Trustbuster in a Bowler

ROBERT ALAN BICKS

TO many businessmen, the most upsetting member of the Eisenhower Administration is a 32-year-old trustbuster who acts more like a New Dealer than might be expected of a Republican. He is Robert Alan Bicks, nominated last week as the youngest Assistant Attorney General ever to head the Justice Department's Antitrust Division. As acting boss last year, Bob Bicks filed 63 criminal and civil antitrust cases against U.S. business, largest number of antitrust suits since the heady days of the New Deal.

This year Bicks expects to do even better: he has already filed 46 cases, is well on his way to 90 or more actions. Among the giants on Bicks's court docket: General Motors, for acquiring Euclid Road Machinery Co.; General Electric, Westinghouse and ten other companies, on charges of conspiring to fix prices in the electrical industry.

Despite his record, Bicks is no fiery crusader against the wickedness of "big business." He is a rock-solid young conservative--and looks the part. He speaks in precise, legal-brief language, favors vests and affects a rusty black derby hat that was handed down to him from his father. Bicks proclaims his faith in the old-fashioned idea of a free, competitive market that Anti-trust helps protect.

WHILE Bicks goes after price fixing and active restraints of trade, his main emphasis is on what he calls "preventive medicine"--challenging mergers and tie-ins that could diminish competition. Bigness alone does not worry him.

"Absolute size," says Bicks, "is absolutely irrelevant. What is important is the power to control price and exclude competitors." Bicks defeated the proposed merger between Bethlehem Steel and Youngstown Sheet & Tube not because the two together would have controlled the market but because he felt such action would lead to a rash of mergers that would weaken competition in what is already a highly concentrated industry.

Outlook for 1960: as many as 30 anti-merger suits, triple the number in 1959.

In his eagerness, Bicks sometimes moves before he has a case. He had such a flimsy case against 29 oil companies for supposed price fixing after the Suez crisis that the judge tossed out the case before the companies even put in a formal defense (TIME, Feb. 22). Yet his overall batting average is impressive.

The record this year: seven won, 35 disposed of to the department's satisfaction, only four losses.

Bicks was practically born into the law. Both his mother and father (New York District Court Judge Alexander Bicks) are lawyers. Graduating summa cum laude from Yale in 1949, he went to Yale Law School, became Comments editor on the Yale Law Journal. His work attracted another Yaleman and onetime Comments editor: Herbert Brownell, then Attorney General, who needed a bright young man to help him with a newly appointed committee on antitrust laws. Bicks took the job in 1953 and discovered that antitrust work was precisely what he wanted. "One of the few absolute personal values I have is diversity of experience," says Bicks, "and antitrust work is damned diverse."

BICKS was soon a top assistant to Stanley Barnes, who headed the Antitrust Division. When Barnes left, Bicks became first assistant to a new head, Victor Hansen. Straw-bossing the department's 470-odd lawyers, clerks and economists while preparing and arguing the big cases himself, Bicks was the obvious choice ,for department chief when Hansen quit last year, and is not likely to have much trouble getting congressional approval. One fact that impresses Congress: his reputation for aggressive honesty. Says Bicks: "There is a certain luxury in not being talkable-to about a case. I make it clear to anyone who does so that I will be perfectly willing to testify under oath as to the exact nature of our conversation in precise detail."

In court, Bicks presents a picture of massive calm (though his shirt may be soaking with perspiration), is so efficient in running his staff that he almost always manages to get home for dinner with his wife and two small boys, has time on weekends to sail a chartered 41-ft. yawl on Chesapeake Bay.

Bicks hopes to change the antitrust laws as well as enforce them. He would like to provide tax relief for stockholders who, in such antitrust cases as the G.M.-Du Pont divorce, are forced by the courts to sell their shares. He also wants legislation to force corporations to hand over their records in civil as well as criminal cases. At present, antitrust lawyers must grope half-blind before trial, guessing what documents contain, or else stretch the law to make criminal charges. Such legislation, he argues, would enable the trustbusters to make a more rational decision on whether to take a case to court.

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