Judge Rosenman Reports

Into the White House waddled Judge Samuel Irving Rosenman, welcomed the President back from his conference with Winston Churchill in Newfoundland, laid upon his desk three alternative plans for a complete realignment of the ailing defense setup.

Biggest news about the Rosenman plans was the fact a week later they were still gathering dust on the President's desk. For the plans suggested merely a reshuffle of the present defense managers, a retitling of the present organizational components. None of the three proposed new blood. All called for an overall policy board; all ignored the tiresomely reiterated advice from all sides that control be centralized in one man. (The FORTUNE Forum of Executive Opinion--see p. 78--last week showed that 72.8% of the nation's business leaders favor a War Industries Board under one-man control, 20.1% prefer representative industry committees under Federal coordination, only 9.1% approve the present setup with minor efficiency changes.)

The plans gathered dust simply because the President still teetered on the brink of the great decision he dreads: to reorganize the defense management by a sweeping surgical operation, or to let things boggle along until somehow the U.S. produces enough war material in spite of bad management. From almost every man whose opinion he has respected in the past still came the sincere warning: revise the setup from top to bottom now; bring in fresh management blood to replace the men who have failed to deliver what was needed of them; outline the controls so clearly that the red-tape bottlenecks will vanish; give one man the responsibility; it is later than you think.

But it was hard for the President to give up the laissez-faire habit of a lifetime; as a great planner but a poor manager himself he simply could not see that the OPM strangled as much as it produced. And he hated to act.

Moreover, he liked all the men who had thus far come close to failure in defense management:

>Loyal Big Bill Knudsen, who was content to be a good soldier no matter how badly things went; who never reached out for power he needed if his chief was unwilling to give it; who inspired such loyalty that any reshuffle that did not leave him out would have to leave him at the top.

>Edward R. Stettinius, whose Industrial Materials division was caught napping on almost every major defense material: steel, aluminum, copper, ad infinitum; and whose eagerness to please everybody had almost wrecked the priority system by first giving full priorities to almost everyone and then forgetting to set up any enforcement plan until last month.

>John David Biggers, whose Production division was directly responsible for many a bottleneck that could have been foreseen; who was accused of playing such swift back-&-forth politics within defense that he was widely known in Washington as "The Phantom."

>Sidney Hillman, the smoothest compromise artist to appear in years in the City of Compromises.

>Ralph Budd, who spent the first year of defense in issuing statements that there was no transportation emergency; who only recently has settled down to catching up with his last year's job.

Men close to the President told him again & again, even to the point where they faced the White House doghouse, that a mere reshuffle of the present management and agencies would be completely phony, that the American people deserved better. And the President was now under enormous pressures from Britain, from Russia, from China, from the U.S. Navy, Army and Marines, from Congress, from public opinion.

The U.S. had pledged itself to be the "arsenal of democracy." If its allies against Hitler were not yet democracies, neither was the U.S. yet an arsenal.

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