Three Men on a Bench

On a hard park bench in Washington’s Lafayette Square, three of the nation’s most distinguished citizens held a momentous conference on the Rubber Scandal last week. The sun gleamed dully on the scabrous green of the old Andrew Jackson hobbyhorse statue. Serious, bespectacled James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University, shed his coat. So did aggressive, square-jawed Karl Taylor Compton, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But Elder Statesman Bernard Mannes Baruch—to whom the bench is a favorite office (TIME, May 12, 1941)—kept on his light summer jacket.

They talked in undertones for an hour, shooing away pigeons and inquisitive strollers. Then newsmen spotted Bernie Baruch’s tall, white-topped frame, his long, crossed legs revealing the inevitable high black shoes. The conference came to a reluctant end. Presidents Conant and Compton put on their coats. Tall Bernie Baruch walked, in his deliberate, soldierly stride, back to his suite at the Carlton Hotel.

Less Talking, More Facts. Day before, in a stroke which inspired confidence in & out of Washington, Franklin Roosevelt had made these three men his Rubber Committee. Their chairman: Baruch. Their job: to probe all synthetic rubber possibilities, weigh the whole question in relation to war needs and the supply of raw materials, report back quickly to the President. To give them a clear hand, President Roosevelt had vetoed a bill—shoved through Congress by the farm bloc —which would have set up an independent agency to make synthetic rubber from agricultural and forest products.

The committee will hold no public hearings (there have already been no less than 17 separate Congressional hearings on rubber). It will listen to no crackpots. It will gather facts, listen to a few men who know, and make recommendations on a war rubber program. On its report—which is not likely to be postponed till after the elections—decisions about nationwide gas rationing and motor transportation are to be based. And if the committee does a good enough job, it may well become the nucleus of the “economic high command” of which all Washington was talking last week (see col. 3).

Chemist, Physicist, Speculator. Shy, high-strung James Conant, 49, made his reputation as a first-rate organic chemist before Harvard named him president in 1933. In World War I, as a major in the chemical-warfare division, he closeted himself in an old auto factory near Cleveland to perfect deadly Lewisite gas. A firm believer in free academic research, he early spotted the Hitler menace, urged U.S. entry into the war long before Pearl Harbor.

Broad-shouldered, athletic Karl Compton, 54, whose M.I.T. is just below Harvard on Boston’s Charles River, has spent much time in Washington doing odd chores for Franklin Roosevelt. An able physicist, he has urged that scientists be given a greater part in the war.

For tall (6 ft. 3½ in.), slow-speaking, kindly Bernie Baruch, the appointment meant restoration to the field where he made his greatest success, as master of wartime economics. Since war’s beginning he has helped the Administration regularly on informal assignments, and given it the benefit of his experience as World War I’s head of war production. Now again, in a time of crisis, the U.S. has called on the Wall Street wizard of the early 1900s.

Wise, fact-demanding Bernie Baruch is 72 this week, and somewhat deaf. But his friends know that when he cups his hand to his good right ear and asks that a question be repeated he is often just stalling. And he can well make a park bench his office: he carries all the facts and principles of war economy in his patrician head.

The Rubber Scandal had become the outstanding mess of World War II economics. If Baruch & friends could settle it neatly in one swift operation, they would be in a strategic position to take on other economic problems now looming.