Mellow Man in Charge

For the first time in Dwight Eisenhower's years in office, the White House last week was headed for a new pace and temper in its vital inner workings. Five days after flinty New Hampshireman Sherman Adams took to television (surprising some viewers with his warmth) to announce his retirement as the President's chief of staff, the President named Adams' successor: Alabama's Wilton Burton Persons, 62, Adams' admiring but totally dissimilar deputy. With Persons in charge, said a White House wag, the difference would be like that between hard cider and mellow bourbon.

Where Adams is brusque and businesslike, Persons is completely amiable, can always find time for the human touch. Where Adams--by virtue of his four years in the New Hampshire Statehouse --is "Governor" to all but a few close associates, Persons is "Jerry" to nearly all Washington, "Burt" to his family, and "Slick" to old Army friends. (There is a dispute about whether the "Slick" came from the stuff he put on his hair or from the smooth way he handled Congressmen as an Army legislative liaison man.) Where Adams was President Eisenhower's closest professional colleague, Major General Wilton Persons, U.S.A. (ret.), is one of General Dwight Eisenhower's oldest, best friends.

Irreplaceable. One of five sons* of a Montgomery druggist, Jerry Persons won an engineering degree at Alabama Polytechnic Institute ('16), served as a coast artillery captain in France during World War I, stayed in the Army while studying business administration at Harvard, and wound up as a congressional liaison man in the War Department. There, in the early 1930s, he met and became a favorite companion of Major Dwight Eisenhower, working just down the corridor in the office of Chief of Staff Douglas Mac-Arthur. In 1938 Persons breezed through the Army's Command and General Staff School. During World War II, he moved up to major general, was the Army's top lobbyist on Capitol Hill, did his job so well that Chief of Staff George Marshall refused Ike's request for Persons' services during the North African campaign. "There are few men in the Army I consider irreplaceable," said Marshall, "and Persons is one of them."

Retiring from the Army in 1949, Jerry Persons became superintendent of Virginia's Staunton Military Academy, enjoyed watching his cadets grow up "like a damned fine garden." But in 1951 Ike called again; Persons went to France as liaison man at Supreme Allied headquarters, became the go-between for General Eisenhower and the scores of political emissaries urging Ike to run for President. Named White House congressional representative by President Eisenhower in 1953, Persons worked skillfully at a job that concerned him with everything, from the "control of the tsetse fly to foreign aid." Occasionally criticized for his soft-shoe approach (e.g., he urged the President to avoid a public squabble with Joe McCarthy), Persons nonetheless won many a legislator over to the Administration side on such bills as this year's four-year extension of reciprocal trade.

Reorganized. Where Adams had only one deputy--Persons--Staff Chief Jerry Persons will have three. Oklahoma City Publisher Bryce Harlow, 42, previously Persons' Capitol Hill assistant, becomes Deputy Assistant to the President for Congressional Affairs; former Chicago Alderman and Republican Mayoralty Candidate Robert Merriam, 40, becomes Deputy Assistant for Interdepartmental Affairs; a third deputy, still to be named, will act as Persons' immediate assistant. Leading prospect: Treasury Undersecretary Fred Scribner of Maine.

The White House denied that such changes added up to a staff "reorganization." But with the new faces, and with amiable Jerry Persons replacing stern Sherman Adams, one White House era has surely ended and another begun.

*The others: Seth Gordon Persons, 56, Governor of Alabama (1951-54); Major General John Williams ("Willie") Persons, 59, commanding officer at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia; Jo Robert Persons, one of the nation's leading life-insurance salesmen until his death in 1946, and the Rev. Frank Stanford Persons II, 71, an Episcopalian who carried the Gospel to moonshiners in Virginia, coal miners in Pennsylvania, orange pickers in Cuba, is now back in Alabama.

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