THE ADMINISTRATION: Noah

If Paul Gray Hoffman takes the tiller of ECA, an exhausted, socialistic Europe will meet an ebullient U.S. businessman and an evangelist of free enterprise.

Paul Hoffman was born 56 years ago in Chicago. He went to the University of Chicago for one year, then quit to sell autos. Selling was his forte. He plunged into the rich Los Angeles auto market, served two years in the field artillery in World War I, returned to Los Angeles to operate the Studebaker agency.

In 1925 he became Studebaker’s vice president in charge of sales, helped reorganize the company when it went broke in 1933. He has been president since 1935. Married, he has five sons, two daughters. A tireless, hard driver, he is a non-smoker and a teetotaler.

No man to sit still when something needed fixing up, he organized the Automotive Safety Foundation to do something about U.S. traffic deaths. In 1942 he presided at the birth of the Committee for Economic Development, a group of businessmen and economists organized to do something about keeping the U.S. economy up to its wartime Henning level and providing jobs for all.

He is still chairman of C.E.D.

Paul Hoffman is convinced that enlightened capitalism can be the most productive economic system in the world.

He is no novice at Government assignments. He was on the Harriman Committee which recently measured how much European aid the U.S. could afford. This week he returned from a State Department economic mission to the Far East. He was mentioned as a possible administrator of the Marshall Plan almost as soon as Congress began discussing the program. His chief sponsor was George Marshall; he also had the approval of Senator Arthur Vandenberg. In his testimony before Vandenberg’s Foreign Relations Committee, Hoffman outlined his conception of the nation’s task in Europe: “If production can be increased by one-third quickly, Western Europe will be on the way to prosperity. … A half-hearted program is likelv to be worse than useless.”