and is that, under a single chief of staff, Navy interests may generally run a poor third to those of the Army and Air Force.

Soon Wilson was at war on another uncharted battle front, with some of the more prominent members of the press. The trouble began last January, when Columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop blasted Wilson for his plan to appoint his great friend, CBS Funnyman Arthur Godfrey, as Defense Department representative to the President's Psychological Strategy Board. Wilson finally surrendered to White House pressure and named Kyes instead of Godfrey, but he muttered grimly, in retreat: "No columnist is going to run the Department of Defense." He was livid with anger eleven weeks ago, when Drew Pearson published the full text of a letter which Wilson had sent to the service secretaries under the classification "secret." Wilson's reaction was to order and enforce a long-needed tightening of Defense Department security. Circulation of documents was greatly restricted, public demonstrations of new weapons was stopped, and the expensive public information divisions of the individual services faced virtual abolition (they are now operating under a reprieve). Some Pentagon reporters, finding their news sources drying up and the usual flood of publicity handouts dwindling to a trickle, joined the battle by writing that an Iron Curtain had been dropped over the Defense Department.

Helping Hand. Such was the climate when Charlie Wilson turned to the major problem of revamping Harry Truman's estimated defense budget for fiscal 1954. Here was tricky ground, an area which, unlike management and procurement techniques, had no real parallel in Wilson's Detroit experience. The real significance of a defense budget could only be expressed in terms of force levels, weapons systems and strategic applications of power--matters about which both Wilson and Kyes knew very little.

They turned for guidance, as if by instinct, to Assistant Secretary Wilfred McNeil, a handsome, blue-eyed Iowan whose fiscal talents won him a reserve rear admiral's rank during World War II. McNeil was brought in by Forrestal to supervise the defense budget, and had done the job for every Secretary of Defense since. He appealed to Wilson and Kyes because he could talk their language--production phasing, subcontracting, economic units. He was a storehouse of facts & figures about the armed services, and little short of a magician when it came to budgetary techniques.

Along with facts & figures, McNeil gave Wilson and Kyes a short course in weapons systems and grand strategy. It was a short course which wound up proposing a $5 billion cut in the U.S. Air Force (TIME, May 18). Day in & day out McNeil opposed the program to build the Air Force up to 143 wings by 1956, and advanced the late Admiral Forrest Sherman's arguments that the U.S. should divide defense appropriations among the three services without establishing a specified date when any one of them should complete its buildup.

Admiral's Triumph. As far as Wilson could see, the argument was impressive--in part, perhaps, because it was the only proposal he had heard which would permit the Administration to take a sizable cut out of the defense budget. Eventually, Wilson himself began to deride the Air Force goal of 143 wings as "unrealistic" and "unobtainable." Flying out to Omaha to inspect the atom-bomb-carrying Strategic Air Command, he sat through a briefing by SAC Commander Curtis LeMay only to comment at the end of it: "I think 57 wings for SAC is too many." And three weeks ago, when Charlie Wilson's defense budget went to Congress, it was clear that the Sherman plan had triumphed. Most of the $5.2 billion cut in appropriations for fiscal 1954 came out of Air Force funds. Of the total cut, a whopping $3.4 billion--a figure set by Wilfred McNeil--came out of funds for Air Force procurement.

In the outraged clamor which the defense budget provoked, Dwight Eisenhower took to the radio and gave Engine Charlie what sounded like full public support. "The President is sticking with Wilson," reported an Administration spokesman. There were indications, however, that Ike's regard for his Defense Secretary had dwindled considerably since last January. Both at Cabinet meetings and at personal interviews with the President, Wilson tended to monopolize the conversation, devoting a good deal of his talk to problems that did not properly concern him, and often failing to make clear what he was trying to say about the Defense Department. Two weeks ago, when Wilson blithely told a congressional committee that the national budget could not be balanced during 1954 and 1955, Ike felt obliged to order him to leave statements on fiscal policy to Treasury Secretary Humphrey or Budget Director Dodge.

Two-Way Problem. On Capitol Hill, Wilson has never overcome the impression created by his garrulous stubbornness during the confirmation hearings. His testimony in support of the defense budget has done nothing to improve his congressional relations. Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, seeking a way to justify the Air Force cut to their constituents, were appalled by Wilson's failure to offer any coherent argument for his budget. "Charlie Wilson," said one Congressman last week, "will never make anything but a hell of a lousy politician."

Washington has a lot to learn from Detroit, and few men are better qualified to teach Detroit skills than Engine Charlie Wilson, one of the most successful products of the U.S. managerial class. Washington, wise in the ways of politics and the ways of representative government, also has something to teach the man from Detroit. Since Eisenhower has given Wilson full power and authority, Wilson must absorb and understand standards, and value judgments which are based on the very survival of the U.S., before he can hope to give sound direction to the U.S. defense effort. If he would learn to add the skills of the statesman to the skills of the businessman, he could well become the first fully successful U.S. Secretary of Defense. But Charles Erwin Wilson is a stubborn fellow.

*For latest amendments to G.M.'s contract, see BUSINESS.

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