Caretaker for TVA

The White House this year screened some 50 candidates to replace Gordon Clapp as board chairman of TVA--and rejected them all as too controversial. President Eisenhower was hunting for a man to cool off the hot arguments over

TVA. Last week he appointed Brigadier General Herbert Davis Vogel of the Army Engineers, a man whose politics, if any, are his own secret.

Vogel has had little experience in the field of hydroelectric power, but he has built a distinguished career in river control. After graduating 24th in his class ('24) at West Point, he studied engineering at the University of California and at Berlin's Technical University, got his doctorate in Berlin in 1929. The next year he was selected to design and construct the U.S. Waterways Experiment Station at Vicksburg, Miss. Vogel did some of the most important work of his life at Vicksburg, on his knees with a grapefruit knife in his hand, digging out the first scale models of American rivers. He recalls that many top engineers ridiculed the project, and Vogel for "making mud pies," but the Vicksburg scale models now allow the engineers to predict and combat great river floods with amazing accuracy. Vogel later served as district Army engineer in Pittsburgh and Buffalo, and lieutenant governor of the Panama Canal Zone. During World War II, he won the Legion of Merit for home-front engineering projects and the Distinguished Service Medal for service in the Pacific. His present station is division engineer for Southwestern states. Now 53, Vogel will retire from the Army August 31.

Asked about the public-v. private-power controversy, Vogel said: "Such a question is like asking someone if he likes apples or pears, cats or dogs, horses or mules." In picking Vogel, Ike hired a caretaker, not a redecorator. TVA will not shrink or grow. It will be operated.

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