Matter of Approach

OPA's tall, chin-chopper boss, Chester Bliss Bowles, walked up Capitol Hill last week to ask Congress to extend OPA for another 18 months. As usual, Adman Bowles was armed with a great sheaf of adman's charts--150 of them--to show what OPA had been doing. As usual, he was urbane, softspoken, deferential. Only one note was missing in the interview. The rabbit-punching truculence with which Congressional committees have usually greeted OPAsters in the past was gone. This time the Senate's Banking & Currency Committee was on Chester Bowles's side from the beginning.

In a few earnest words, Bowles made his case:

"If ever we needed to fight inflation, we need to fight it in the year ahead. . . . No increase in the supplies available to civilians can be expected. At the same time, incomes continue to rise. ... It would be impossible to exaggerate the dangers that we face. We must not relax."

No Profit Control. Chester Bowles asked that OPA be given power to control commercial rents, barber shop and beauty parlor prices. OPA, or some other federal agency, should also be given authority to curb the boom in real estate. He brushed aside the charge that OPA is trying to control profits, saying: "We have no interest in profits except in cases where a price increase is requested."

Liberal Conservative. There was little doubt that OPA's life would be extended, and that the extension would be agreed to with none of the usual brawling. This turnabout is partly due to belated recognition by civilians of the fact that wartime price control is necessary. But it is chiefly a tribute to Chester Bowles, who is often described in Washington, a town of masterminds, as a man of ordinary intellect who knows how to talk to the public and to Congressmen, i.e., other men of ordinary intellect.

A grandson of Samuel Bowles, famed independent editor of the Springfield Republican, Bowles came out of The Choate School and Yale with a liberal outlook that satisfies New Dealers and labor. His years as board chairman of Manhattan's plushy ad firm of Benton & Bowles Inc. make him equally acceptable to most businessmen. When he took over OPA in 1943, OPA seemed ready either to 1) fall apart, or 2) be torn apart by baffled housewives, angry businessmen and the Congress. Optimists gave Bowles six weeks.

Bowles turned his sailboat over to the Coast Guard, and moved his wife and three of his children from his Connecticut home to a modest, rented house in McLean, Va. and set to work.

Sell the U.S. The trouble with OPA, he decided, was that no one had really told the U.S. what OPA was trying to do. Adman Bowles set out to tell it. He set up some 631 committees of farmers, housewives, industrialists to advise OPA (and incidentally to learn about it). He cut down the bedsheet-size questionnaires, pruned questions drastically. He wooed Congressmen with a special information service, took over the chore of answering letters from their mail which heckled OPA.

When he appears before a Congressional committee, he never makes the mistake of making some confused legislator look like a numskull, a trick which had delighted his mercurial, more brilliant predecessor, Leon Henderson. The facts & figures which he presents to support OPA's case are not necessarily better than Henderson's, but the easy-to-understand charts make them seem so.

Occasionally Bowles has blundered badly, as when he cancelled back red points. But he takes the sting out of justified criticism of OPA by readily admitting OPA blunders, promising to do better next time. In effect, his policy has been to give way in small things--e.g., easing rationing when possible to make OPA more popular--so as to hold the grand redoubt against inflation. This policy has worked well. Even the cries against OPA bureaucracy have died to a muted grumble. Yet OPA now has more bureaucrats than ever before: 60,164 employes v. 49,942 two years ago. No Congressman last week even brought up the fact. They were too busy agreeing with New Hampshire's Senator Tobey, once a caustic OPA critic: "OPA has saved the taxpayers billions of dollars."

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