Index Man

Arthur F. (for Frank) Burns rumpled his bushy hair, scrawled a final correction on the document before him, brushed away the shreds of Blue Boar' tobacco which littered his vest, and wearily got up from his desk. It was 2 a.m., and Burns, the chairman of President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers, had just finished the hardest single job of his life: shaping the President's economic report to Congress (see above).

The Burns ideas of economic principle and practice were implicit in every clause of the report. But Arthur Burns took the economic content as a professional matter of course; he expressed greater satisfaction in the report's style and readability. Says Burns: "I've always considered writing important. I went through all the stages that economists go through, from jargon to lucidity, and on the way I passed through the sesquipedalian* stage."

Shoes, Ships &; Stamps. Actually, the career of Economist Burns passed through a good many more phases than that. Burns was born 49 years ago in Austrian Poland. He was nine when he and his father came to the U.S. Arthur worked as a postal clerk, waiter, theater usher, dishwasher, oil-tanker mess boy, and salesman of shoes, furniture and real estate. By his third year as a student at Columbia, Burns had decided that he wanted to be an economist. After graduation he started teaching economics and doing research work while writing his doctor's thesis. Its subject: "Production trends in the U.S."

This led Burns to a close study of more than 600 indicators of the ups &; downs of business activity, which years of research gradually reduced to 21 key factors to be used in taking accurate count of the nation's economic pulse rate. As a professor at Columbia and, at the same time, as research director of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Burns became the leading U.S. expert on business cycles--the ebb &; flow of prosperity.

Eternally Quiet. At Columbia, Burns and Columbia's President Dwight Eisenhower met only casually. But when Ike went to the White House, the doom criers already were predicting a new era of bread lines and Apple Marys. The three-member Council of Economic Advisers had lost professional standing under President Truman; Leon Keyserling, his chief economic adviser, was a lawyer who skillfully tailored economic conclusions to fit political ends. Ike ordered a search for the man who knew most about depressions and what causes them. Arthur Burns was chosen.

Ike's first instructions were explicit.

Said he: "I want my economists to stick to economics. Don't give me political advice." That suited Burns. He told a Senate committee: "My inclination would be to stay out of the limelight, make my recommendations to the President . . .

and then, having done that, to remain eternally quiet." In the early days, most Administration leaders were quite content to have Burns remain quiet: he was a Democrat (who voted for Ike) and a college professor in a place where Democrats and college professors were no longer fashionable. But, almost despite himself, Burns began to be heard. His Administration associates recognized and respected a tough mind at work, and the good, tough mind of Arthur Burns was put to good use. In a year's time, he breathed new life into the Council of Economic Advisers. The economic report was the result of years of study and weeks of sheer drudgery by Burns and his colleagues. When it went to Congress, he celebrated by trundling off to the barbershop for a long-overdue haircut.

* A weakness for using words like "sesquipedalian."

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