A Proprietary Interest

Four years ago, when many American businessmen were bewildered by the Kennedy Administration's bristling rebuke of U.S. Steel, Mobil Oil Corp. Chairman Albert Lindsay Nickerson took Washington to task. He warned stockholders of the "cumulative, undermining effects" of such attacks on large corporations, protested that too often the Government's response to the legitimate needs of business had been "halfhearted, apologetic, and even occasionally antipathetic."

Now Nickerson can take an even more proprietary interest in the problem of federal-business relationships. Last week he was elected to a two-year term as chairman of the prestigious Business Council,* succeeding Campbell Soup President William B. Murphy.

Attached to the Commerce Department until 1961, the blue-ribbon Business Council of some 100 corporate chiefs is now an independent but highly influential group: it provides guidance on Government programs, recruits businessmen to fill Administration jobs, and serves as a sounding board for Administration policies. Beyond the status it gives them in Washington, members value the Council as a forum for top-level cross-pollination of ideas and attitudes.

Tall, courtly Al Nickerson, 55, has been the $250,000-a-year chairman of the nation's sixth largest company (1965 sales: $5.5 billion) since 1961. He joined Mobil in 1933 when, fresh out of Harvard, he landed a $19-a-week job in a Brookline, Mass., service station. One of his main achievements has been to help build up Mobil's foreign operations, which ^suffered heavily during World War II, to the point where they now bring in more than half of the company's net income, which reached a record $320 million in 1965. For more than a year, Republican Nickerson has been putting that experience to work for the Administration: as head of a special Commerce Department advisory group on the balance-of-payments problem, he has pushed the President's "voluntary" program to curb overseas investment--working hard to keep it voluntary.

* Along with four new vice chairmen: General Electric President Fred J. Borch, B. F. Goodrich President J. Ward Keener, Federated Stores President Ralph Lazarus and Hewlett-Packard Chairman David Packard.

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