New Managers?

Franklin Roosevelt would have been more fretful than he was last week, if he had heard what some of his friends and lieutenants were saying. They said that his Administration had badly managed the defense effort, that soon there would have to be an internal explosion.

As reason for their belief they had the manifold evidence of how far short was the production of many needed arms, of the whole civilian defense machinery running without any responsible head, of uncertain policies, of fresh confusions piled on stale confusions.

"Plus-Four." If bad management was again carving over Democracy's door the bitter motto, "Too little & too late," immediate responsibility lay on the Roosevelt War Cabinet--the Secretaries of State, War, Navy and Treasury--and the President's manager of the Lend-Lease program, Harry Hopkins. For one reason or another each of them has drawbacks as a manager and administrator of a war effort.

With grave, careworn Cordell Hull the reason is partly age (69 years j. Buried in the paper-shuffling details of his mountainous task, he very often does not realize what goes on in the intrigue-ridden old halls of the rococo Department. This rough judgment, made solely in the blazing exigencies of wartime, and without regard to the saintly Tennesseean's years of patient, farseeing service, is current in Washington.

With Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson the reason is both age and health. Now no cocktail party passes in the District without a new anecdote about the Secretary's dozing off in some important conference, of his inability to work more than a few hours a day, of his valiant but losing struggle to keep abreast of the demands of war in 1941. No reflections are made on his spirit, his mind, his will: the emphasis is on his years.

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox is contrarily full of vigor; but ice-cold appraisers praise only his muscles. When he makes some such remark as "The U.S. will outproduce Hitler in 90 days" his whole Department groans; last week one Navy airman fell back on flying jargon to grumble: "The Old Man is shooting the breeze again."

Yet these three, with cautious, slow, well-meaning Henry Morgenthau Jr., Treasury Secretary, make up the President's War Cabinet. In a vain try to develop some kind of dynamic organization, the President chose a fifth man to lean on^ ailing Harry Hopkins, as executive secretary to the Secretaries. But Hopkins can work only six hours a day under as little strain as possible. So around him the President placed a small flying squadron of young Treasury-trained braintrusters, such as Philip Young and Oscar Cox--however, this was a compromise with a compromise.

Bossman. But if his managers were not the men to do the job, the worst executive management could be traced to Franklin Roosevelt. To solve his problem of management, the President had done little except to create new jobs and new agencies, overlapping and ineffectual.

This was typical, for although Franklin Roosevelt often creates new agencies to retrieve old failures, he rarely reorganizes those that fail. For two years he had the power for which many a President before him yearned--to reorganize the departments of the Government--but last January, when the Reorganization Act which gave him that power quietly expired at its two-year term, he had used it to shift only a few bureaus and make a few more jobs. Neither a key organization nor a key man had come out of the multiplication of agencies. No one had yet grown up out of the cutthroat tangle of confusion as had Bernard Baruch in World War I.

One apparent reason for the multiplication of jobs without the multiplication of results was that Franklin Roosevelt never fires anybody.

So last week when men in Washington talked of an explosion soon, they were hoping for something contrary to Franklin Roosevelt's habits. If Franklin Roosevelt soon has to find a man to run the war, likelihood was he would make more promotions instead of a shakeup.

Benched? For some months Washington has heard, without paying particular attention, that Supreme Court Associate Justice William Orville Douglas was the President's real defense choice; that he wanted to make Douglas Secretary of State, at the head of the War Cabinet--but feared public outcry. Last week the rumor was revived, and astute Sir Will-mott Lewis, veteran correspondent of the London Times, reported that Mr. Hull might be made Chief Justice, for the retirement of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes in June has been rumored persistently.

One vacancy is already open on the Court--the seat of retired Justice James Clark McReynolds. This post is almost definitely promised to Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina. If Justice Douglas can be taken from the bench, if Chief Justice Hughes does retire, three vacancies would open in June, possible month of the "explosion," and three vacancies on the highest bench would make lots of room for promotion upstairs.

New Faces. Besides Justice Douglas, New York City's dynamic, hen-shaped Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia is one of the new managers whom the President may have in mind. Both are nail-hard temperamentally; are doers first and askers afterward. Both are believed to be holding off acceptances of key jobs until they get the power to fire. Both are men of action and of plain speech.

In the meantime two new faces have risen to power in Washington: Budget Director Harold Dewey Smith, and Wayne Coy, an "anonymous" Presidential assistant, now executive secretary of the Office for Emergency Management.

Smith, a Michigander, was a career man recommended to the Treasury by Chicago's Public Administration Clearing House as an unusually able administrator.

Pallid, with a pale mustache, short and chunky in build, he is talkative, friendly, and regards himself as a policy-carrier-out, rather than a policymaker.

Coy, 37, a young Indianan who worked under Harry Hopkins as a State WPAdministrator, was a longtime protege of Indianan Paul McNutt, outgrew McNutt to become increasingly important to the President as a drafter of domestic and defense programs. He is spectacled, sallow, and extremely fast of mind.

The prominence of Coy and Smith underscores the fact that there is no longer such a thing as a little cohesive group of New Dealers who can be called Braintrusters, or the Janizariat. To tackle the great problem of his first term, Depression, the President had a powerful braintrust: Raymond Moley, Donald Richberg, General Hugh S. Johnson, George Peek, Rexford Tugwell--all now off the scene. The so-called Second New Deal--Robert Jackson, Harold Ickes, Leon Henderson, William Douglas. Corcoran, Cohen--are separately employed to the point of scatteration.

For the great problem of his third term, preparing for war, he has neither a manager nor any cohesive group to manage for him.

The President works like a newspaper copy-desk's man-in-the-slot, farming out assignments to his staff according to their abilities. Through Justice Felix Frankfurter he hears from England's Economist Harold Laski, about the international New Deal; and John G. Winant, Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, and Ben Cohen work in London toward that dream.

In Washington the ex-Ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, is advance man with trial-balloon speeches; and Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle Jr. has long been assigned the problem of the U.S. ultimate peace aims--which he has boiled down to three words, "Peace without empire." And the President is coming more & more to depend on two ex-bankers Under Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, now on a mission to London, and Robert Abercrombie Lovett, ex-banker, now Assistant Secretary of War for Air.

But the striking fact about all these figures is that they work in almost separate compartments. And still more striking is the fact that those who are closest are more notable as advisers than as administrators. If the President is to see the nation's war effort well managed, he will have to find at least one expert executive to whom he can give power and his confidence.

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