Parade of Talent

For weeks the Great Kennedy Recruiting Drive turned out better than one draftee a day for the New Frontier--and not even an occasional conscientious objector slowed the parade of talent into front-line jobs. But last week the recruiters stepped on a booby trap, with everybody watching.

Thanks largely to a speculative story in the New York Times, Georgia's Governor Ernest Vandiver suddenly found himself pegged as a likely choice for Secretary of the Army. The reports said that two powerful Georgians, Senator Richard Russell and Congressman Carl Vinson, were pressuring Kennedy on Vandiver's behalf. The news was as much a surprise to Vandiver, who wants to finish out his two remaining years in the statehouse, as it was to Kennedy himself, who had no intention of naming a segregationist to the sensitive Army job. To avoid embarrassment all round, Kennedy at first allowed that Vandiver was "under consideration," then went through the motions of calling the Governor to ask if he would like the job --but let him understand that the right answer was no.* Vandiver agreeably begged off; just as agreeably, Kennedy wrote that when Vandiver finishes his term, "I hope it will be possible for you to join the Administration in a position of responsibility."

At week's end, Kennedy still did not have his Army Secretary, but the recruiting drive had filled up nearly 50 other top jobs beneath Cabinet level, left another 50 to 100 to go before Inauguration Day. Among the happier choices:

John Jay McCloy, 65, director of the U.S. Disarmament Administration. Bald, brusque Banker-Lawyer McCloy, a Republican, has a flair for doing the almost impossible--a characteristic that suits his new job of supervising the new Administration's disarmament policy. A graduate of Amherst ('16) and Harvard Law School, McCloy began his Government life at the edge of World War II. After resigning from his Manhattan law practice, he became a troubleshooting assistant to the Secretary of War, worked in the distinguished circle that included General George C. Marshall, Robert A. Lovett, James Forrestal, Robert Patterson. His war duties done, McCloy went briefly back to law, but in 1946 he agreed to place the disorganized International Bank for Reconstruction and Development on its financial feet. McCloy's dictatorial methods won no friends among his fellow bank directors, but when Harry Truman drafted him for High Commissioner to Occupied Germany (1949-52), the bank had an operational profit. In Germany, he helped an ex-mayor named Konrad Adenauer lead West Germany toward its new prosperity. McCloy then returned to private life as chairman of the Chase National (later Chase Manhattan) Bank but served as an unofficial, unpaid adviser on disarmament problems to the late John Foster Dulles.

McGeorge Bundy, 41, special assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Bostonian Bundy's first claim to public attention came in 1948 when he helped write the memoirs of old friend Henry L. Stimson, for whom Bundy's father had worked in the War Department during World War II. Later he became the only Yaleman ever to serve as dean of arts and sciences at Harvard, was long best known in the Yard for his trenchant course on the U.S. in world politics. Bundy, a liberal Republican, admires the foreign policy views of his close friend (and father-in-law of Brother William Bundy), Democrat Dean Acheson. He edited a volume of Acheson's public papers, once noted that the former Secretary of State was right not to turn his back on Alger Hiss, adding that "Hiss could have been a little more grateful." For that kind of comment, Bundy had a run-in or two with the late Senator Joe McCarthy, who tried to get William Bundy fired from a CIA job. Another old foe is Massachusetts' ex-Governor Foster Furcolo, who denounced Bundy as "completely unqualified" for Government service--obviously in response to Bundy's 1958 gubernatorial campaign attacks. But Kennedy had other views, gave him the tough assignment of planning long-range policy for the National Security Council.

Charles J. Hitch, 51, Assistant Secretary of Defense (comptroller). Bow-tied Scholar Hitch has been chief of economics research at California's highbrow Rand Corp. since 1948, two months ago was named director of the corporation's overall research program. He has published three brain-cracking books (the latest: last year's The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age). At Rand, Hitch has been in charge of thinking out the economic implications of cold war military problems and weapons systems--an assignment so close to his new job as Defense's financial watchdog that he says, "It won't be a change of work but a change of responsibility."

Roger Warren Jones, 52, Deputy Under Secretary of State for Administration. Conscientious, Connecticut-born Roger Jones took a temporary civil service job in Washington in Depression-dreary 1933 to help pay for a Ph.D. in English literature that would launch him on a teaching career. He has yet to find time for that doctorate. A talent for staffwork hoisted him up through civil service ranks to its top-level GS-18 rating before he stepped out of ranks in 1958 to become assistant director of the Budget Bureau. Two years ago Dwight Eisenhower named him chairman of the Civil Service Commission. "God and the Government," Jones once noted, "have been very, very good to me."

James Tobin, 42 and Kermit Gordon, 44, members of the Council of Economic Advisers. Shy, brilliant, three-degree (A.B., M.A., Ph.D.) Harvardman Tobin is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale and a specialist in statistical analysis of consumer purchasing. A believer in federal spending, he stands in economic thinking just a slight twist to the right of Council Chairman Walter Heller. Rhodes Scholar Gordon--the fourth Rhodes scholar for the New Frontier team, after Dean Rusk, Treasury Under Secretary Robert Roosa, Charles Hitch--also did graduate work at Harvard, took leave from his professorship at Williams College last January to be director of economic development and administration for the Ford Foundation. Another academic liberal, Democrat Gordon has specialized in international economics.

* A ploy similar to that used on Chicago's aging (74) Negro Representative William Dawson, briefly boomed for Postmaster General. To soothe the feelings of a valuable political ally, Kennedy made the offer, but Dawson knew that a refusal would be quite in order.

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