Musical Chairs

With President Truman calling the tunes from his Key West watering place, official Washington last week bustled about in a brisk game of musical chairs. It was "a cozy little game among the regulars; no new faces were invited in to play.

First, handsome, able W. Stuart Symington, 48, left his job as the nation's first Secretary of the Air Force to become chairman of the National Security Resources Board. On the record, the NSRB, established three years ago, wasn't much of a job--but it should be. It had been designed as a big cog in the nation's defense machinery, but somebody forgot to connect it to the machine. Its first chairman, Arthur M. Hill, could not get along with Harry Truman and quit after 14 months on the job. Then Harry Truman nominated the conspicuously unqualified Mon C. Wallgren, a Democrat out of a job, who couldn't get the Senate's approval. The board had rattled around without a real head ever since.

Stu Symington, popular in Congress, was a cinch to be confirmed in his new job. A skilled persuader, he will then have to cajole the board's members (the Secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, Commerce, Interior, Agriculture and Labor), the President, the Congress and the U.S. people into hardheaded preparations for mobilizing industry, manpower and national resources in the event of war. His new job will not be so exciting as selling air power, which, with the help of a receptive audience, he had done very well.

Other chair movings: CJ Gordon Gray, 40, tobacco heir and Winston-Salem, N.C. newspaper publisher, left his job as Secretary of the Army but agreed to stay on in Washington until September, as a special presidential assistant to study the dollar gap, before taking up his new job as president of his alma mater, the University of North Carolina. P: Budget Director Frank Pace Jr., the youngest (37) high official in the capital, was moved over to the Pentagon to replace Gray as Army Secretary. An independently wealthy Arkansan, graduate of Princeton and Harvard, Pace likes working for the Government, has done so for four years.

P: Frederick J. Lawton, who will succeed Pace, is a 49-year-old career civil servant who joined the Government at 19 as a Census Bureau clerk, has been Pace's Assistant Director of the Budget. P: Under Secretary of Commerce Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney, 51, quit to "get a rest," tend to his own business (mines, lumber, and a fine stable of race horses).

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