NDAC's Mac

Outstanding example of patriotic sacrifice for the U. S. is the National Defense Advisory Commission (Knudsen, Stettinius, et al.). While legislators have sniped at the Administration's defense plan from political trenches, while "Youth" has cried out against the inconvenience of conscription, many a U. S. businessman has dropped a plushy job for harder work at $1 a year at a Government desk in Washington. Last week in its headquarters in the marble Federal Reserve Building, in overflow quarters in three other buildings, NDAC had somewhere between 400 and 500 dollar-a-year men and salaried employes (top, $9,000). No one had had time to count them but the draft on industry was still going on. Within six weeks NDAC will have 700.

Many wondered how U. S. industrialists, used to a swift way of doing things, would fare when they met Government red tape. The Army's Chief of Staff George Catlett Marshall, no novice in Government business, has said that "to cut red tape you've got to be deadly accurate, or run into a demoralizing snarl." But fortnight ago big William Knudsen showed surprise when newsmen asked him about red tape's interference with NDAC's work (TIME, Aug. 5). Replied he: "I do not recognize any. People might have thought we had red tape at General Motors because we did things in a definite way. Here too, there are certain definite ways to proceed."

Chief reason why NDAC has been able to thread a decisive way through Washington mazes is that its guide (and secretary) is a veteran civil servant named William Henry McReynolds. Reputed to know more about the ins & outs of the vastly proliferated Government structure than any man in Washington, leisurely "Mac" McReynolds is as deadly accurate as George Marshall would like his officers to be. Scottish and canny, he has worked in every department of the Government as payroll employe or efficiency expert since he left his law office in Battle Creek 34 years ago. For Herbert Hoover he helped draw the Government reorganization bills, saw them knifed by the Democratic majority, went to work for that majority when the New Deal came to town, as Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s administrative assistant. Impatient of tenseness, intolerant of hurry, he presides at NDAC meetings with a leg slung over the arm of his chair, his eyes half closed. But he makes Commission members' eyes pop when someone says of a pending job: "It'll take ten days." McReynolds likes to, and often does rouse himself long enough to say something like: "I'll have it done by afternoon." Commission men know that's a promise.

When NDAC burst into being, it was McReynolds who knew where there was some spare office space in the Federal Reserve Building, deliciously air-cooled.* Now nearing completion on Washington's "Triangle" is the new, massive Social Security Building. Mac thinks it's just the place for the National Defense Advisory Commission, just the place for Army headquarters, now in the Munitions Building. Social Security officials don't like the plan, but with McReynolds behind it there's not much they can do.

*In World War I, Chairman Bernard Mannes Baruch went into his own pocket for rent of a floor of office space. Told by his secretary there was no more room available, he snapped: "Buy the building."

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