Can't Say No

"There are three people to whom I can never say no," Robert Abercrombie Lovett once said. "My wife, Henry Stimson and General Marshall." In the past ten years, Bob Lovett has often shown that he meant just what he said.

In 1940, at Henry Stimson's call, he gave up his Wall Street banking office (Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.) to become Stimson's special assistant, stayed on for the duration as Assistant Secretary of War for Air. After the war, he had scarcely settled back into private business before he got a call from George Marshall. Within a matter of days, he was back in Washington again as Marshall's Under Secretary of State. Last week Washington was on the wire again to the Lovett home at Locust Valley, N.Y. This time the caller--at the hearty hour of 7:30 a.m.--was Harry Truman himself. Now that George Marshall was back in harness as Secretary of Defense, Marshall wanted his old teammate to join him again.

The nation would have a hard time finding a better man for Defense's No. 2 job. A Navy bomber pilot (Navy Cross) in World War I and an early apostle of air power, Lovett proved a tough-minded administrator in World War II, was the man chiefly responsible for organizing the gigantic 100,000-planes-a-year program and driving it through. In his five years at the War Department, Bob Lovett and Chief of Staff George Marshall became professionally and personally devoted to each other. As Under Secretary of State, with Marshall away at international conferences much of the time, Lovett actually served longer in the Secretary's chair than George Marshall himself.

A quiet, almost icily cool man with a craggy bald head and an elegant drawing-room slouch, Lovett had long since proved to be as effective with a diplomat or a Congressman as he was with a general or an industrialist. In his new job he could be expected to tighten still further the liaison between State and Defense which had already improved perceptibly since the departure of Louis Johnson.

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