Out of the Top Drawer

This time there was no fanfare. There were not even any new anagrams—as when NDAC became OPM, OPM became SPAB and SPAB became WPB.

But this time there was just as big a change as in any of those elaborate overturns. Donald Nelson got himself a whole cabinet of new executives. And this time the new bosses are not merely men who had fancy titles in their companies. They are men out of the real top drawer of private industry.

In the same week that Donald Nelson helped President Roosevelt pick a real No. 1 man of U.S. industry—Union Pacific’s able president, William Martin Jeffers—for rubber tsar (see p. 77), he went on to pick three other men out of the top drawer for his own WPB.

To serve as vice chairman of WPB in full charge of production, he named equally able, equally eminent Charles E. (for Edward) Wilson,* president of General Electric, an always well-run company.

As another vice chairman in charge of coordinating Army & Navy needs with production schedules, he chose practical, resourceful Financier Ferdinand Eberstadt, chairman since last January of the Army & Navy Munitions Board.

As head of WPB’s vital Iron & Steel Branch—the disgusted resignation of whose boss, big Reese Taylor (TIME, Sept. 7), helped precipitate Nelson’s action—he picked Hiland Garfield Batcheller, head of small but potent Allegheny-Ludlum Steel Corp.

These three appointments amount to the installation of a new top management in WPB. To neat, hardboiled, balding Ferd Eberstadt, who has done a top-flight job of handling military schedules and priorities on the Munitions Board, falls the key job of setting WPB’s sights on all production except rubber. To factory-wise Charlie Wilson falls the job of meeting the goals that Eberstadt sets. And to Steelman Batcheller falls the particular responsibility of meeting the key goal, steel production.

Mr. Plan-It. In this setup, Ferd Eberstadt, 52, will inevitably become Donald Nelson’s second in command. He is used to taking charge. In World War I he interrupted his Columbia University law course to serve in France in the 304th Field Artillery, was wounded and rose to captain, was noted for commanding the best-drilled, best-disciplined battery in the 304th. Afterward he went to Wall Street as a corporation lawyer, soon was a partner in the investment-banking firm of Dillon, Read. In 1928 he sold his partnership (for a reputed $2,000,000). He started his own company and made money during the depression by specializing in small stock-&-bond issues while most underwriters piled up deficits waiting in vain for the return of the boom of the ’20s.

Eberstadt went to Washington last January at the behest of two old friends, Under Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson. Working with Forrestal and Patterson on the Munitions Board, he has tried to use the same straight-line tactics that Bernard M. Baruch applied to World War I, has sided with the Army in its arguments with WPB but has always believed that the right men could make WPB work. Now he will get his chance to prove it.

Mr. Make-It. Charlie Wilson, as top man of one of the nation’s biggest manufacturing firms, brings a lifetime of manufacturing experience to the big production job. He grew up in Manhattan’s shabby lower West Side, was left fatherless at three, had to go to work at twelve. He started as office boy in a General Electric subsidiary at $3 a week, never left the company, fought his way through the ranks as factory hand, clerk, accountant (a skill he picked up at night school). At 20 he was a factory manager, at 21 assistant superintendent. Then, a self-made man in the midst of G.E.’s engineering aristocracy, he rose to vice president in charge of the company’s big appliance business executive vice president in charge of everything. When famed Gerard Swope retired as president in 1940, Wilson was the natural choice to succeed him. (Gerard Swope last week went back to take his old job.)

At 55, Charlie Wilson is muscular ruddy, carries his six-foot frame like an infantry major. He likes golf, deep-sea fishing, has seldom missed a big prize fight and has taken on some pretty good men himself in gymnasium rings. But mostly he just works.

It took both Nelson and President Roosevelt to persuade Wilson that he could serve better in Washington than with G.E. Said he, after that hard decision was made: “It took me 40 years to climb to the presidency and 40 seconds to step out. . . . [But] I keep reminding myself that there’s a war on. Hell’s broke loose and I’ve got to do something about it.”

Mr. Alloy. The appointment of tall dapper Hiland Garfield Batcheller, 57 to boss WPB’s important Iron & Steel Branch seemed to make certain that WPB would throw its hopelessly confusing priority system out the window, set up a rigid allocations plan under which each manufacturer will get a quota that sticks.

When the WPB realignment loomed Secretary Knox called up Hiland Batcheller in Pittsburgh, told him a Government plane would be there at noon to take him to Washington. The reason for this urgency was not hard to guess. Batcheller as president of Allegheny-Ludlum Steel Corp. is head of a company that is relatively small in the steel industry but one of the biggest companies in the realm of alloy steel. As an expert in alloy steelmaking he is invaluable, for in the steel bottleneck the real choke is in alloy steels (for armor plate and many a vital part in war machines). The Government now wishes that it had taken his advice two years ago, when he foresaw the raw-material shortages now plaguing the U.S. Then he urged stocking up on nickel, chrome and tungsten, suggested substitution of molybdenum for tungsten alloys, and other steps which, had they been taken, would be godsends now.

Peace With the Army? WPB’S shake-up looked as if it might end the long-standing fight between Donald Nelson and the Army (TIME, Aug. 3) by the simple process of merger.

Eberstadt is a close friend and great admirer of Lieut. General Brehon B. Somervell, energetic chief of the Army’s Services of Supply.

Wilson will head a new production committee made up of all the top-flight military production men: General Somervell; Major General Oliver P. Echols, chief of Army Air Forces materiel; Vice Admiral Samuel M. Robinson, chief of Navy procurement; and Rear Admiral Howard L. Vickery, vice chairman of the Maritime Commission. The committee has orders to meet at least twice a week—the closest tie between military and civilian directors of the war effort that has yet been attempted.

The new WPB will not necessarily succeed where the old WPB failed. Many a problem is still unsolved: the deadwood which Donald Nelson had not yet cleared out of WPB’s staff, the development of a new system to ease raw-material shortages, the fact that WPB—which has no control over manpower or prices—is intrinsically a poor substitute for a genuine Economic High Command. And it still remains to be seen whether even really top-drawer industrial executives can get Washington’s huge bureaucracy to function—or will be able to put up temperamentally with its futility.

But if the new WPB is not yet quite the agency to run the war effort, it is better than anything that had come before.

* Not to be confused with Charles E. (for Erwin) Wilson, president of General Motors, or Charles E. (for Eben) Wilson, vice president of Worthington Pump & Machinery.