Smith & Coy

Two of the most important Men Around the President are Harold Smith and Wayne Coy. The two men, little known to the U.S. because newsmen respect their "passion for anonymity," serve the President directly as general managers.

They came into the news last week only indirectly, when, joined in the Bureau of the Budget, they began working as a team. The new team of trouble shooters already had the feel of working in harness. They were not high-strung race horses, as many another brain-truster has been. But in wartime Washington, with tough stumps to be yanked up and hard rows of work to be done, they were doing heavy duty.

Harold Smith, the Budget Director, conferring oftener with President Roosevelt than any other man save Harry Hopkins, had turned into a kind of left-hand man to complement Hopkins on the right. Long before the Army shake-ups in March, Smith's able, quiet staff workers had run fish-cold eyes over the War Department, seeking out weak spots. When the State Department and Nelson Rockefeller's Inter-American Committee feuded, Harold Smith wooed them back to harmony. Before Presidential Adviser Samuel Rosenman reorganized war production, and cleaned up the defense-housing mess, he conferred chiefly with Smith. The executive orders with which President Roosevelt made and unmade war agencies, delegated power and took it away, were drawn up in Smith's office. And Harold Smith has the final say on Government bureau requests for funds.

Wayne Coy, now Smith's assistant, had served for a year as liaison man for the mysterious, jack-of-all-trades Office of Emergency Management. He was the man who untangled Lend-Lease to Russia when the knots were tight, who helped steer the property-requisitioning bill through Congress, helped bring C.I.O. and A.F. of L. together when John L. Lewis' "peace offer" threatened civil war in labor.

Coy had also been--on his own hook and at risk of his job--the No. 1 drumbeater for the all-out war expansionists in their fight with OPM slowpokes. In the days when OPM's Bill Knudsen assured President Roosevelt that production was 100% good, and Virginia's tart Senator Harry F. Byrd shouted that it was 100% bad, Coy knew that Byrd was closer to the truth--and said so all the way to the top. For this he went deep into the doghouse for a while, but he finally won. OPM gave way to WPB; the expansionists took over.

The Team. Working together now, Smith & Coy have enough odd jobs to keep them busy from 9 a.m. to midnight, six or seven days a week. Their offices are prissy chambers on the second floor of the old State Department rookery; each has high ceilings, gold-velvet draperies withering around the windows, a fireplace of sickly chocolate marble, festoons of exposed pipe and wiring. Among this lavender & old lace sit the two streamlined gogetters.

Into the basket on Smith's desk, on a typical day, may pop any number of neat typewritten notes signed F. D. R.--each meaning a new chore. For in wartime Washington, with its myriads of new officials, its changing pattern of authority, its good spots and bad, Smith & Coy are the doers on whom the President relies.

Kansas Boy. Harold Dewey (born in 1898) Smith is stocky, sandy-haired, has pale blue eyes behind trim hectagonal spectacles, a mustache so colorless that it seldom shows in photographs. He grew up on a Kansas wheat farm, worked his way through the University of Kansas by building houses. He thought of teaching in China but became an expert on municipal government instead, wound up as Michigan's Budget Director under Governor Frank Murphy.

Summoned to Washington in 1939, he went reluctantly to an interview with Franklin Roosevelt, who took a shine to him at once. When someone mentioned casually that Smith would have to burn a lot of bridges in Michigan before he could take a Washington job, the President handed Smith a box of matches, told him to hurry back.

The office of Budget Director had not existed until 1921; under Smith's predecessors it had been chiefly a device for saying no to spendthrift bureau chiefs. Harold Smith took to this office a new conception of its duties.

"Cyclical Budget." Smith felt no compulsion, as had other unhappy budgeteers, to balance the budget. He thought the budget should be geared to the business cycle, not the fiscal year; it was foolish to "synchronize the management of our fiscal affairs with the rotation of the earth around the sun." What he thought of his over-all job was shown by the title of one speech: "The Management of Government in a Democracy."

President Roosevelt gave Smith heavy managerial powers; his office grew from a handful of workers on a $187,000-a-year appropriation to a staff of 425 with $1,982,000 to spend.

Quiet, diffident Harold Smith still likes to work with his hands; he plays handyman around his brick Colonial house in Virginia, turns out smooth walnut furniture on a power lathe in the basement. His tall, robust wife, who shoots near-championship golf, thinks his mathematics is only good in big figures, never permits him to meddle with the household accounts.

He is cautious, precise, knows what he is about and can always prove it, gets along well with Congressmen of all shades of belief. The only complaint is that he is too meticulous. Last year he built a big rowboat in his basement, listened patiently to the ribbing of acquaintances who were sure he could never get it out the door; when he finished, it cleared the door by a quarter-inch.

Indiana Boy. Albert Wayne Coy, 38, was born in Shelby County, Ind., soon dropped the Albert as excess baggage. After college he worked for the Franklin Evening Star, finally bought a scraggly country weekly.

He made friends with Governor Paul V. McNutt, who hired him as secretary, made him Indiana WPA administrator, took him along to the Philippines. When McNutt switched from High Commissioner of the Philippines to FSAdministrator, Coy went along as McNutt's assistant in Washington. There the beautiful friendship broke on the rocks of jealousy: McNutt tried to write the first blueprint for OCD; President Roosevelt, dissatisfied, turned the job over to Coy.

Slim, sallow Wayne Coy, with a little black mustache beneath a long sharp nose, looks like the late movie comedian Charley Chase. He seems frail, is actually hard as nails. When an Indiana political thug beat him up in 1937, he stayed on his feet until one side of his face was crushed and an eye nearly knocked out, then walked under his own power to have the wounds stitched.

Coy is extroverted, talkative, makes friends easily. He likes to spin yarns, spends free Sunday afternoons playing softball at a friend's home.

No yes-men, Smith & Coy both like to call a spade a spade, and often do, in conferences with Franklin Roosevelt. They share none of his skittishness in weeding out bad helpers. The new brain trust is a far cry from the old.

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