NEW ADMINISTRATION: First Frontiersmen

President-elect Kennedy’s first top-level appointees:

Abraham Alexander Ribicoff, 50, to be Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. “If I am elected,” John Kennedy once promised, “Abe Ribicoff can be anything he wants to be in my Administration.” One of Kennedy’s first and staunchest supporters for President, Connecticut’s popular, soulfully handsome Ribicoff was considered a top candidate for U.S. Attorney General. Ribicoff turned down that job with the characteristic comment that he was out of practice as a lawyer—and besides, it would be politically hard on the new Administration for a Catholic and a Jew to lead any fight for integration. Son of an immigrant factory worker, Ribicoff escaped from the New Britain, Conn, tenements to win a law degree at the University of Chicago in 1933. After two terms on a Hartford police court, he spent four impressive years in Congress, narrowly (by 3,115 votes) edged out G.O.P. Incumbent John Lodge (brother of Cabot) in the 1954 gubernatorial race. As Governor, Ribicoff has faced Republican-controlled legislatures during most of his regime. Nonetheless, he has seen a surprising number of his major requests passed into law: one of the nation’s stiffest traffic-safety programs, court reform, abolition of a 300-year-old system of county government, $350 million in bonds for new highways. Ribicoff is unlikely to be a Cabinet innovator, but should prove popular in carrying out orders of a chief whose welfare philosophy, he says, is “on all fours” with his own.

Luther Hartwell Hodges, 62, Secretary of Commerce. To Kennedy, North Carolina’s outgoing Governor Hodges has a number of shining political virtues: he worked hard for the ticket in politically touchy North Carolina; he is trusted by the South; and he is respected and liked by the U.S. business community. An old pro with young ideas, Hodges is the Methodist son of a dirt-poor tenant farmer. He worked his way through the state university at Chapel Hill, spent 17 years with the Marshall Field & Co. textile empire. where he became a vice president, before taking his first political step in 1952. Then, on a friend’s advice, he ran for lieutenant governor, won with surprising ease. Two years later, Governor William Umstead died of a heart attack, and Hodges moved into the executive mansion. Although a segregationist himself, he planned so successfully for school integration (of the token variety) that North Carolina has had fewer legal problems than almost any other Southern state. As Governor, Hodges traveled endlessly promoting new business, has lured more than $1 billion in investment to North Carolina since 1954; at the same time he pushed stiff zoning laws past his legislature to prevent industrial blight. Hodges is a fiscal conservative who thrives on unorthodox operating procedure. “He’s a perfectionist,” says a friend. “He wants a report two weeks before he asks for it.”

David Elliott Bell, 41, Director of the Budget Bureau. The least known of Kennedy’s first appointees, Bell has good credentials. Born in Jamestown, N. Dak., towering (6 ft. 4 in.) David Bell, a Presbyterian, graduated from California’s respected Pomona College. He taught briefly in Harvard’s economics department after earning his master’s degree there in 1941, then signed on as an analyst for the Budget Bureau. Bell spent three years as a Marine combat tactics instructor and intelligence officer, went back to Washington in 1946 as a Budget Bureau examiner. A good writer and likable administrator, he soon caught the eye of Harry Truman’s special counsel. Clark Clifford; Bell was eventually promoted to assistant to the chief of the Budget Office’s fiscal division, later served three years as a speechwriter and administrative assistant in Truman’s “kitchen cabinet.” During the Eisenhower years Bell went back to Harvard, where in time he became secretary (assistant dean) in the Graduate School of Public Administration, served on the side as an economics adviser to the government of Pakistan. As an economic pragmatist, Bell sees the Budget Bureau as a positive instrument of presidential policy rather than as a taxpayers’ watchdog. He can thus be expected to approach defense spending with essential needs instead of an arbitrary monetary ceiling in mind.

Gerhard Mennen Williams, 49, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Early last March, greying, bow-tied “Soapy” Williams, announcing that he would not try for a seventh term as Governor of Michigan, brooded over his uncertain future. “I would like,” he said, “to work for the cause of peace in some public office where I could be effective.” Last week Soapy got part of his wish, with an appointment that President-elect Kennedy rated soothingly as “second to none in the new Administration.” (Actually, Williams had obviously hoped for Cabinet rank, perhaps the new job that Ribicoff got.) During his twelve statehouse years, Princeton-educated Soapy Williams, an Episcopalian and heir to a shaving-soap fortune, was a tireless political administrator who took dedicated care of Michigan’s welfare needs. That dedication earned him few plaudits from the G.O.P.-run legislature, which fought his tax programs so bitterly that the state last year narrowly avoided bankruptcy ($110 million deficit in June 1959). If Arkansas’ William Fulbright becomes Secretary of State, Williams’ civil rights record would be expected to soften the blow: Williams belongs to the N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League, and actively promoted Negroes for high Michigan office. Although his background in foreign affairs is thin, Williams visited Africa in 1958, has a quick ear for languages. Even those who distrust his doctrinaire liberalism expect that he will be an ingenious experimenter in his new job. ”Whoever works with Soapy in the State Department.” said a Michigan aide, “had better expect to get phone calls at any hour, including 3 a.m., when he gets an idea he wants to discuss. He’ll call from Africa or anywhere else.”