Nominations for Oblivion

In Dwight Eisenhower's White House office, Chicago's Charles Harting Percy, 38-year-old president of Bell & Howell Co., cameramakers, told how key businessmen were planning to hash over ways of fighting the recession. High point of the plans would be a Manhattan meeting of the American Management Association attended by some 2,000 top businessmen. President Eisenhower, who holds it an article of faith that Government, business and labor have a joint antirecession responsibility, jumped to his feet, began pacing the floor. "Do you mean that's really what you're going to do?" asked he. "Do you mean that these businessmen are really going to take on responsibility for getting out of the recession?" Percy assured him that was the case. Said Eisenhower: ''That's where I'd like to be."

That was how the President of the U.S. came last week to appear before the A.M.A. in Manhattan's Astor Hotel with a plain-spoken report on the recession ("Not all our economic troubles are over by any means") and some strong ideas about what business and labor could do to help the economy. He nominated a "whole kit and caboodle" of economic notions "for oblivion." Items:

P:"The idea that the consumer is not price conscious any more."

P:"The notion that, without paying the piper in higher prices, we can as a nation overpay ourselves for what we produce."

P:"The idea that management can be lax about costs without pricing its product not only out of foreign markets but out of the American market as well."

P:"The idea that large annual wage increases can be regarded as a matter of course."

P:"The delusion that more rigid farm controls and larger surpluses to dispose of at the taxpayer's expense can lead to a prosperous farm economy."

P:"The notion that we can export without importing."

P:"And, finally, we must be disabused of the thought that a competitive enterprise economy can be free of all loss, failure and disappointment, and that Government can take all the bumps out of the road of business."

In fighting recession. President Eisenhower urged that businessmen do only ''what is clearly in their own interest." He called for "vigor and imagination in forging ahead with new and improved product developments and in product and market research." He asked business to show faith, not fear, in the U.S. economy by keeping inventories up to normal standards, by investing in needed plants and equipment.

"The economic recovery and growth we bring about." said President Eisenhower, "must take the form not of higher costs and prices but of more production and more jobs. The American people believe in good wages, both in private and public employment . . . But the consumers are not going to be satisfied with less and less value per dollar of price, which is the inevitable result of less and less production per dollar of cost. I am quite certain if businessmen and labor union leaders forget these truths, the consumer will remind them in ways that are clear and painful.

"And in the process, the whole economy will suffer."

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