Change of Spirits

Instead of taking the usual bicycle ride by which he unwinds at the end of a 6 1/2day week, Presidential Assistant Robert Cutler, chief executive officer of the high-policymaking National Security Council, stayed at his desk last week to make up a thick folder of top-secret background information for his successor. The successor: Dillon Anderson, 48, who, like Cutler, is a lawyer, novelist and man of affairs.

The two men share a rare combination of sensitive, creative intellect and administrative forcefulness. They met in the wartime Pentagon, where Proper Bostonian Cutler, handling officer procurement, "hired" Proper Houstonian Anderson* as a major. Cutler rose to brigadier general, while Anderson served as a Military Government staff officer in the Middle East and returned to Washington a colonel. Two years ago Bobby Cutler got President Eisenhower to appoint Anderson as one of seven outside National Security Council consultants.

A senior partner of Houston's largest law firm, Dillon Anderson in recent years has branched into business as a director of banks, transit lines, Westinghouse and other industrial corporations. His method of unwinding is to travel by train, using the time to write fiction. In his first published novel, I and Claudie (1951), the adventures of two fun-loving Texas hoboes, Anderson gave Bobby Cutler a credit for "encouragement." A poker player, Anderson recently wrote a short story about a poker addict who, abhorring the status quo ante, always ups it. By driving for decisions and following them up with action, Bobby Cutler has raised the NSC's ante of ability. Noting that he had overstayed his promised tour of duty by nine months, Cutler, 59, last week asked President Eisenhower to let him return to Boston's Old Colony Trust Co. as its board chairman. Granting the wish, the President replied, "You have breathed into [the NSC's] work new life and effectiveness."

New Presidential Assistant Anderson should enjoy his new job. In I and Claudie one hobo says, "There is hardly anything that is not in my line . . . It is only when [a man] does the same thing over and over that his talents begin to wither and his spirits to fester up." The NSC's span of global problems is not likely to fester a man's spirits.

* No kin to fellow Texan Robert Anderson, now Deputy Secretary of Defense.

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