Command Request

Anna Marie Lederer Rosenberg decided to answer the letter by phone. In New York she put in a call to Defense Secretary George Marshall. "What's your answer, Anna?" asked Marshall. "Any request of yours to me has always been a command," said Mrs. Rosenberg.

George Marshall did not wait for President Truman's formal appointment. He announced to the press that Anna Rosenberg, 48, would take the big, pressure-blown, $15,000-a-year job of Assistant Secretary of Defense in charge of manpower and personnel. No woman had ever before held such a job in the manly precincts of the Pentagon. But Anna Rosenberg, said George Marshall, was "one of the country's outstanding experts--I believe the outstanding expert--on the subject of manpower." She succeeds bumbling Paul Griffith, who owed his job to Louis Johnson (both were ex-national commanders of the American Legion).

Anna Rosenberg is a 5 ft. 3 dynamo and a resolute wearer of outlandishly feminine hats which cover one of the shrewdest heads in public life. A Hungarian--her father made furniture for the Emperor--who was brought to the U.S. at ten, she has never quite disposed of her Budapest accent. She has been alternately charming or browbeating people into accord since her junior year at New York's Wadleigh High School. There, during World War I, she persuaded boys at two neighboring high schools to end their strike over compulsory military drill which lengthened the school day by an hour and a half, then politicked the authorities into shortening the school day. She was barely old enough to vote when she helped some Tammany Hall small fry get elected.

In the manpower trade, she learned her ABCs and minded her Ps & Qs in the early alphabetical New Deal days of NRA, WPA and the Social Security Board. At one point she was so busy that she was known as "Seven-Job Anna." As New York regional director of the War Manpower Commission in World War II, she evolved "the Buffalo Plan," juggling manpower on the basis of priorities, which was copied across the U.S. An ardent supporter of Fiorello La Guardia, and like him, volatile, unpredictable and tireless, she can be coy as Bo-Peep or brassy as Sergeant Quirt. Running her own labor-and public-relations business on the side, Mrs. Rosenberg (whose husband, Julius Rosenberg, is a Manhattan rug dealer) earned up to $60,000 a year for advising such clients as R. H. Macy & Co., I. Miller (shoes) and Nelson Rockefeller.

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The Administration also filled a tough job left vacant by another departing friend of Louis Johnson. As new chairman of the federal Munitions Board, the President appointed Businessman John D. Small of New York, an Annapolis graduate ('15) who formerly headed the Civilian Production Administration after World War II.

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