Triple-Threat Man

Even though he is president of the nation's largest bank holding corporation and earns $100,000 a year, Maurice Stans is a moonlighter. Once a week, he addresses himself to trends in business and Government and turns out a newspaper column that makes sober sense. Measured by the mail he brings to the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Syndicate, Stans is more popular than any of his flashier colleagues.

U.S. Budget Director during the final three years of the Eisenhower Administration, Stans, 54, is billed by the syndicate as a sort of fiscal triple-threat man--an expert in both business and Government who can distill his wisdom into lucid monologues. Last weekend's column was a dark appraisal of personal bankruptcies and of the cloudy economic climate they foretell, but Stans usually attacks more general themes. A sampling:

sbOn free enterprise: "What we have in American free enterprise is an almost perfect blending of the forces that motivate people. It combines equality of opportunity and freedom of choice with our dominant individual traits of acquisitiveness and competitiveness."

sbOn the budget : "The safe and sound policy would be for the Government to abandon its career of fiscal brinkmanship, and in times like these control expenditures within limits that allow for significant annual reductions in the national debt. Then, when sudden economic declines happen, the loss in revenues will not cause severe deficits."

sbOn welfare: "It is clear that we have come a long way from the concept of protecting the unfortunate, and have moved close to the idea of a socialization of incomes." Stans is more analyst than stylist: "Let me particularize," he is fond of saying as he warms to an earnest exposition of the Communist economic threat. He exhibits a practiced columnar hand by asking himself a question and then answering it: "Can business discipline itself?" ("Yes"), or "Can we believe in statistics?" ("Sometimes"). Somehow the answers spin out to proper length.

Stans states his journalistic aim simply: "My effort is to point out to people what I've learned about the economy--the forces at work . . . The pattern I use is to add just enough figures to analysis to prove a point. I'm not in competition with Sylvia Porter [who appears in about 350 papers] on elementary finance and Government fiscal processes. As far as I can tell, I haven't any competition."

Successful Sample. Son of a Belgian immigrant house painter, Stans grew up in Shakopee, Minn., then went off to Chicago, where he spent his nights studying accounting at Northwestern University; he worked days as clerk for a sausage-casing importer. Without finishing college, he joined a small firm of accountants, became a partner in three years, sole owner in 18. When he sold out in 1955 (to avoid possible conflict of interest with Government duties), his firm stood among the top accounting houses in the U.S.

Stans became president of Western Bancorporation in March 1961 ; soon afterward, Times-Mirror Publisher Otis Chandler suggested the possibility of a weekly column. "It was tempting," says Stans. It was even more attractive after his first five sample columns drew orders from 21 papers; 25 more have joined in the six months since then. But Stans turns his $12,000-a-year newspaper take over to Western Bancorporation because "they pay me for my thinking time."

Slow & Tough. Stans opposes the Administration's medical-care plan, its deficit budget, its tendency to "paternalism." He composes his thoughts on foolscap tablets at home among the African curios in his den or during long airplane flights.

"I'm pretty slow," he says. "I do a lot of rewriting." His letters (100 a week) have supplied him with a view of journalism's perennial surprise: "Some tell me I'm wonderful, and some tell me I'm crazy. I never realized how tough it is to be a newspaperman."

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