New Boss for Harvester

In a walnut-paneled room high in a Chicago office building one morning last week, Fowler McCormick, 52, International Harvester Co.'s chairman and big stockholder, met his board of directors for a showdown. The directors wanted to make President John Lawrence McCaffrey top dog in the company, turn the chairmanship into an advisory post. McCormick opposed the change, but the directors approved it anyway. Promptly McCormick resigned as chairman (but not as a director). For the first time since 1831, when Fowler McCormick's grandfather Cyrus introduced the reaper, the largest U.S. maker of agricultural equipment had no McCormick in a top executive post.

Fowler McCormick, after breezing through Groton and Princeton, had joined the company as a $25-a-week factory worker in 1925, worked up through the engineering, accounting and sales departments to a vice presidency in 1934. He was president from 1941 to 1946 when Harvester smoothly shifted to wartime production of armored vehicles, shells and airplane cowlings along with peacetime farm equipment. When he was made chairman five years ago, directors changed the bylaws to let him keep the chief executive powers. McCormick decentralized the company's management, sparkplugged its $150 million postwar expansion, helped boost profits from $22 million in 1946 to $66,700,000 last year. He also made a reputation as a business statesman, favored liberal pensions, cost-of-living adjustments and other benefits, personally mediated a strike last fall by giving the union almost everything it wanted.

But over the past 2 1/2 years, weakened by an attack of virus pneumonia, McCormick was away from his desk for prolonged periods, missed directors' meetings time & again, left the job--but not the authority--of running the company to McCaffrey. This was presumably the chief reason the directors clipped McCormick of his power. Another reason, according to union gossip: the directors objected to McCormick's too-liberal labor policies. (Even with them, Harvester has been plagued by strikes by its Redline C.I.O. United Farm Equipment and Metal Workers union.)

Harvester's new boss, 58-year-old Larry McCaffrey, is a company veteran. The son of a blacksmith, he went to work at 16 at Harvester, rose through the sales department (McCormick was his assistant), was made second vice president and a director after McCormick became president. For years, the "two Macs" worked as a team, and Mac McCaffrey wanted to keep it that way. Said he last week: "I asked [McCormick] to change his mind after the meeting. I will ask him again the first time I see him."

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