Key Man

"The key to success" of the foreign-aid program, wrote Dwight Eisenhower to his Secretary of State last month, would be the man picked to head the State Department's new International Cooperation Administration, which would take over most of the work of Harold Stassen's Foreign Operations Administration. Having no man in mind, John Foster Dulles turned over the search for the policy-making executive to his Under Secretary, Herbert Hoover Jr., and five days later headed north for a Duck Island vacation.

Under Secretary Hoover did not have to look far: his candidate was already in Washington serving as executive director of the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch (the Hoover Commission), whose chairman happens to be the Under Secretary's father. One morning, just before a Cabinet meeting, ex-President Hoover slipped into the White House for a visit with Ike. When the Cabinet (including Dulles) met, it approved the Under Secretary's candidate: Cincinnati's John B. Hollister, 64, longtime law and golfing partner of the late Senator Robert A. Taft.

Hollister first met the elder Hoover after World War I, helped him dispense relief in Poland and Lithuania. After World War II, Hollister served briefly with UNRRA. But to many foreign-aid supporters, the Hollister appointment sounded off key, not at all in harmony with Predecessors Paul Hoffman, Averell Harriman and Harold Stassen. Some of Stassen's top aides muttered that they would quit rather than work under Hollister. The Washington Post expressed "misgivings" based on 1) reports that a Hoover Commission task force will propose to atomize the foreign-aid setup, scattering the fragments among various departments, and 2) Hollister's record as a Taft Republican (a Congressman from 1931 to 1936, Hollister fought the New Deal and voted against Cordell Hull's Reciprocal Trade Act).

The White House was at pains to explain that, with Taftman Hollister in charge, the program had a better chance of overcoming growing congressional resistance to foreign spending. The Taft family's Cincinnati Times-Star glowed with pride, certain that to Hollister, "thrift is more than a word." But newsmen had trouble getting an answer to their key question: Is Hollister for or against foreign aid?

Said Hollister himself last week: "I certainly would not accept direction of any program with the idea of cutting its throat," but he added that he knew too little about foreign aid to have an opinion on it.

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