U.S. At War: Mr. Secretary Stettinius

Mr. Secretary Stettinius ( See Cover ) The Senate’s Lone Ranger, North Dakota’s Bill Langer, took the floor one day last week. He had an objection to make, to the appointment of Edward R. Stettinius Jr. as Secretary of State. The objection took up two and a half hours of his and the Senate’s time, and filled 57 columns of type in the Congressional Record. But Bill Langer spoke with the air of a man who knew the truth of Ben Franklin’s dictum that he who spits against the wind spits in his own face. He made it clear that he had no personal objection to Edward R. Stettinius Jr. In fact, most of Bill Langer’s objections, in the old Midwest Senatorial tradition of denouncing Wall Street, seemed to be against Stettinius Sr. (d. 1925) and the House of Morgan to which he belonged. At last, not winded but despairing, Langer confessed: “I realize I am a lone voice in the wilderness.” A few moments later, the Senate voted confirmation: 68-to-1.

“Thanks, Bob.” Day after the Senate confirmation, into Cordell Hull’s old black leather office crowded tittering Government clerks, a jostling mass of hardelbowed photographers, the Stettinius family—wife Virginia Wallace Stettinius, sons Edward R. III, 16, Wallace and Joseph, twins, 11—the protocol officer in striped pants, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in black, General George Marshall in olive drab, and Ed Stettinius in a blue business suit. The Secretary of State’s desk, stacked high for twelve years with pamphlets, cables and memos, was clean.

Justice Jackson read the oath of office and radiant, robust Ed Stettinius, hand on Bible, boomed out a baritone “So help me, God!” Then the new Secretary characteristically thrust out a friendly big hand to the Justice: “Thanks, Bob!” He turned about and kissed his wife (too quickly for the photographers; he had to do it again for them). Soon after, he held a spot press conference, where he paid Cordell Hull what must have been his 200th tribute. He told the correspondents, in effect, that from now on, boys, whatever you want is yours. This was welcome news; State Department newsmen are often treated as if they carried concealed weapons.

It is this very friendliness that has taken Ed Stettinius so far so fast. He calls people by their first names, which he always remembers. He chews gum, smokes cigarets, smiles often. He has an almost pastorlike skill at presiding over meetings. He has a knack of getting people to agree. He leans back, crosses his legs, talks in formally. A caller at his office is greeted like a long-lost brother; Ed sits down facing him, slapping his big hands down on both knees, leaning forward, all interest. He has presence. He is tall, handsome and prematurely white-haired. The color of his hair, and his quick rise to position, long ago gave him a nickname, not always spoken in jest: the White-Haired Boy. (Other nicknames: Little Stet, Mr. Statistics, Junior, Big Ed.)

New Trail. Many Americans would hesitate to predict that Ed Stettinius would rank with Secretaries of State who are U.S. household names: with John Quincy Adams, who helped negotiate the “most popular” peace treaty in U.S. history after the War of 1812, and who braintrusted James Monroe’s famed Doctrine; with Daniel Webster, who ended the era of hate between Canada and the U.S.; with Seward, who bought Alaska at 4 a.m. one morning; with Elihu Root, who did his diplomatic best to mollify Latin America after Theodore Roosevelt seized Panama; or with John Hay, who by taking a British hint gave China an Open Door.

By now, as Winston Churchill had said, the U.S. is the “greatest military, naval and air power” in the world, a fact which was also a summons to greatness in diplomacy. No longer could U.S. policy be summed up, as in Admiral Mahan’s day, in ten words: in Asia, cooperation; in the Caribbean, predominance; in Europe, abstention.

The U.S. was not yet an active partner in a world society, but the will, and part of the way, were there. No previous U.S. Secretary of State had had so much need for a sure foot on a new trail. But in his last major act as Under Secretary, Stettinius had made what was probably a serious diplomatic blunder: his assertion that the “traditional policy” of the U.S. is not to guarantee European frontiers, in particular the frontiers of Poland (TIME, Dec. 4). This was in line with the old “abstention” of American foreign policy, but it ignored the fact that the old line is now rounding a big curve. It ignored the fact that at Teheran Franklin Roosevelt had gone even farther afield by guaranteeing Iran’s borders. And as one effect of restating such a “tradition” now, loud and prompt protests came from London and Paris last week.

The Abstemious One. Ed Stettinius was not exactly born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he soon grew accustomed to using one. His father, a St. Louis orphan raised in a Jesuit school, made and lost a fortune as a boy plunger in Chicago’s Wheat Pit. Stettinius Sr. was on his way back up—as an executive in a boiler factory—when Stettinius Jr. was born, Oct. 22, 1900, in a gaslit, greystone house along Chicago’s famed Gold Coast.

By the time Ed Jr. was 15, his father was a big name in U.S. business as president of the Diamond Match Co. The House of Morgan put him in charge of the Allies’ $3,000,000,000 war purchases in the U.S. Lord Northcliffe called the elder Stettinius “easily the ablest business organizer in the ranks of the Allies or the enemy.” When the U.S. declared war on Germany, he became a $1-a-year aide to Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch.

At this time, young Ed had just emerged from Harstrom, a small Connecticut boarding school. His schoolmaster recommended him to the University of Virginia with qualifications: “Personal character—excellent, without a blemish. Seriousness of purpose —very good. Intellectual promise—fair.”

Beside the University of Virginia’s famed serpentine walls, Stettinius walked a straight path. He taught Sunday School in an Episcopal church, became president of the campus Y.M.C.A., headed the under graduate honor system. Other students sometimes journeyed up to the Ragged Mountains to fill Mason jars with moon shine. Ed Stettinius went there only to do missionary work among the hillbillies. And as he neither smoked nor drank, fraternity brothers gave him a nickname: “Abstemious Stettinius.” This was to distinguish him from an older brother (Big Stet), now dead, who was a more consistent hedonist, and known as “Continuous Stettinius.”

His father thought Ed was taking evangelism too seriously, so he sent him abroad. His traveling companion was a philosophy instructor who has since become one of the University’s legendary characters : William S. A. (“Billy”) Pott, half Virginian, half Chinese. Billy Pott and Ed Stettinius bounced around Middle Europe in a second hand Fiat, stayed mostly at simple inns. The philosophical Mr. Pott (now president of Elmira College, N.Y.) helped leaven his companion’s seriousness. Yet Ed was not unpopular in college: he was holy, but not holier-than-thou; he was elected president of the University’s exclusive society of hell-raisers, the IMPs.

The Rise. Scrawled now across his academic record are the shining words “Phi Beta Kappa,” but he won this not during the indolent early ’20s as a student, but in 1941, when he was made an honorary member. In almost four years of college, he was out for two terms—once for sickness, once to travel. In the end, Stettinius earned only six of the 60 necessary credits, and did not graduate. “Abstemious” had particular trouble in a course in Government. Passing was 75; his grades were 54 and 57. Said Virginia’s President John Lloyd Newcomb: “He certainly wouldn’t be allowed to stay here today with those atrocious grades.”

With his hair already greying, he drove about Charlottesville in an archaic model T, a seedy overcoat and a pair of trousers with a hole in the seat, conscientiously trying not to appear wealthy. And he helped put several fellow students through college, without ever mentioning the fact to anyone. He did such a good job of rounding up jobs around town for needy students that his organizing ability and earnestness are still remembered. This brought him to the attention of a Virginia alumnus—John Lee Pratt, a vice president of General Motors (Stettinius Sr. was a G.M. director).

In 1924, Pratt started young Ed “at the bottom,” in a 44¢-an-hour stockroom job in a G.M. subsidiary. Within two years Stettinius was wearing a white collar and the title of assistant to Mr. Pratt. In another five years, he was himself a vice president of General Motors, in charge of industrial and public relations.

In a rise which thus has more of Dale Carnegie than Horatio Alger in it, the next friend whom Ed Stettinius won and influenced was U.S. Steel’s Myron C. Taylor, in 1933. U.S. Steel was rich, fat, sprawling and unwieldy. Taylor had three ambitions : to tighten its management, to increase its popularity with the public and to step out. He chose a triumvirate of youngsters to succeed him: Ben Fairless to handle sales and operations; Enders M. Voorhees to oversee finances; and Ed Stettinius to be “front man.” Ed began as vice chairman of the finance committee in 1934; by 1938, at the bright young age of 37, he followed Taylor as chairman of the board of giant U.S. Steel. He was now the industry’s $100,000-a-year “wonder boy.”

The Virginian. He lived well. He bought a Virginia estate in Culpeper County at an auction, without even warning his wife, who like his mother was a Richmond belle. She could hardly have objected when she saw the lovely Greekporticoed house on a hill, and the 650 acres that overlook the Rapidan River. There Stettinius, as a “gentleman farmer,” still keeps blooded Guernseys, and sells 1,500 turkeys a year. Amid the lindens and old magnolias of “The Horse Shoe,” he rides horseback and romps with his Dalmatian. Pepper (one of whose pups is owned by his friend George Catlett Marshall).

The place houses most of Stettinius’many collections: autographed photographs of his celebrated friends; scrapbooks,autographed volumes, and much of his extensive collection of old vehicles. But Stettinius is not wealthy; most of his income derives from his U.S. Steel days. His father left behind less worldly goods than Morgan partners are popularly presumed to possess.

The Stettinius era in U.S. Steel was a revolutionary period, although Stettinius himself played only a minor part in the revolution. One of his main contributions was to substitute stainless-steel streamlining for the gas-jetted, Victorian corridors of the U.S. Steel headquarters at 71 Broadway. But Little Stet surprised oldtimers when he fought off a 1938 proposal that U.S. Steel cut wages to offset a drop in the price of steel. In a fireside chat, Franklin Roosevelt digressed to congratulate Big Steel on its “statesmanship.” And Harry Hopkins, in his steady progress in U.S. society, had met and liked U.S. Steel’s Ed Stettinius, had encouraged him to become a member of the Business Advisory Council, the New Deal’s little group of “tame capitalists.”

The Rise in Washington. By 1939, Ed Stettinius was chairman of a Roosevelt group known as the War Resources Board. This agency was kept in the background because of the inflammatory word “War” in its title; it finally died after four months. Then the safe word “Defense” was thought of, and Stettinius became National Defense Advisory Commissioner, a month before the fall of France. After eight ineffectual months, NDAC was abolished and OPM set up, with Ed Stettinius as director of priorities. There Stet made one good mark: he urged the U.S. to develop synthetic rubber. But he brushed aside talk of an aluminum shortage (later the U.S. spent $500,000,000 building up aluminum capacity); and he sponsored and stood by Gano Dunn’s overoptimistic survey of steel facilities (later steel capacity was increased 17%). He gave his priorities job such slow handling that his successor, Donald Nelson, imported Sears Roebuck mail clerks to expedite a mass of 18,500 requests which had not even been answered. At this point, Friend Hopkins arranged to have Stettinius tucked in as Lend-Lease Administrator. Stettinius glowed to friends: “I got the plum!”

In Lend-Lease, he did better, working as the direct aide to shrewd Harry Hopkins. Most notable ability Stettinius showed was his old knack of getting good men to work under him. With Hopkins as backstop, he helped bring into Government William L. Batt, Harvard’s William Yandell Elliott, General Electric’s Philip Reed, Dartmouth’s Dr. Ernest Martin Hopkins, and the man who gave Stettinius his first job—John Lee Pratt, who retired from General Motors in 1935 and is still Stet’s No. 1 adviser.

And Stettinius had always been a good salesman, which was a prime requirement for Lend-Lease. In personal appearances before Congressional committees, Stettinius won Democrats and Republicans alike. Able assistants had prepared his briefs, but he argued the case well. And when Cordell Hull forced Franklin Roosevelt to choose between him and Sumner Welles, Harry Hopkins was ready with a new Under Secretary of State. Stettinius again “got the plum.”

Wait and See. The months in which Stettinius has served as Under Secretary have been tense and troublesome. For the failures, he has not been entirely to blame. The gradual near-deadlock of the Chicago Air Conference could not be laid to him. (Stettinius has rigorously excluded himself from all air parleys, since his brother-in- law is Pan American Airways’ world-pioneering President Juan Trippe.) He guided Dumbarton Oaks—with plenty of direction from above. This he did with such Rotarian exuberance (addressing the key Russian and British members by their first names, smiting them on the back, taking them to see the Rockettes and Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe in Manhattan) that more reserved diplomats did not know whether they should wince or feel embarrassed for him. The vital question still unsolved by Dumbarton Oaks—whether a nation on trial as an aggressor should be allowed to sit in judgment, and veto, a decision unfavorable to itself—can only be answered at a level above him, by Messrs. Stalin, Roosevelt & Churchill. At the purely technical level, Dumbarton Oaks’ achievement was considerable.

In creating good will, Stettinius had been successful, too, in his whirlwind London trip in April, where he spent Easter with Churchill, took a fine Virginia ham to the Prime Minister’s wife, conferred with General Eisenhower, had a fireside chat with the King, and shook hands with every top diplomat in sight. (In England he was even more tweedy than the British.) Home again, he worked long on an elaborate chart “reorganizing” the State Department. The only major changes proved to be the disgruntled departures of such able men as Dr. Herbert Feis and Laurence Duggan, but this was the fault of feuding Cordell Hull, who was not keen on reorganization, anyway. Stettinius is proud of his attempt to redecorate the department’s archaic architectural monstrosity. He created a pretty press room, increased the wattage of lights and removed the desks of messengers from the halls. But Cordell Hull balked at repainting doors in pastel shades.

More important than these amiable efforts, Stettinius in 14 months had again proven himself a loyal underling. He was certainly not so capable nor informed as previous Under Secretaries—Sumner Welles, for example. But he had been a faithful executor of the Secretary’s will, as they had not.

A usual comment on the Stettinius appointment was that “Franklin Roosevelt will continue to be Secretary of State.” Even so, the old State Department would never seem the same, for which citizens could be thankful. Ed Stettinius had begun with a bang (see above). When the smoke cleared, the U.S. would see new faces in high places. And in its new Secretary, the State Department had a man who had a powerful resolution to do well. Ed Stettinius is not only friendly, energetic and loyal, but he has still another valuable trait, which was rooted in the days when he had wanted to become a parson. It was a solemn, almost reverential, respect for the responsibility of his new high office. Besides this he has one enormous asset: the general good will of the people of the U.S., who are most anxious for him to succeed, and are willing to give him every support.