New Machine

After a fortnight of gauging the economic wind and diagramming its forces, Charlie Wilson was ready for action. He took his calculations to the White House, told the President what he wanted, and got him to issue a new executive order. The order gave Mobilizer Wilson the machine he thought he needed to put power into U.S. rearmament.

Half an hour after the order was issued, Mobilizer Wilson assembled 70 reporters at a press conference, handed each of them a big chart and explained how the new setup was supposed to work. Before taking his place in the driver's seat, Wilson had revamped the baling-wire contraption that the Administration hastily patched together after Korea, and made it into a trimmer, more powerful two-engine mechanism.

The Engines. One engine, to drive the machinery for keeping the U.S. economy healthy, was already assembled in the Economic Stabilization Agency, under Alan Valentine, ex-president of the University of Rochester. Valentine, through Price Administrator Mike DiSalle and Wage Stabilizer Cyrus Ching, will control prices and wages and--if it becomes necessary--will ration food. The only major change in that engine was to give Administrator DiSalle some authority to issue orders on his own--a shift which was not accomplished without a few loud pings.

The other engine, the machinery for setting production goals and figuring out how to attain them, was built around a new agency--the Defense Production Administration. For DPA's boss, Charlie Wilson had only to look about him. He plucked William Henry Harrison, former president of I.T. & T., out of the Commerce Department's National Production Authority, transferred him--together with NPA's top functions--into the new and more powerful job.

The assignment gave Harrison sweeping authority to regulate the nation's industrial output. But, for the moment at least, he would be only a policymaker. The operating agencies which would carry out his orders were still tucked away under their assorted cabinet officers.

The Board. Charlie Wilson knew that his two-engined contrivance would feed policy problems up to him faster than he could feed down answers. For help in solving the problems, he asked the President to set up a top-level Defense Mobilization Board, a kind of board of directors. Its membership: the chairmen of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the Federal Reserve Board, the President's original mobilizer, Chairman Stuart Symington of the National Security Resources Board, and six Cabinet members --Defense, Agriculture, Interior, Commerce, Labor, Treasury.

Most of Stu Symington's other mobilization functions had been swallowed up, quite properly, in the Wilson mechanism. Symington was left free to be the President's side-door adviser on the broad picture--and, perhaps, to be Harry Truman's Harry Hopkins in mobilization matters.

Squeaks & Rattles. Charlie Wilson's new machinery was not yet as big or as high-powered as the total-war mobilization machine of World War II, nor was it guaranteeing to run with fewer squeaks and rattles. Still unanswered, for example, was the vital question of how much power Wilson & Co. would have over military procurement. Another major trouble was that agriculture was still (with the exception of products needed by industry) beyond the reach of the kind of central control imposed on industry.

Wilson was the last man to claim the thing was perfect. Asked if the setup was permanent, he shrugged his shoulders, replied: "It's the one we are operating with today. It's the base." Next likely shakeup: bringing control of operations as well as policy into Harrison's DPA.

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