The Organization Man
(See Cover)
At 9:15 on the fifth morning after Sputnik I changed military policy and practice for all time, a brand new U.S. Secretary of Defense, fresh from a world where Cheer is a product instead of an attitude, took over the cavernous office on Ring E, River Side, Third Floor, of the Pentagon.
Neil Hosier McElroy, 53, for nine years president of Procter & Gamble, sat down at Washington's largest desk (9 ft. by 4 ft. 11 in., with 20 drawers), which had been used by General John J. Pershing in World War I and by General George Marshall in World War II. Near by was William Tecumseh Sherman's ornate library table, and on it a model of the Oozlefinch bird, a frog-eyed, missile-toting creature, the insigne of Army missilemen at Fort Bliss, Texas. Also on the Sherman table were the three telephones whose rings, over the coming months, could only have deep meaning for Neil McElroy; the shrilling command phone over which word might come of war (its number is classified), the White House phone (NAtional 8-1414, ext. 72) and the regular Pentagon phone (Lberty 5-6700, ext. 55261).
Aboard & Working. For the first two hours that day, the red light outside McElroy's door signaled that the Secretary of Defense was aboard and working alone (red and white lights together mean that he is busy with visitors and not to be disturbed). He buzzed for the first of the dozen cups of black coffee he drinks daily, got it from one of the eleven mess attendants attached to his office (all security-cleared because they are in a position to overhear top-secret conversations). Then McElroy began the breakneck round of business that has not since let up: he held a brief press conference, discussed the fiscal 1959 defense budget with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Nate Twining, was briefed by Defense Department Comptroller Wilfred McNeil on the National Security Council meeting scheduled for the next morning.
Defense Secretary McElroy had just come from the U.S.'s 29th largest corporation to the world's largest public business--and Procter & Gamble seemed small by comparison. P. & G.'s 1957 net sales of $1,156,000,000 amounted to the operating costs of the Defense Department for ten days. Its $67 million net earnings would buy little more than a fully equipped nuclear submarine. Moreover, the rush of military technology had made the job of Defense Secretary bigger and tougher than ever before. The Soviet satellite revised all military parameters, and it was up to Neil McElroy to track the course for the U.S.
McElroy moved fast and surely. Even before he took office, he had toured U.S. military bases, poking into every niche of his new land, sea and air empire. Once installed, he drove up to Capitol Hill, appeared before Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson's Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, answered questions with a candor that made senatorial friends, and in detail that showed he had done his homework. He stepped confidently into the high society of international diplomacy, went to London and Bonn and wound up at the NATO conference in Paris beside--if slightly to the rear of--President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles.
In the Pentagon itself, where in the last analysis he would either make or break himself, Neil McElroy began making decisions where for months there had been indecision, started reversing the policies that had caused the U.S. to fall behind in the struggle for technological superiority. "More decisions have been made in the Pentagon in the last six weeks than in the last six years," cried Texas' Lyndon Johnson. Said Pundit Stewart Alsop in an otherwise gloom-ridden column last week: "It begins to seem possible that the soap industry has miraculously given this lucky country a first-rate Secretary of Defense."
Shoestrings & Briefcases. No one knows better than blue-eyed, towering (6 ft. 4 in., 210 Ibs.) Neil McElroy that he is still on his Defense Department honeymoon, that in part he looks good because the U.S. so badly wants him to look good, and that his fast start is worthless unless it is the first stage of successful long-term performance. But there are qualities in McElroy that make him a good bet--and Neil McElroy, himself a gambling man, would be the first to put his wager on his chances.
McElroy's own personal drive leaves no room for failure: years ago, as a very junior employee, he decided that he would one day become president of Procter & Gamble, imposed a strict discipline on himself, rammed straight to the top. His Pentagon job requires a sense of urgency, and Neil McElroy has always been a man in a hurry: he dresses fast ("He has broken more shoestrings than any other man in America," says a Cincinnati friend), walks fast ("You can't call a walk with Mac a stroll. It's more like a run"), drives fast ("He's a good driver but he goes like hell"), flies fast, often pausing just long enough to stuff his toilet articles and an extra shirt into a briefcase before taking off cross-country.
In the masculine Pentagon world, McElroy is a man's man: he can be a two-fisted bourbon drinker, barely manages to suppress a lifelong passion for shooting craps, has a short-fuse temper and can use four-letter language that does not spell TIDE. As Defense Secretary he must walk the tightrope between sufficient defense and national extravagance; McElroy's own nature is such that he could, without batting an eye, decide to spend $30 million for Procter & Gamble to buy Clorox, yet at home in Cincinnati he long kept close personal tabs on the amount of gasoline his daughters bought.
"It's That l%." Above all else, Neil McElroy is an expert organization manager coming to a Washington job where only an organizer can make a dent. Cincinnati's Procter & Gamble is the company of the organization man. People do not work for Procter & Gamble; they live it. The work product of each employee is measured as carefully as the chemicals in a detergent formula. Superiority, not seniority, is the basis for promotion--and the basis on which Neil McElroy was named president at 44.
Says Procter & Gamble's Board Chairman Richard R. ("Red") Deupree: "Management today doesn't require specific skills. A successful manager has to have overall skill of management. It's something in you that wants to come out. Mac makes quick decisions. He makes 'em fast. No one can be right all of the time, but Mac is right a majority of the time. An executive has to be right just about all of the time. He is making maybe 100 decisions a day, but if he knows his business he won't have to think about 99% of them. It's that 1% that separates the good executive from the poor one."
"Out Like a Cigar." The personal traits that Neil McElroy brings to the Pentagon have been in him a long while. He is a strong-minded man, and he was a headstrong child, with a habit of holding his breath until he got his own way (his mother finally cured him by throwing a pan of cold water in his face). Raised in Madisonville, now part of Cincinnati itself, Neil was the youngest of three sons of a high-school physics teacher. He was reared on the run: from his earliest memory, all the considerable McElroy family energies were turned toward earning and saving enough money to send the three boys to college. The boys raised chickens in the backyard, delivered newspapers and advertising dodgers along the same route.
"We all learned to type," recalls Paul McElroy, now an engineer in Cambridge, Mass. "Father would bring home lists of teachers and set us down to the typewriter to copy them. Then he sold the list of names to advertisers [for promotion lists]. He was full of ideas." Result: Neil McElroy had saved $1,000 by the time he got out of Withrow High School, and he followed his brothers to Harvard (all three won scholarships from the Harvard Club of Cincinnati).
In Cambridge, Neil McElroy majored in economics, subbed in basketball ("I would be in for five minutes, then out like a cigar in a swamp"), tootled the piccolo, became president of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter--and ran the floatingest poker game in Matthews Hall. When his devout Methodist father heard about the poker, he insisted that Neil take up bridge instead (years before, figuring his sons should sin at home if they sinned at all, he had bought them a pool table to keep them from hanging around pool halls). The upshot: Neil McElroy plays both bridge and poker, enthusiastically and well.
One Way to Find Out. In 1925, planning to return for work at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, McElroy took a $100-a-month summer job with Procter & Gamble. Says he: "I was a mail boy. That's where they tell you to open and read everybody's mail. It's one way of finding out what's going on." Ambitious, hard-driving Neil McElroy found out enough to realize that Procter & Gamble, with its incentives for the ambitious, hard-driving organization man, was the place for him. He never got to business school, instead stayed on at P. & G., first as a soap salesman, then in the advertising department. In the early 1930s he had an offer from a big New York ad agency. "I'm not going to take it," he told a friend. "I'm going to stay with Procter & Gamble. But I'm not going to be satisfied to be advertising manager." At that time he was still years away from being advertising manager--but he had already made up his mind to be president.
In his race for P. & G.'s presidency, McElroy got a strong hand up from Camilla Fry McElroy, handsome daughter of a Cincinnati industrial-soap manufacturer, whom he had married in 1929. "Camille" McElroy shared his ambition, helped him overcome a personal handicap of stuttering, entered into a family partnership to get him on his way. They limited their entertaining primarily to important P. & G. people, resolved never, never to go into debt--in fact refused to buy a house until they could do it without a mortgage. In due time he bought his present grey-green stucco house (known to visiting relatives as Grand Central Station) at 3478 Vista Terrace in the Hyde Park section of Cincinnati.
This joint enterprise, along with Neil McElroy's real professional abilities, worked spectacularly. McElroy was named Procter & Gamble advertising and promotion manager in 1940, a director and vice president in charge of advertising in 1943, general manager in 1946 and president (at $285,000 a year) in 1948.
Two Washes for One Head. McElroy came up through the advertising route, but he bore no resemblance to the caricatured three-martini sincere-tie adman of Madison Avenue legend. In Procter & Gamble's tight check-and-balance organization, advertising was something of a science, tied closely to research and development, production and marketing. P. & G. advertising knew almost to the ounce how much soap each of its bubble-bathos radio programs could be credited with selling. P. & G. advertising still does the weekly wash free for 100 Cincinnati housewives, checks them closely as to their likes and dislikes. In P. & G. beauty salons, ladies have their hair washed with two Procter & Gamble shampoos--one for each side of the head--to find out which they prefer, and why. Advertising studies tell Procter & Gamble whether Tide will sell better if it is white, blue or green, whether another ounce of Joy for the same price will pay for itself in increased sales. As P. & G.'s advertising chief, Neil McElroy was death on guessing about such matters. "I don't want opinions," he said repeatedly. "I want facts."
As president, McElroy still wanted the facts. "Just as he remembers names and faces," says a P. & G. executive, "Mac remembers facts, and woe be to anyone in the Pentagon who doesn't remember that Mac can remember every damn thing he ever saw. He can look at a page with hundreds of figures on it and get to the source of any error. He has the same ability to detect a flaw in an argument."
Procter & Gamble's organization existed to give its president the facts--and McElroy used them to make his top-level decisions. When a scientist wrote P. & G. suggesting that fluorine in toothpaste might prevent tooth decay, the company hired the scientist, launched an intensive research project which came up with the information that enabled McElroy to give the go-ahead on Crest.
Largely because of the impetus Neil McElroy gave to research and development, about 70% of Procter & Gamble's income last year came from products that did not exist a dozen years before. Overall results of the McElroy regime: Procter & Gamble's net sales doubled, moving over the billion-a-year mark, and P. & G. twice won awards from the American Institute of Management as the best-run company in the U.S.
"I'll Nail It Together." One of P. & G.'s traditions is that its executives should be active in the life of their community, and
Neil McElroy became Cincinnati's No. 1 civic participant, belonging to everything from the Community Chest to the opera association (as well as the Rookwood Historical and Philosophical Society, a bigwig, poker-playing group). In 1950 McElroy's public spirit took him to a luncheon for the president of Columbia University, who needed $25,000 to help finance Columbia's American Assembly, a series of conferences on public issues. After Columbia's president explained the project, McElroy asked him to "wait around for a few moments while I nail this thing together." On the spot he raised the $25,000, and Columbia's Dwight D Eisenhower was most impressed.
In 1952 Cincinnatian McElroy contributed to the preconvention campaign of Cincinnatian Robert A. Taft, but supported Ike in the general election. As a Harvard overseer and an adviser to the University of Cincinnati, McElroy had long been a lay educational leader, and in 1954 President Eisenhower tapped him for a big educational assignment: chairmanship of the White House Conference on Education. Before taking the job McElroy first pondered whether it would "be good for P. & G." Then he bluntly asked Ike: "Are you genuinely interested in this problem, or are you doing this for window dressing?" Ike liked the frankness, assured McElroy that he was interested, and McElroy started on his 18-month task. Working with a group of rugged individualists, he came out with a hard-hitting, unified report recommending that expenditures for education be doubled. The President was again impressed. Last July, seeking a successor to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, he sent the call to McElroy.
During their half-hour talk, McElroy accepted the President's offer on the single condition that he be allowed to take a leave of absence from (instead of quitting) Procter & Gamble (since P. & G. was willing to give up its small share of defense contracts, there seemed to be no conflict of interests). Before taking over, McElroy characteristically set out on his tour of military establishments. On the evening of Oct. 4 he was at dinner at the Army's Huntsville, Ala. ballistic missile center when Rocket Scientist Wernher Von Braun was called from the table. Von Braun returned, face flushed, with the news that Sputnik I was in outer space. Even then the Secretary-to-be sensed that the Defense job would never quite be the same again.
Faces on the Wall. In his new office McElroy operates under the gaze of his five predecessors, hanging in oil portraits on the pale blue walls. Set apart is the first Defense Secretary, tight-lipped James Forrestal, whose health was broken by the job. Frame by frame are jowly Louis Johnson, whose ham-handed economy, reducing the forces on the insistence of Harry Truman, left the U.S. almost totally unprepared for Korea; austere George Marshall, who had to work mightily to pick up Johnson's pieces; able Robert Abercrombie Lovett, who found that even-handed patience was not nearly enough for the Pentagon; and blunt Charles Erwin Wilson, whose experience remains most meaningful of all to Neil McElroy.
For right or wrong, better or worse, Charlie Wilson was the man most responsible for the situation McElroy found in the U.S. military establishment. Wilson's five-year tenure covered half the life span of the Defense Department, and his heavy thumb left the biggest print. When Wilson came to Washington the Korean war was about over, and his first big job was to convert to the long-haul New Look. He cut manpower, substituted the firepower of increasingly plentiful nuclear weapons, and it is Charlie Wilson's monument that he maintained an effective force-in-being that kept the peace for five rough years.
But Charlie Wilson's New Look lacked forward vision. He had little if any use for the basic research that makes possible the weapons of the future. Why is the grass green and the sky blue? Why do fried potatoes turn brown? What is the molecular secret of life itself? The answers could not shoot and therefore should not be bought with defense dollars. Why would anyone want to go to the moon? An outer-space satellite could not destroy a target and should therefore have a relatively low priority. In 1957, for example, Wilson's research and development cuts took the Army down from $596 million to $327 million, the Navy from $666 million to $505 million ("That's a lotta money to spend on research, young fella," said Wilson to a Navyman) and the Air Force from $1.2 billion to $622 million. Said a top Army general last week: "Research is the goose which lays the golden egg. Wilson wanted the egg, but he didn't want to feed the goose." As a result the Soviet Union, by devoting its resources to feeding the goose, got the golden egg.
Moreover, Charlie Wilson's idea of improving Pentagon organization was to bring in more civilian officials, some plain incompetent, few with much real military knowledge. While the professional military men, with all their parochial bickering, are far from blameless, it is nonetheless true that the major mistakes of Wilson's day were made by civilians. It was civilian mismanagement of funds last year that forced procurement cutbacks and threatened to wreck the nation's airframe industry. It was a civilian decision that left the Strategic Air Command with a majority of its force grounded for lack of gasoline last summer. It was a civilian decision to slap overtime restrictions on ballistic missile programs. And it was civilian indecision that left both the Army and the Air Force spending hundreds of millions for rival intermediate-range missiles.
Free Hand, Sure Touch. Neil McElroy's great advantage is that he has clear and specific authority for cleaning up the Pentagon mess. A few weeks ago President Eisenhower called him in and told him to get the job done--no matter how. Said the President of the U.S.: "You have a free hand."
So far the free hand has been used with an encouragingly sure touch. Hardly had McElroy taken office than he removed the freeze on overtime work--an economy measure--in the ballistic missile program. He restored $170 million for research and development, released $400 million, mostly for Air Force procurement (another $300 million is to be released in the second half of fiscal 1958). It seemed unbelievable to McElroy that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the civilian secretaries were so split that the U.S. has no overall war plan under which service roles and missions are definitely parceled out. He made it perfectly clear that they had better get together or some changes would be made.
McElroy jumped the Army's Jupiter C into the satellite race as a backstop to the
Navy's lagging Vanguard. He figured that the IRBM rivalry between the Air Force Thor and the Army Jupiter had gone so far, taken so long and cost so much that both should be put into production. McElroy upgraded Deputy Assistant Secretary William Holaday to the post of missile boss. To those who doubted Holaday's ability, McElroy also let it be known that the Pentagon's real missile boss was Neil McElroy.
Diplomacy's Shortcomings. Finally, McElroy announced his intention to take outer-space research and development out of the hands of the separate services. He would, he said, set up an Advanced Research Projects Agency, staffed by the top scientific talent of all three services, to develop space projects to the point where they can be turned back to the services for operational use. At this infringement on their autonomy the services began grumbling, and Neil McElroy, going slow for once, has not yet named an ARPA head. "I am taking my time on this one." says he. "I consider this to be one of the key appointments I will ever make, and I don't want to be rushed into it."
Most of these moves were admittedly stopgap; e.g., it is entirely possible that neither Jupiter nor Thor but the Navy's solid-fuel Polaris is the IRBM of the near future. Neil McElroy has not yet had to put his personal drive or his organization-man's skill to the fullest test. Before he is through, he will have to. For the U.S. Secretary of Defense is no longer a man who prepares for hot war while the Secretary of State wages cold war. Indeed, U.S. defense shortcomings have been a major factor in the weakening of the U.S. diplomatic position in Europe. And not until Neil McElroy--or someone else--brings sound defense and sound organization to the Pentagon will the U.S. again move ahead positively in both hot and cold war capabilities.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.