Wanted: Iron Men

As soon as the "all in" was sounded in his weekly press conference, President Truman made an announcement that was a surprise to none of the 158 newsmen gathered in the White House Oval Room. Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall, who wanted to get back to his North Carolina law practice, had resigned (that is, Royall's third letter of resignation had been accepted). Who would get the job? The President couldn't say. Would there be other changes in the top defense command? Harry Truman said he didn't expect any major ones. But, he hedged quickly, in Government there are always changes because it takes an iron man with an elephant hide, and the pay is not worth the ribbing he's got to take.

Last week, though the leather folder on the President's desk fattened with candidates for Government jobs, there was a painful shortage of iron men with elephant hides. There was no stampede of qualified men for Royall's $15,000 job, or the $10,000 under secretaryship abandoned by William H. Draper. Navy Secretary John L. Sullivan ($15,000) and his Under Secretary W. John Kenney ($10,000) were thinking of leaving, too. There were two $15,000 openings on the Atomic Energy Commission (former Iowa editor W. W. Waymack had left, Physicist Robert Bacher had submitted his resignation). Admiral W. W. Smith's $12,000 chairmanship of the Maritime Commission was also open.

Tailor-Made. While he looked for good men for the jobs at home, Harry Truman succeeded last week in filling two tough diplomatic posts abroad with men practically tailor-made to his specifications. To succeed Lieut. General Walter Bedell Smith as ambassador to Moscow, the President wanted someone who would not run wild with ideas of his own, could be depended on to execute instructions to the letter, and to maintain the tough U.S. military front that seems best understood in Moscow. The man he picked is poker-faced, tough Vice Admiral Alan Goodrich Kirk, 60, USN (ret.), who ran the Navy's showin the invasion of Sicily, is now ambassador to Belgium. In June, Kirk will take over Spasso House, the U.S. embassy just a mile from the Kremlin, known to some of the inmates as Spasm House.

To replace punctilious career diplomat Jefferson Caffery, 63, as ambassador to France, Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted a man who was enough of an economist to keep abreast of French financial crises, enough of a diplomat to help Western Europe toward unity. For this job Truman picked David K. E. Bruce, chief of the Economic Cooperation Administration mission in France, a lawyer and Virginia gentleman farmer. Bruce learned economics managing Mellon interests (his first wife was Andy Mellon's only daughter, Ailsa), later took a postgraduate course as Assistant Secretary of Commerce. To succeed Bruce at EGA he picked lively, earnest Barry Bingham, 43, wartime naval officer, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal and son of the late Robert Worth Bingham, onetime ambassador to Great Britain.

Pay Cut. An old, familiar problem was plaguing the President in trying to fill the hottest spot of all--the new U.S. Civilian High Commissioner for Germany to succeed General Lucius Clay. The man he wanted for the job (salary: probably $25,000) was World Bank President John J. McCloy, onetime Wall Street lawyer and wartime Assistant Secretary of War. But John McCloy, who had had a hard time in the war years on his $10,000 salary, was in no hurry to give up his tax-exempt $30,000-a-year salary at the World Bank for less pay and more trouble.

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