Armed Forces: Engine Charlie

“The price of progress is trouble,” said Charles Erwin Wilson, “and I must be making lots of progress.” Wilson knew what he was talking about: a bulky man with cowlicked white hair and a round, mobile face, he had a habit of blurting out whatever was on his mind. That habit got him into plenty of trouble—and sometimes diverted attention from abilities that Wilson brought to the presidency of the world’s greatest industrial corporation and to the post of Secretary of Defense as the U.S. entered the missile age. Last week at Richland, his showplace plantation in Louisiana, Charlie Wilson, 71, died in his sleep of a heart attack.

“You Talk More.” Charlie Wilson had an inventive mind. The son of Ohio schoolteacher parents, he went to work for the Westinghouse Electric & Mfg. Co. in Pittsburgh as an 18¢-an-hour apprentice engineer, by the time he was 22 had designed Westinghouse’s first auto starter and was on his way up. He also had a touch for labor-management relations. Having moved to General Motors and become its youngest vice president, at 38, he was assigned by G.M. President William Knudsen to take charge of the corporation’s dealings with labor. “You have more patience than I have,” said Knudsen, “and you talk more.” Wilson steered General Motors through the labor conflicts of the late ’30s and won the respect of organized labor. Once, when he was recovering from a hip fracture suffered during an impetuous attempt at ice skating, Wilson got an idea for inspiring the labor force by giving raises based on increased production. Wilson coupled his “productivity clause” with the famed cost-of-living “escalator clause” in a package that has become a basic provision in auto industry labor contracts.

When Knudsen resigned to go to Washington just before World War II, Charlie Wilson took over as president of G.M. Under his presidency, General Motors became the greatest cornucopia of war materiel in human history. From its production lines flowed a quarter of the tanks and armored cars, nearly half of the machine guns and carbines, three-quarters of the diesel engines used by the U.S. armed forces during the war. Dwight Eisenhower first encountered Wilson while serving as the Army’s Chief of Staff in the postwar years; in 1952, after Ike was elected Pres ident, Wilson was his choice for the job of Secretary of Defense.

“You Men.” Washington, although it eventually became quite fond of him, never understood Charlie Wilson—and Detroit’s Wilson certainly never understood Washington. The Wilson remarks that would have passed for wry banter in a General Motors boardroom became mat ters of controversy in the capital’s political climate. During the closed hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee on his confirmation, Wilson made a comment that was widely misquoted and was to dog him throughout his governmental years. According to the press, Wilson told the Senators: “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” What he actually said: “For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”

Wilson ruffled Senators by constantly calling them “you men” and by his reluctance to give up his G.M. holdings as a prerequisite to Government service (a sacrifice that ultimately cost him $2,500,000). In the middle of the 1954 recession, he faced Detroit reporters and came up with an analogy about the nation’s unemployed that was raised as a Democratic battle cry during the year’s congressional election campaigning. Said Wilson: “I’ve always liked bird dogs better than kennel-fed dogs myself. You know, one that’ll get out and hunt for food rather than sit on his fanny and yell.” In 1957, when he accused the National Guard of being a haven for draft dodgers, Wilson was publicly rebuked by President Eisenhower.

“Why Worry?” As Secretary of Defense, Charlie Wilson’s record was bittersweet. He strove to apply Detroit’s big-business methods to big Government, in his first 17 weeks in office fired 40,000 civilian employees. Over three years, he slashed $11 billion from the nation’s defense budgets. But in running the Pentagon, economic efficiency is not always equivalent to military effectiveness—and there can be little doubt that Charlie Wilson, chopping away at the U.S. Army on behalf of the Eisenhower Administration’s massive deterrent policies, left wounds that pain to this day. Beyond that, and despite his own mechanical inventiveness, Wilson was remarkably blind about the basic research that leads to new technological revolutions. Said he: “Don’t worry about what makes the grass green or why fried potatoes turn brown.” Wilson was a hardware man, and he could see little sense in projects that did not have an obvious military value. Even in 1957, when Russia entered space with Sputnik I, Charlie Wilson was scornful. “Why worry?” he asked. “It isn’t going to fall down and hit you on the head, you know.”

When he resigned in 1957, Wilson had served longer as Secretary of Defense than anyone else. In his efforts to get more bang for the buck, he had retarded the U.S. potential for fighting any kind of war, any place, any time. But he had effectively led the armed forces in their development of the strategic missiles necessary for all-out war.