Against the Winds

One 40-below-zero Sunday 40-odd years ago, a Lutheran minister made his way across frozen snowdrifts in a horse and buggy to keep his preaching schedule at five different churches in and around Hawley, Minn. In the winter and spring of 1958, the minister's son, Presidential Assistant Gabriel Hauge, showed the same old-fashioned fortitude in the face of icy winds of another kind. With the U.S. economy slipping downward, panicky cries for drastic federal intervention rang out in Washington and across the U.S. But calm, articulate Gabriel Hauge, sometime economics teacher at Princeton and Harvard, economics assistant to the President of the U.S. since the start of Ike's first term, counseled his boss to resist the pressures for inflation-breeding, damn-the-deficits programs. The downturn would halt during the year's second quarter, Hauge firmly predicted, and then an upturn would slowly set in.

The second quarter did indeed see the end of the downturn, and by last week signs of upturn were visible (see BUSINESS) even through grey-colored glasses. With his predictions and counsel proved sound, Gabriel Hauge, 44, made a decision to return to private life. His new job: finance committee chairman of New York's Manufacturers Trust Co., fourth largest U.S. bank (after California's Bank of America, New York's Chase Manhattan and First National City).

In his letter of resignation Hauge summed up the Administration economic philosophy that he himself helped to mold over the past six years. "You have brought a badly needed re-emphasis of some plain but oft-obscured truths," he wrote to Ike. "You have:

P: "Restated the traditional American be lief in incentive and reward for individu effort and excellence;

P: "Stressed integrity of the currency;

P: "Reasserted America's vital interest in strengthening economic ties with other free nations;

P: "Remembered the rightful claims of tomorrow in the policy decisions of today;

P: "Shown how a firm floor over the pit of personal disaster can be built without disregard for our heritage of self-reliance;

P: "Reminded us that only sensible economics, not razzle-dazzle substitutes, can truly serve the ends of equity and social justice."

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