Ed & Mr. Mansure

In the White House mail one recent morning, there was a letter to President Eisenhower from General Services Administrator Edmund F. (for Forsman) Mansure. After describing the really fine job he thought he had done as head of the U.S. Government's mammoth purchasing, housekeeping and property-managing agency, Mansure wrote that he was resigning for "personal" reasons. He signed himself "Ed." With pointed promptness, the President shot back a letter to "Mr. Mansure," coolly accepting the resignation. From the exchange, outsiders could guess what insiders knew: before Ed had taken pen in hand, he had been summoned to the White House and informed that it was time to go.

Sharp Whistle. A wealthy Chicago textile manufacturer, Mansure, 54, had run GSA since May 1953. In the process he had built a reputation as a money-saving, detail man. So meticulous that he separates the meat from the potatoes when eating beef hash, he saved paper clips, and put three-minute egg timers on subordinates' desks to shorten telephone calls. But Mansure's fine eye for housekeeping details (which won the praise of the Hoover Commission) was not always matched by a clear view of the bigger picture. He seemed to have one standard for office efficiency and quite another for political shenanigans.

Last August FORTUNE, in a microscopic study of GSA operations, blew a sharp whistle on Mr. Mansure. He had stubbornly kept on the payroll, in important positions, many of the political hacks who had given GSA a bad name under the Truman Administration. What's more, there was evidence that his own personal political friends were scooping up some brow-raising favors.

Old Hand. His closest political pal was one William J. Balmer, a Republican power in Chicago since the second corrupt reign (1927-31) of "Big Bill" Thompson. An old hand at doing business with GSA (the Justice Department is suing him for $400,000 on the ground that he used fraudulent means to buy surplus Government property), Balmer sponsored Mansure for the GSA job, and then began to advise him frequently on important contracts. At just the right time Balmer registered as an insurance broker and obtained, through Mansure's GSA, a whopping insurance contract at the U.S. Government's Nicaro nickel plant in Cuba. Estimated take for Balmer's firm: $40,000.

When these and other curious events and operations in GSA came to light, Congress, the White House and the Department of Justice began to take a quizzical look at Mansure's managership. The eventual result was the polite and pointed exchange of letters. As he cleaned out his desk last week, Mansure expressed a bit of philosophy that explained a great deal. "I stand by my friends," he said. "I felt about Balmer the same way Harry Truman felt about Pendergast."

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