THE ADMINISTRATION: O.K., S.A.

(See Cover)

The time passed swiftly as the two old friends and classmates sat in a Concord, N.H. hotel, swapping reminiscences about the old days at Dartmouth. In the three years since their graduation, class of ’20, Richard Pearson had worked as a textbook salesman, saw ahead of him a promising career in book publishing. Slim young Sherman Adams was already a successful lumberman. Preparing at last to leave, Salesman Pearson grinned and said he guessed they must have talked about nearly everything. Adams agreed. Then he added matter-of-factly: “I got married today.” The startled Pearson spun about. “Where’s the bride?” he cried. Replied

Adams: “Out front in the car.” Pearson, only half-believing, insisted that he be shown. “Sure enough,” recalls Pearson, now with Macmillan Co., “there I saw the littlest thing curled up on the front seat, fast asleep. That was Rachel. She was 18.” Wondrously, the marriage of Rachel and Sherman Adams did not end on that first day, or even the next. It has continued for 32 years and, although marked by a curious and continuing sort of one-upmanship (in which Rachel Adams is more than capable of holding her own), is one of unusual devotion. This is the flinty touchstone to Sherman Adams: often inconsiderate, always demanding, possessed of the disposition of a grizzly with a barked shin, Adams has in him rare strengths of loyalty, integrity and selflessness that inspire the respect and confidence—and sometimes even the fierce affection—of those closest to him. By his own dedication to work, he leads others to labor far beyond their ordinary capacities. Hard-minded and hard-muscled (5 ft. 8 in., 140 Ibs.), Sherman Adams is an ideal man for his job—and his job has been even tougher and more important since Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack.

The Closely Knit Headquarters. Adams’ official title is “the Assistant to the President” of the U.S. Adams himself modestly describes his duties as the “management of the President’s desk.” President Eisenhower says it another way: “I think of Adams as my chief of staff, but I don’t call him that because the politicians think it sounds too military.”

Harry Truman was the first U.S. President to make a real start toward establishing an adequate White House staff system. Truman, who greatly improved the administration of the presidency, deemed his staff of such importance that he conducted many meetings himself—and that was probably a mistake. On paper, the White House organization under Truman appeared much the same as that under Eisenhower. But by working so directly with his staff members, Truman encouraged each to come straight to him with his problems. Thus Assistant to the President John Steelman was bypassed, decisions were made without his knowledge. Truman was constantly bothered, and the whole staff concept was often defeated.

Old Soldier Eisenhower recognized that the job of Chief Executive could not be handled properly without a staff strong enough to keep track of, and ride herd on, the dozens of governmental departments and agencies with their divergent interests. But if each staff member reported only to the President, the result would be merely the added complication of warring liaison men. In today’s White House organization, the best roads to the President lead through Sherman Adams (see chart). The Limited Power. Adams has immense power, to the extent that New York Timesman James Reston, studying the state of the nation during the period of the President’s recuperation, recently wrote: “There is a growing feeling here that Mr. Adams is now exercising more power than any man in America.”

The Adams power includes a considerable influence on the formulation of policy. He is blamed by Republican right-wingers for helping to keep the Administration on a progressive course. In this, Adams takes a practical view: he realizes that the Administration simply could not survive if it failed to support such institutions as social security, minimum wage, and essential federal aid to health and education. But at the operative level, Adams’ power is sharply circumscribed, by both his own inclination and that of his boss. Once policy has been established—by the President in public and private pronouncements, by the Cabinet and National Security Council, by the acts of Congress —Adams strictly confines his work to the framework of how policy can best be implemented.

He regularly attends the meetings of the Eisenhower Cabinet and is often present at the sessions of the National Security Council. At least twice a week, he presides over the White House staff meetings, where policy is reviewed, problems discussed and assignments made. Adams is quietly on hand for many of Ike’s business talks with visitors. On other matters, he is in and out of the President’s office half a dozen times a day. This causes him some distress, because of a firm credo: “The really efficient Government official is the man who makes decisions for himself, within the framework of established policy, without running to the President with his problems.”

A key Adams duty is that of ironing—or, if necessary, stomping—out the scores of differences that must arise within any Administration. It is up to Sherman Adams to bring together for negotiation the department and agency heads who may have an interest in a specific problem. He can and does hold over their heads the fact that if they do not arrive at a reasonable solution he will write the recommendation himself—and his is the one that goes to President Eisenhower marked with the all-important scrawl: “O.K., S.A.”

The Basis for Decision. The papers carrying that notation are the ones that President Eisenhower is least likely to question, for he knows what lies behind the Adams seal of approval. Basic to the White House staff system is the rule that no verbal assumptions are made: everything possible is put in writing for staff processing. Whenever a Cabinet member or other Government officer makes a recommendation to President Eisenhower, he is asked to submit it in writing, to be

logged in by Staff Secretary Andrew J. Goodpaster.

From Goodpaster the papers go through channels to appropriate officials, both on the staff and in the departments or agencies, for analysis and comment. Statistics are gathered, the implications of a subject are studied, recommendations are made, and final papers are prepared for Adams and the President. Thus there is not only the original proposal at hand, but also supplementary data from everyone whose views may be relevant. It is on the basis of this information that the decisions of the Eisenhower Administration are reached.

“Now, Ezra …” Last week Sherman Adams was finishing up, at least for a while, one of his toughest and most important chores: the preparation of the Administration’s annual legislative program, to be presented in the State of the Union Message.

Each fall, Adams begins a series of meetings with departmental officers, and outlines in general terms the Administration’s hopes and plans for the next session of Congress. Then the departments go to work on the specifics of the program. Finally the drafts go back to Adams, who ruthlessly kills the impossible and the impractical.

This year’s negotiations on farm policy furnish a prime example of Adams in operation. The farm program was first discussed at a Cabinet meeting while the President was sick and away. Adams suggested that the controversial subject be turned over to a special committee. As established, the committee included Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson, Vice President Richard Nixon, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. and Sherman Adams. The committee worked out, and unanimously recommended, a farm program far more responsive to farm pressures than any Ezra Benson would have considered three months before. This was in large part due to Adams, who said, time and again: “Now, Ezra, the Boss feels this way …” And when Adams said that, everyone present believed him.

A Big Bass Voice. Adams has the respect of most top Administration officials, but his relationships with the Congress could hardly be worse. Much of the ill will is unavoidable; Adams is a perfectly postured whipping boy for politicians who do not care to match themselves against the President’s popularity. A powerful Senator, who has known Adams a long while and dislikes him heartily, pays a lefthanded tribute: “When Adams gets a problem, he dedicates himself to it to the exclusion of everything else. Nothing else matters, not the common courtesies of life, not his friends, not the political niceties or even the common decencies. Nothing matters but the problem at hand.”

It has always been like that with Sherman Adams.

Llewellyn Sherman Adams (he long ago dropped the first name) was born Jan. 8, 1899 in his maternal grandfather’s Baptist parsonage in the hill town of East Dover, Vt. His father, Clyde Adams,* ran a small grocery; his mother, Winnie Sherman Adams, was a strong-willed young woman from whom Sherman Adams got an obsessive love of music.

After his parents moved to Providence, R.I., Adams was song leader of his Hope High School class and later, in his senior college year, led the famed Dartmouth Glee Club. Says a fellow glee club member: “He looked just like a little choirboy, with his pink face and close-cut, blond hair. You almost expected him to sing soprano. And then this big bass voice would roll out, and you knew this fellow was something special.” While a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Adams sang in the second bass section of the Washington Cathedral choir. When he was New Hampshire’s governor, it was his wintertime prebreakfast habit to cut figure eights on the ice of Webster Lake near his Lincoln home, to the music of Mozart and Chopin, piped through an amplifying system he had rigged up. Today, Adams’ invariable custom is to turn on his Scott hi-fi set the moment he gets downstairs in the morning. Yet there is a streak of Yankee practicality even in Adams’ devotion to music. Referring to one of the memorable occasions of his life—Paderewski’s last New England concert—Adams says: “My chief recollections of the event are that we had to pay $3 apiece for gallery seats and listened to the most stirring rendition of Chopin’s ‘Revolutionary’ Etude that it was ever my good fortune to hear.”

Blindly On. Throughout high school, Adams went back summers to the Vermont parsonage of his stern, bearded grandfather, Cyrus Sherman (who raised five children on $500 a year). While there, he worked on the farms, pulling a rake in the hay fields, and developed another passion: love of the New England outdoors. At Dartmouth—before and after a six-month World War I stint in the Marine Corps—he flung himself furiously into the activities of the Dartmouth Outing Club, which he led during his senior year. That year he logged 41 3½ hiking miles, including one 24-hour marathon march from Skyline Cabin, near Littleton, to Hanover, a distance of 83 miles. For the last ten miles Adams was racked by stomach cramps, but he staggered blindly on.

Naturally enough, Adams looked first to the outdoors for his life’s work: he got a job as clerk and sealer in the Healdville, Vt. logging camp of the Black River Lumber Co. When the company manager became ill, Adams took over. In 1923 he was transferred to the parent firm, the Parker-Young Co., with headquarters in Lincoln, N.H., and was successively made woods superintendent and general woods manager. Adams’ present taciturnity was doubtless conditioned by his days of eating in lumber-company boarding houses. When the dining-room doors were opened, some 125 men elbowed and kicked their way to the table. Because any sort of conversation led to fights, there was a strict rule against talking.

Up to His Belly. As a woods boss, Adams won success the hard way. “I guess all of us bucked him at one time or another,” says Old Woodsman Ed Gillman. “He was smart and hard to get along with, but he would try everything, and most of us got to like him.” Says Abe (“The Cub”) Boyle: “He was a cocky little devil. I mind a time he was giving this old woodsman the devil about something. So the old boy laid down his tools, picked Sherm up and threw him into a deep snowdrift. He picked up his tools again and went to the camp clerk. Sherm followed him in, and said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ The old boy said, ‘I’m quitting before I get fired.’ ‘The hell you are,’ said Adams. ‘Get back out there on the job.’

“I’ll say this for him,” Boyle continues, “he’d pitch in and do anything, whether he knew anything about it or not. On river drives, he’d be right out there with a pickaroon, keeping the logs moving. You got to move fast, and he’d move fast. Being a little guy, he’d be right up to his belly in that cold water.”

Sherman Adams still carries the scars of the logging camps. He lost his upper front teeth when an unbalanced log skid came up and smacked him full-front. He was partly deafened by a flying chunk of wood that clipped him behind the left ear. One day Adams was showing off Barker-Young stock to a visiting horse dealer. An old plug named Snowball kept getting in the way. Adams swatted Snowball on the rump; Snowball kicked Adams in the face, fracturing his frontal sinus.

String in His Sandwich. In 1922, while still at Healdville, Adams met a local girl named Rachel Leona White, home from school for a holiday. He heard her say that she was quite a square-dancer, one of the lesser arts at which Adams still considers himself adept. “You’ve got to show me,” he challenged. She did. They were married the next year and settled down in Lincoln, where they still have a barn-red home. The Adams house faces Loon Mountain, while Little Coolidge Mountain juts almost out of the backyard. Ten miles distant is Franconia Notch, above which looms the Great Stone Face—of which Adams is said to be a rival.

For Sherman Adams, pretty, rippling-voiced Rachel (he calls her “Plum,” but a more popular name is “Pebble,” deriving from his nickname, “The Rock”) has been a saving grace. When his nerves fray, she calms him; when he begins slashing about with his sharp tongue, she takes him aside and puts him smartly in his place. While he was governor, and frugally carrying his lunch box each day to the State House, she once put string inside his sandwich to get even for “something he was fussing about.” Currently, Pebble is playing another little trick on her rock-like spouse. He has decided that he likes Sanka better than regular coffee and demands it for breakfast. So Rachel makes regular coffee but leaves the Sanka jar in full view. Adams sees it and sips happily away, murmuring about the superior taste of Sanka. It is also one of the trials in the life of Sherman Adams that Rachel at latest count was three games ahead of him in Scrabble, at which he is a fanatic for the letter of the rules.

A Political “Huh.” Adams was practically pushed into politics. Lincoln, a one-industry town of 1,500, was dominated by the Parker-Young Co. In 1940, says Martin Brown, then Parker-Young’s president, “some of the men at the mill said we ought to send a better type down to the Capitol. They said the men we had sent there were not attending to business.” Brown called a meeting of about 25 company officials and suggested that Adams be put up for the legislature.* The proposal was agreed upon. Next day Brown walked into Adams’ office and said: “Sherm, I guess we’ve got to send you down to Concord this fall.” Replied Adams: “Huh.”

He served two terms in the legislature, the second as the house speaker, and went on to Washington and the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was a hardworking but undistinguished one-termer. In 1946 Adams ran for governor of New Hampshire and lost by only 157 votes to Incumbent Republican Charles Dale. Two years later, Adams won easily over another candidate.

Governor Adams set briskly about streamlining the state’s cumbersome administrative machinery. He succeeded, but not without a hard fight that he partly brought upon himself. One of the members of the reorganization commission was regularly late to its meetings. Adams, who makes a fetish of punctuality, began railing at the late comer. The man was later on hand as majority leader of the state legislature to fight the reorganization at nearly every turn. From such political enemies, Adams earned the nickname “One-Term Sherm.” He seemed, however, to do all right with the voters, and he was re-elected in 1950.

Backing the Fastest Horse. On Sept. 30, 1951, Adams attended a governors’ conference at Gatlinburg, Tenn., where he announced that the name of General Dwight Eisenhower—whom he had never met—would be entered in the New Hampshire presidential primary. Says Adams: “I became convinced that he had the capabilities and the principles to make a really great President.” Then he adds: “He was the fastest horse in the stable.”

During the New Hampshire primary, Adams bore the brunt of campaigning for his absent candidate, and he is entitled to much of the credit for Ike’s make-orbreak New Hampshire victory over Bob Taft. In July, as the Republicans trooped to Chicago for their national convention, Adams was named floor manager of the Eisenhower forces. Up to that time, Ike hardly knew Adams from Adam, but he was impressed by the terse, accurate battle reports sent by Adams from the floor.

A few days after he was nominated, Eisenhower called upon Adams to become his personal campaign manager.

As the campaign progressed, Candidate Eisenhower depended more and more on the counsels of Manager Adams. Ike’s trust was especially earned in the episode of Dick Nixon’s expense account, when many of the Eisenhower staff members panicked and began screaming for Nixon’s head. Adams’ advice was simple: “Sit tight and wait.” Then he helped set up Nixon’s effective television speech.

On election day, when the floor of the Commodore Hotel headquarters was littered with bitten fingernails, Sherman and Rachel Adams slipped quietly away and went sightseeing at the Bronx Zoo. That night Sinclair Weeks, later to become Commerce Secretary, gallantly remarked on Rachel’s fresh outdoor complexion. “We’ve been to the zoo to see all the animals,” she explained. “Ah,” said Weeks, “quite a change from the campaign.” Replied Rachel: “Not so much.”

“Yeah, Go Ahead.” With the campaign over, President-elect Eisenhower wasted no time in saying to Adams: “I have been thinking this over. You had better come down with me to the White House. You can be there at my right hand.” In his rented home in Washington’s Rock Creek Park, Adams nowadays arises even earlier than he did before the President’s illness. His first morning home from Denver in November, he was up at 5:45. “I would think we were back logging again,” said drowsy Rachel Adams. Her husband, already wide-awake, routed her from bed, took her by the arm and led her over to a window, through which the first streaks of light could be seen. “Now, Plum,” he said, “you see it’s the loveliest part of the day.”

Once downstairs, the hi-fi set goes on, and Adams reads the morning papers while Rachel prepares breakfast (fruit, two eggs and—he thinks—Sanka). He is at the White House desk, emblazoned with the Seal of the President of the U.S., by 7:30, plunging deep into the stack of papers that never seems to diminish. The rest of the day is accurately crowded: conferences, sometimes as many as three at a time, with Adams circulating among them; a parade of visitors; dozens of telephone calls; and, always, papers and more papers. Generally, Adams takes time out only to have lunch in the staff dining room, but occasionally, when the pace becomes too breakneck, he will put on his coat and hat and simply disappear from the White House for a couple of hours.

Returning from one of these excursions recently, Adams came racing through the White House lobby just in time to keep an appointment with a visitor who was already waiting in the anteroom. Spotting the caller, Adams motioned toward his office with the crook of a finger and said: “In.” Inside, Adams pointed and said: “Chair.” The visitor sat down near the desk. Hat and coat still on, Adams opened several envelopes marked “Confidential.” He pressed a buzzer and summoned an assistant staff secretary. Adams handed the aide a paper and ordered: “Send this to Gettysburg . . . Seems self-explanatory—but add any necessary comment.” A telephone rang. Adams picked it up. “That’s right,” he said. “Yeah … Let’s try it.” He hung up (Adams considers the words hello and goodbye to be the sheerest waste of time). Next, Adams left his office to talk with his secretaries in an adjoining room. He returned, minus his hat and coat, in about ten minutes, sat down, turned to the visitor, and said: “Yeah, go ahead.”

Adams drives his help as hard as he drives himself. One time he and his then assistant, Charles F. Willis Jr., walked out of Adams’ office to discover that two of his four stenographers had obviously been weeping. Startled, Adams beat a hasty retreat. “What are they crying about—what did I do?” Adams asked. “You were abrupt and somewhat rude,” replied Willis. “Oh no,” said Adams. “Oh yes,” said Willis. “What’ll I do?” asked Adams. “I think you ought to say something to them,” advised Willis. “Well-all right,” said Adams hesitantly. He returned to the outer office, gazed awkwardly at the girls for a moment, and then, striding quickly around the room, thumped each girl on the back with a cheery “Hiya, honey!” He was thoroughly bewildered when the girls began sobbing in earnest.

The Highest Compliment. The members of the office staff who stick around long enough to get to know him swear by Adams. Says Alice Smith, a former secretary on his White House staff: “The work he does! A few times people in Washington asked me where I worked, and when I told them they would look at me with a squint and say, ‘Oh, you work for him?’ And I would say, ‘Yes, I do, and he’s the finest boss in Washington.’ ”

This is the sort of confidence that Sherman Adams can inspire, both from below and from above. He has no greater admirer than the President. When the political demands for Adams’ removal go up—Ike is likely to snort: “The trouble with those people is they don’t understand integrity.” And once, to a friend, President Eisenhower paid Adams the highest compliment at his command. “The only person who really understands what I am trying to do,” said the President of the U.S., “is Sherman Adams.”

*Through his father, Sherman Adams is de scended from the Henry Adams who left Somer set, England in 1638, settled in Braintree, Mass., and founded an American dynasty. Henry Adams’ seventh son, Joseph, was the great-great-grandfather of President John Adams and the great-great-great-grandfather of President John Quincy Adams. Sherman Adams traces his lineage through Henry Adams’ eighth (and last) son, Edward. *The 399-member New Hampshire house of representatives, the nations’ second-largest lawmaking body, includes a representative from every incorporated township with a population of at least 729.