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For weeks Franklin Roosevelt had told newsmen he was brooding over some eggs which were not quite ready to hatch. Last week they burst their shells. What emerged, as everyone had expected, was the President's new, 1943 war cabinet, bred especially to end the chaos into which manpower and food administration had fallen.

The biggest egg of all--the plan to switch Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes to the Labor Department and give him full charge of manpower (TIME, Dec. 7)--had failed to hatch. Thus Franklin Roosevelt's brooding produced an official family which looked like all its predecessors, but which he hoped would have a group physique better able to cope with total war.

For his Manpower Commissioner, the President chose Manpower Commissioner (since April) Paul Vories McNutt. For Food Administrator he chose Claude R. Wickard, who, as Secretary of Agriculture, has been something of a food administrator all along. But to both men he gave important new powers--perhaps enough authority really to do the job this time.

How well Paul McNutt and Claude Wickard would do with their new powers (see below), only time would tell. To some Administration critics, it seemed ironic that the men under whom manpower and food situations had steadily worsened, should now emerge as the czars. But the new setup, if not perfect, was far tighter and better than anything tried before in World War II. Much of the divided authority which had kept Paul McNutt and Claude Wickard busy debating instead of working was now clearly and finally determined. How well they would do the job was now, for the first time, up to them.

Last week the President also:

>Enlarged and formalized Harold L. Ickes' powers as Petroleum Coordinator (see p. 29).

> Ordered all WPA projects ended by next Feb. 1 (see p. 29).

>Was host to two more distinguished foreign visitors who came to talk of the post-war world: suave General Wladyslaw Sikorski, Premier of the Polish Government-in-Exile. and grey, careful William Lyon Mackenzie King, Premier of Canada. (Canada and the U.S., in an exchange of notes last week, agreed to post-war attempts to reduce tariffs and eliminate other trade barriers.)

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