Send for Ike

After 19 months of unification, the top service commanders were still scrapping among themselves over wartime functions and peacetime appropriations. To end the bickering and to clank some brass hats together, President Truman last week sent for General Ike Eisenhower. Since early December Ike had been a part-time troubleshooter, occupying on occasion an unpretentious suite in the Pentagon. Now he would take a full leave from Columbia University for seven or eight weeks.

Ike's title would make him "principal military adviser" to the President* and to Secretary of Defense Forrestal. More important, he would also sit in as acting chairman at meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Though he would have no vote, his prestige and winning ways were expected to help solve such nagging disputes as the Navy's air role, the strategic demands of the Pacific, the allocation of military largess to signers of the proposed North Atlantic pact.

Eisenhower's job and his title were temporary, but Harry Truman would like to have somebody permanently in the job. The President had once asked Congress to create a single, overall Chief of Staff. Congress, with plenty of urging from the apprehensive Navy, decided it would be too powerful a post for any military man.

* Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, 73, who was Franklin Roosevelt's Presidential Chief of Staff, and is now Truman's, is on sick leave and expected soon to retire.

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