Men & Jobs

Hoping to finish selecting the general staff of his Administration before he took off for Korea, Dwight Eisenhower spent long hours last week matching men and jobs. He talked it over with most of the candidates himself, conferred frequently with an impromptu personnel selection board headed by Herbert Brownell, who is to be Ike's Attorney General. Out of their deliberations came a dozen more appointments, which underscored the whole character of Ike's team: internationally minded and progressive in foreign affairs, middle-of-the-road to conservative on domestic issues, with a heavy leavening of businessmen, who are likely to concentrate on efficient management rather than new social and economic changes.

By this week Ike had rounded out his full Cabinet. The three final appointments: Michigan's Arthur Summerfield, chairman of the "Republican National Committee, to be Postmaster General; Boston's Sinclair Weeks, Republican finance chairman, to be Secretary of Commerce; President Martin Durkin of the A.F.L. Plumbers and Pipe Fitters Union to be Secretary of Labor (see THE NEW ADMINISTRATION).

Another appointment of near-Cabinet rank helped repay Ike's political debts to two important groups of supporters: 1) the women; 2) Southern Democrats for Ike. For Federal Security Administrator he picked Mrs. Oveta Gulp Hobby, Houston publisher and first commander of the WAC, and invited her to sit in on Cabinet meetings because of the "vital importance of her position"--supervising the Social Security program and a clutch of welfare offices including the Public Health Service, the Office of Education and the Food and Drug Administration.

A poised and handsome 47, with a flair for wearing clothes and a brisk, aloof air of success, Oveta Hobby first took to politics at the age of ten when she began reading the Congressional Record aloud to her father, a lawyer and state legislator. At 20, she was parliamentarian for the Texas legislature, later went to work as a clerk on the Houston Post. She married its publisher, ex-Governor William Pettus Hobby (she was 26, he was 52) in 1931, soon became a power on the newspaper (this fall she formally became its editor & publisher). She has two children, William Pettus Jr., 20, and Jessica, 15.

Of her new job she says only: "I'm in favor of people having security and I hope I can help." One Washington big shot tried his hand at a capsule characterization last week by comparing Mrs. Hobby to the Truman Administration's No. 1 woman executive, Anna Rosenberg. "Where Anna is earthy, Oveta is aristocratic; where Anna is agitated and hell bent for infighting, Oveta is cool and superior; where Anna sparkles and jangles with brain work, Oveta maintains authority simply by acting as if it were her right."

Other appointments of the week:

P:Treasurer of the United States: Mrs. Ivy Baker Priest, 47, of Bountiful, Utah, assistant chairman of the Republican National Committee, a Republican party worker since she was enrolled as a baby sitter at the age of 10. Ike's second Mormon appointee (the first: Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson), she has always managed the family budget for her husband (a wholesale furniture dealer) and three children, proudly boasts that "my checkbook always balances." As Treasurer her main job will be to do the same for the Treasury's accounts and to sign her name to all U.S. currency, thus:

Ivy Baker Priest

P:Deputy Attorney General: William P. Rogers, 39, New York and Washington lawyer and wartime Navy lieut. commander, who began his career as a prosecutor under Tom Dewey, then New York County district attorney. Appointed counsel to the Senate's War Investigating Committee (once headed by Harry Truman) during the Republican 80th Congress, Rogers earned such a reputation for fairness and competence that the Democrats kept him on after they won back control of Congress in 1948. His first political job: helping his boss-to-be, Herb Brownell, present the Eisenhower case on the contested Southern delegations at the Chicago convention.

P:Under Secretary of Commerce: W. Walter Williams, 57, Seattle mortgage banker, chemical engineer and chairman of Citizens for Eisenhower. Williams succeeded Paul Hoffman as head of the Committee for Economic Development and served as chairman of Washington's state Republican committee. Last month, after chatting with Ike about a possible Cabinet job, Williams confessed that he thought of himself as a square peg in a round hole in Treasury, but a "round peg in a round hole" in Commerce.

P:Secretary to the President: Arthur Vandenberg Jr., 45, bachelor son of the late Senator from Michigan. First head of the Citizens for Eisenhower and a top Ike aide throughout the campaign, his main job will be to keep Ike's daily engagement book.

P:Presidential Press Secretary: James C. Hagerty, 43, onetime reporter for the New York Times, where his 76-year-old father, James A., is still a top political writer. Young Jim became Tom Dewey's press secretary in 1943, has served on loan to Ike since before the 1952 convention. Most newsmen agree that he lives up to his avowed intention "to give reporters the same treatment that I expected when I was a reporter."

Last week Ike also began to assemble his personal presidential family, the men, as F.D.R. described them, with "a passion for anonymity." Iks' choices:

P:Special Assistant: Major General (ret.), Wilton B. ("Jerry") Persons, 52, brother of Alabama's Democratic Governor Gordon Persons and former head of Staunton (Va.) Military Academy. A long time Army spokesman on Capitol Hill and Ike's public-relations adviser at NATO, he will be Ike's liaison man to Congress.

P:Special Counsel: Thomas Stephens, 49, slight, Irish-born corporation lawyer, for many years a Republican worker in Manhattan and a close friend of Herb Brownell. His duties are still unspecified.

P:Administrative Assistant: Dr. Gabriel S. Hauge (pronounced how-ghee), 38, New York economist and Business Week editor who wrote most of Ike's whistle-stop speeches. He will be charged with liaison between the White House and Government departments on economic problems.

P: Administrative Assistant: Emmet J. Hughes, 31, an editor of LIFE, former TIME & LIFE correspondent in Europe and onetime press attache at the U.S. embassy in Madrid. An Eisenhower speechwriter and idea man during the campaign, Hughes will perform the same functions in Washington, and act as liaison man with the State Department on special assignments.

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