Stormy Weather

In routine fashion, President Roosevelt last week sent to the Senate the names of two appointees to the new Surplus Property Board. They were Connecticut's ex-Governor Robert A. Hurley, 49, and Lieut. Colonel Edward Hellman Heller, 44, multimillionaire member of one of San Francisco's first families, who resigned seven directorships to join the Army. Fifteen minutes after the names reached the Hill, the squall broke.

Some Senators promptly recalled a House Military Affairs Committee investigation last year into war contracts and $4,000,000 in Government-guaranteed loans given the Narragansett Machine Co. of Pawtucket, R.I. The committee had wondered why Hurley, as vice president, had been paid $12,000 a year when he spent "as little as one day a week" at the plant, had no set duties. Coupled with this was the fact, suspicious to the committee, that Hurley got the job just before a $2,000,000 loan and just after several million dollars in war contracts had gone to the company. The committee noted that Lieut. Colonel Heller was at the time attached to the office in charge of contracts and loans in the area. This was enough to cause the Senate to hold up approval until it could probe deeper in its own hearings.

The third member and probable chairman of the board, which will have the big. ticklish job of disposing of some $75 billion in surplus materials, is expected to be Iowa's lame-duck Senator, Guy M. Gillette. (He cannot be appointed till his present term expires.) The Senate will probably approve him. But it would be no sinecure--already the Board has stirred up one bitter fight which caused the President to drop his first choice for chairman, Defense Plant Corp. President Sam H. Husbands (TIME, Nov. 20).

As if to point up a reason for all this caution, the Senate's Mead Committee last week came up with a first-rate example of the enormous profits which private speculators might make in surpluses. The Army decided to sell 22,000,000 flashlight batteries--for which it had paid 7 1/2-c- each--for 4-c- apiece, although the ceiling price on such batteries is 10-c-. Thus, buyers might clean up as much as $1,000,000 by reselling the batteries. When the Senate Committee stepped in, the Treasury hastily canceled the sale.

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