Shift in Defense

Before he gave up his $285,000-a-year job as president of Procter & Gamble to take the $25,000-a-year Defense Secretary post in Sputnik-spooked October 1957, lanky Neil Hosier McElroy warned Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams that he would have to go back to P. & G. before the end of President Eisenhower's second term. A good man for the Defense post was hard to find, and with "Engine Charlie" Wilson eager to get back to Michigan after 4 1/2 years in Washington. Ike decided that getting a good man to serve two years was better than settling for a less promising man willing to serve the full stretch.

Last week Neil McElroy, 54, confirmed the buzzing rumors: he will go back to P. & G. (as board chairman) late this year, after he sees the current defense budget through Congress and helps start work on the fiscal 1961 budget. One big factor in his resignation is money--not so much a tax-slashed big salary as a top P. & G. executive's fat stock-option, profit-sharing and pension benefits. (He gets not a cent from P. & G. so long as he stays in Washington.) But also, Neil McElroy's wife Camilla is ailing (sciatica), he himself dislikes the Washington social grind (13 inescapable dinners in the first 20 days of March), and for the first time in his life he is nagged by exhaustion.

If the President feels that "conditions in the world are such that I should stay," McElroy told a press conference, "I will stay." Said Ike at his own press conference: "I know his sense of duty, and if things got tighter, well . . . I think he'd forget all the rest of it because he wouldn't want to break up the team."

But because it seemed that he wanted to quit one of the free world's most important posts for money reasons at a time of crisis, McElroy drew some sharp barbs; editorials hooted at him as a "two-year man." Pundit Walter Lippmann complained that "McElroy expects to leave the job just as he is about ready to do it." Actually, McElroy gets top marks from both the Pentagon and Capitol Hill for his quickness and sureness in grasping the complexities of his job.

His successor is likely to be someone who already grasps the complexities. Top possibilities: Deputy Defense Secretary and former Air Force Secretary Donald A. Quarles, 64; former Deputy Defense Secretary (1951-53) William C. Foster, 61, now an executive vice president of Olin Mathieson Chemical Corp.; Red Cross President Alfred M. Gruenther, 60, retired four-star general and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe from 1953 to 1956.

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