Landis to OCD

Franklin Roosevelt, who occasionally talks through his hat but more often pulls rabbits out of it, last week pulled out a rabbit and threw him into the brier patch of Civilian Defense. The fierce-looking rabbit: hawk-faced, hawk-eyed James McCauley ("Chink") Landis, Dean of Harvard Law School. A precocious Princetonian and one of the keenest legal eaglets ever to swoop from Harvard Law School, Dean Landis was an early Brain Truster, as SEC chairman presided over a whipped Wall Street at the age of 36.

Inside OCD's brier patch Fiorello LaGuardia was bounding around like a snarled-up bandersnatch, uttering encouraging yells, while the briers made rips in his reputation. Butch himself admitted that he might be attempting too much, trying to run New York City and OCD all at once. A lot of people were sure of it --the House of Representatives, for one lot. Flatly rejecting the Senate's liberal plan to give OCD unlimited funds, the House voted to appropriate $100,000,000 but to put the Army in charge of spending it. For Butch, not a nickel.

At that point, President Roosevelt had to do something. Rather than fire Butch, he pulled his favorite trick: appoint another man to ambiguously equal authority, and leave the rest to nature. As "executive" director of OCD, he appointed Dean Landis. Washington predicted that Congress, mollified by this move, would now give OCD the funds it wanted. (The Army, too busy with other things, does not want the civilian-defense job.)

LaGuardia is still to be chief of OCD. With plenty of yell left in him, he announced that Dean Landis "will take the details of the office administration off my shoulders. I will then be able to devote more time to perfecting the organization throughout the country."

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