Big Four

When was the President going to give the U. S. defense program an executive head with full executive powers? Franklin Roosevelt's regular Friday morning press conference came & went without definitive answer from the President. Big Bill Knudsen of the National Defense Advisory Commission had set the country ringing with his blast against the weekend "blackout" in U. S. industry, his plea to machine toolmen--management and labor--to speed up because of "terrible urgency."

Friday afternoon the President conferred first with the Secretaries of War and Navy, then with the NDAC. It was getting dark when Secretary Steve Early went out into the anteroom, told the few newsmen that whatever was to be said would have to come later from the Boss himself. Then came an unexpected summons to one of the rare (three or four) nonscheduled press conferences the President has held in the past four years. Grabbing pencils & paper, they made for the office, were soon scribbling notes on the best White House story in weeks.

What Franklin Roosevelt had to tell them was something that could not keep: it was his answer to the question. On the soundness of his answer might well depend the fate of the democratic world.

He had not, as some had expected, appointed a National Defense Tsar, endowed with more power than Bernard Mannes Baruch had had as head of the War Industries Board of 1918. Franklin Roosevelt's answer was a super-defense board, on which he had hung a cumbersome jawbreaker--Office for Production Management for Defense. (Later he referred to it as the "Big Four.") Its director: Big Bill Knudsen. Other members: Laborman Sidney Hillman (with the title of associate director), Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

In a series of executive orders soon to be issued, said the President, the Big Four will get all the powers he can constitutionally give it, including power to make all decisions on national defense without reference to the President. He would interfere, he said, only when the Big Four's decisions were not in the best interests of the country. And he expected the Council's decisions to be unanimous. If they ever disagreed, the President would have to step in and settle the matter himself.

Only amateurs in Government, said he, grinning, talk of putting a pooh-bah, a Tsar or an Akhund of Swat in charge of national defense. No one man knows enough for the job. Better, said he, to have on the board management (Knudsen), labor (Hillman) and the user-buyers of national defense products (Navy's Knox, Army's Stimson). Under their four-man chairmanship (if it works that way) will be planned the three big Ps of industrial defense: 1) Production, 2) Purchasing, 3) Priorities. The National Defense Advisory Commission will go on planning, advising.

Thus briefly Franklin Roosevelt laid out his remedial changes for the U. S. defense setup. He left no doubt that, when his reorganization order was published, National Defense would finally have all the authority it has lacked to give it direction and speed, to wipe out confusion in priorities and procurement.

Whether these four men could work smoothly together, unanimous on all important points, remained to be seen. On one point they were in complete agreement. Day after their appointment they called upon the U. S. public "to recognize the full gravity of the crisis . . . pull off their coats and roll up their sleeves. . . . The contest which produced this crisis is irreconcilable in character and cannot be terminated by any methods of appeasement." With Bill Knudsen's "terrible urgency" becoming more actual every day, the Big Four's teamwork would be visible very soon.

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