Bostonian at Work

Scurrying jerkily from one White House office to another with a sheaf-of papers clutched against his chest and clear-rimmed glasses perched far down his nose, Presidential Assistant Robert Cutler suggests a silent-movie comic about to get trapped in a revolving door. But this harried, hapless appearance is deceptive: in two months on the job as Dwight Eisenhower's administrative assistant for national security affairs, intense, energetic Bobby Cutler, 57, has earned a reputation as one of the Administration's sharpest and toughest minds. Also deceptive is Cutler's proper-Bostonian look. He is indeed a Bostonian, with a Harvard accent, a vaguely old-maidish face and a wardrobe of sedate grey suits. But his vocabulary is far from Louisburg Square; he has a bottomless fund of earthy anecdotes and observations, and he dips uninhibitedly into it.

After graduating cum laude from Harvard ('16), Class Poet Cutler wavered between literature and the law, between times served as an infantry officer in World War I. He finally chose the law, but before getting his LL.B. (cum laude at Harvard), he wrote two novels, Louisburg Square and The Speckled Bird. When a reporter recently asked him what the subjects of the novels were, Bachelor Cutler replied: "Love, love. What else does a young man write about?"

Other People's Money. Cutler became one of Boston's most successful lawyers. In 1946, he became president of Boston's Old Colony Trust Co., which takes care of $1.5 billion worth of other people's money. But in Who's Who he puts war service ahead of both law and trust management describing himself as "Army officer, lawyer, fiduciary." During World War II, he was a special assistant to the Secretary of War, with the rank of colonel (brigadier general at war's end). Among his assignments: serving as coordinator of soldier voting in the 1944 presidential election.

For recreation, Cutler rode a bicycle, sometimes as much as 70 miles on a weekend, on the traffic-clogged roads around Boston. When Ike called him to Washington, Old Colony employees gave Cutler a fine English bicycle as a farewell present; he took it to Washington, but has had no time to ride it since he became a member of the White House guard.

During the presidential campaign, Cutler was the Republicans' special gifts chairman, but he soon left money-raising to others, and went off on the campaign train as a personal secretary and adviser to Candidate Eisenhower. Fussy, brusque and conspicuous, Cutler was not an unqualified success as a campaign train factotum. But before inauguration, Eisenhower tabbed him as a presidential assistant with the job of helping the President to reorganize the National Security Council.

Under Harry Truman, the main function of NSC meetings was to iron out interagency disagreements on policy. Under Eisenhower, the goal is to formulate security problems and policies so explicitly that each department and military service will know its mission, and the Government as a whole will have a policy that is more than an interagency compromise. As NSC's chief executive officer (a new job), Cutler presents the agenda, introducing each topic with a clear, concise report, and guides the discussion back to the track whenever it wanders too far.

A Single Old-Fashioned. His job brings Cutler into contact with every major problem, plan and policy decision having to do with national security. He probably carries more top secrets in his head than any other man in Washington.

Running NSC keeps Cutler at work twelve hours or more a day. Grumbling loudly and profanely about the earliness of the hour, he scrambles into the White House just in time to make Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams' 8:30 a.m. staff conference. Between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., he winds up his working day, walks across Lafayette Park for dinner at the Metropolitan Club. He almost always dines alone. He used to have several drinks before dinner, but now, with his head full of national secrets, he limits himself to a single bourbon oldfashioned.

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