War Cabinet

President Roosevelt, the man who would not delegate power, suddenly delegated more of it than any other President in history. He set up his War Cabinet. It was streamlined by trial & error, stripped of great hopes, bolstered by new men. The President had picked his men slowly; now he gave them vast authority to direct, control, order, authorize and enforce. No one--not even the five he had chosen--knew exactly how far their great power stretched.

Outside the Army & Navy, the War Cabinet had three men and a team: >Tall, portly Donald Marr Nelson, the onetime Sears, Roebuck executive who plugged along quietly within the old National Defense Advisory Commission, grew in stature with every reorganization, finally emerged as the nation's Chief of the War Production Board. > Silver-haired, tall, tan and handsome Paul Varies McNutt, a joiner and doer who once looked like a merely ambitious politician, wound up last week as chief of all the nation's manpower in the new War Manpower Commission (see col. 2). > Brisk, terrible-tempered Leon Henderson, the Great Jawbone, who managed the nation's fight against inflation and its rationing schemes, bossed civilian supply. and became the biggest financial man in the U.S. as boss of OPA. > The team of thoughtful, gentle Vice President Henry Wallace and his alter ego, Businessman Milo Perkins, who got full power last week to forge international trade into a weapon against the Axis in their Board of Economic Warfare

On these men's shoulders the great wartime problems lay. Around and among them Washington's peacetime agencies still operated, the regular peacetime Cabinet still met; but these were the men on whom the President and the nation now depended.

Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard had the big job of feeding the United Nations; he was just outside the War Cabinet. The rest of Washington's onetime great had faded away; their jobs were no longer important or they had been tried by war and found wanting. Jesse Jones had lost much of his power, more of his prestige. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins had virtually no job left. Good, grey Cordell Hull, who returned to his desk this week after a long rest in Florida, had seen the world shrink smaller and smaller.

The bright new faces which the President had brought to Washington in 1940 were deep in the shadows. Big Bill Knudsen was trouble-shooting for the Army, in his new uniform, looking a little like a Salvation Army General. Sidney Hillman was practically on the same shelf with Frances Perkins.

Out of the confusion and inexperience, the old mistakes, the old near-misses, had risen the President's three men and a team, the men with the power, the managers of the U.S. at war.

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