The New Appointments

To signal the start of a new regime, every presidential appointee in the Administration sent the President the traditional letter of resignation, and he is, of course, free to pick up any or all of them. But if Lyndon Johnson means to rebuild his team, he is certainly going about it slowly and cautiously. The word last week was that the President is seeking no major Cabinet changes, at least for the present, although Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, HEW's Boss Anthony Celebrezze, and CIA Director John McCone all may resign soon. Nor is Johnson rushing to fill the vacancy left by Bobby Kennedy, though the post may well go eventually to Nicholas Katzenbach, who is now Acting Attorney General.

But for the lower reaches of his Administration, Johnson wants to find in the next few weeks some 15 new "Little Cabinet" members (assistant secretaries and under secretaries) and some 35 agency heads and commission members. Some of the initial choices in that area were openly political, but a remarkable number of Johnson's new appointees were selected for ability and experience.

Internal Revenue. As Internal Revenue Commissioner, a job left vacant since Mortimer Caplin resigned in July, the President picked Sheldon S. Cohen, 37, who just a year ago left the Washington law firm of Arnold, Fortas & Porter to become chief counsel at the Internal Revenue Service. There Cohen streamlined the legal branch, pruned excess personnel, installed automatic data-processing and microfilm files for his 650 attorneys. He hammered the point home to his staff that the Government's aim in any tax litigation was not just to win the case but to set principles of law. Cohen hopes to build a friendly image for the 60,000-man service, said after his appointment: "I don't want anyone to fear a visit from a revenue agent. Our people can disagree with taxpayers, but there is no need for them to be disagreeable."

Treasury. As Under Secretary for Monetary Affairs, Johnson chose Frederick L. Deming, 52, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, to replace Robert V. Roosa, who is joining a New York investment firm. Roosa will be a tough act to follow; he was a key figure in the intricate international finance operation in November that poured a desperately needed $3 billion loan into the British treasury to prop up the sagging pound. But Deming, an economist with a Ph.D. from St. Louis' Washington University and a career man in the Federal Reserve System for 23 years, was hand-picked in mid-1962 by Roosa himself to be his stand-by replacement in an emergency. Deming's new job is one of the toughest in Washington; it includes supervision of the Government's domestic borrowing to finance the national debt as well as the international wheeling and dealing necessary to guarantee the stability of the world's currency.

State Department. As chief of protocol replacing Angier Biddle Duke, 49, Johnson selected Lloyd Nelson Hand, 35, a vice president of the Pierce National Life Insurance Co. in Los Angeles--who also happens to be one of Lyndon's best political money raisers in California. Hand graduated from the University of Texas law school in 1957, wound up working on Johnson's Senate staff until 1961. Since then he has dabbled in diplomatic protocol by helping Duke arrange the California state visits of Mexico's President Lopez Mateos and Israeli Premier Levi Eshkol. As for the polished Duke, Johnson promised an "important ambassadorial post" soon.

That will be only one of at least 15 changes the President is expected to make in the ranks of U.S. ambassadors. The President made it clear that major posts in Paris, London, Moscow and Bonn would not be included. But some upheaval seemed likely in upper State Department echelons too. Averell Harriman, Under Secretary for Political Affairs, will probably be out before long--in fact, he has already been offered an ambassadorial post but has turned it down. And former Michigan Governor G. Mennen ("Soapy") Williams, who is now Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, may well be on his way back to home-state politics in the near future.

In other sub-Cabinet appointments, Johnson picked John A. Carver Jr., 46, as Under Secretary of the Interior. Once a Boise attorney, Carver has solid Washington experience, ran the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the National Park Service among other agencies. And to head up the 170,000-man, $6 billion-a-year Veterans Administration (third largest Government employer behind Defense and the Post Office), Johnson chose William J. Driver, 46, a VA career man who has served as deputy administrator for nearly four years. Even on this less than Olympian level of Government, Johnson was being unusually reticent about discussing who was in and who was out--the word was that the President just does not want "the wives of these administrators to start crying in bed because they had read that the President had fired their husbands."

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