Banker Boss

For his first major appointment, Harry Truman had called in an old friend and World War I buddy, St. Louis Banker John Wesley Snyder, to succeed Fred Vinson as Federal Loan Administrator. This week, as Vinson moved on to the Treasury Department, John Snyder moved into another Vinson seat: he became Director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion.

Plump, amiable John Snyder, who had spent more than half his 49 years in the banking business, had seemed a natural for the Federal Loan job. Former RFC official, former executive vice president of the Defense Plant Corp., he had (in 1943) become first vice president of the First National Bank of St. Louis. As a banker he was sound; in the field of government credit he had been an able red-tape cutter. But OWMR was something else again.

Tough Job. Now Banker Snyder would find himself in a hurly-burly world of Washington compromise--of giving & taking and influencing people--at a time when the U.S. was moving into the delicate period of reconversion. Already the civilian side of OWMR was embroiled in a rough-&-tough battle with the military; OWMR felt that Army & Navy were holding too tightly to high production schedules, that the civilian economy should get a better break.

Moreover, as Snyder moved in, some of OWMR's ablest operators moved out. Vinson's fat, fast-thinking general counsel, Ed Prichard, would follow his boss to the Treasury; Don Russell, a Jimmy Byrnes protege who had handled much of the war production side, had gone with Byrnes to the State Department. Others were gone or going. Grey, bespectacled Boss Snyder would have to find a new staff.

Banker Snyder set out to build his own pipelines to other Government departments. He had one consolation: Fred Vinson would carry much of his economic policy-making with him to the Treasury Department. No one pretended that John Snyder would ever be called the Assistant President, as Jimmy Byrnes and Fred Vinson had been.

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