After Acheson

For many months, Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson had been wanting to retire. The reason was simply that he was gradually going broke on his $12,000-a-year salary, which failed to cover entertaining on the scale required by his job. When Secretary Marshall took over, Acheson had consented to stay on only with the promise that he would be able to return to his law practice by July 1.

Last week Washington learned that Dean Acheson really meant what he had said. Those in the know were sure that his successor would be lean, articulate, 51-year-old Robert A. Lovett, onetime Assistant Secretary of War for Air and an old friend of Marshall's.

A capable organizer, Lovett had built a big reputation as a man who could get things done with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of effectiveness. He was credited with streamlining the cumbersome peacetime structure of the Army Air Corps. He persuaded the brasshats to give the Air Corps a large measure of autonomy. He pleaded, cajoled and begged for bombers and more bombers. He got them, and they made the U.S. Army Air Forces the mightiest striking force in the world.

Before the war, Bob Lovett was a Wall Street businessman (Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.) and director of several banks, railroads and insurance companies. No stranger to Europe, he used to spend an average of two months a year there on business. When he left Washington and the War Department in December 1945, he returned to Wall Street. This week he was vacationing in Hobe Sound, Fla.

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