Smooth Shift

Ten years ago, Economist Gabriel Hauge was one of the youngest and one of the most influential voices among President Eisenhower's economic advisers. At 48, Hauge (pronounced How-ghee) now says. "I wouldn't have missed a day of my time in Washington--but I've never missed a day since." He has accomplished what few economists ever manage: a smooth transition from theorizing about business to managing one. Last week he was named president of New York's Manufacturers Hanover, the world's fourth largest bank.

The son of a Lutheran minister in Minnesota, Hauge graduated from Moorhead. Minn.'s Concordia College (class of '35), got his doctorate in economics at Harvard, and taught at both Harvard and Princeton. He was an editorial writer for McGraw-Hill's Business Week when he joined the draft-Ike movement in 1951. After six years with Ike, Hauge was lured away from the White House in 1958 when ubiquitous Wall Streeter Sidney Weinberg. a partner of Goldman, Sachs & Co., persuaded him to become chairman of the finance committee at Manufacturers Trust Co. When Manufacturers merged with the Hanover Bank last year. Hauge became vice chairman, a job in which he was charged mainly with managing the bank's large investment portfolio. He will become president next summer when Robert E. McNeill Jr., 56, moves up from president to chairman and becomes chief executive officer.

Hauge will be working under a man with a vastly different background: the slow-spoken. Florida-born McNeill began his business career by running a watermelon-and-cucumber brokerage while still in high school. He got into banking in a small bank that his uncle controlled, was president of the Hanover when it merged with Manufacturers Trust. On the side he is a Chrysler Corp. director, and as chairman of Chrysler's finance committee has played an important part in putting the company on the comeback trail.

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