Appointments

From the White House last week came announcements of still more Administration appointments. Among them:

Arthur M. (for Meier) Schlesinger Jr., Special Assistant to the President. Harvard history professor and prolific author of articles and books (The Age of Jackson, The Age of Roosevelt), Schlesinger is a Ph.D. in doctrinaire liberalism. A leader of Americans for Democratic Action, he was Adlai Stevenson's adviser and speechwriter in 1952 and 1956, swung away in 1960 when it looked as if Kennedy would be the front runner in the presidential primary campaigns. He was a top man in Kennedy's campaign brain trust. Schlesinger, 43, will have no specific assignment, but will write a speech here, offer an idea there, and serve as a kind of informal governmental gadfly as well as, perhaps, the author of the yet to be written Age of Kennedy.

George Crews McGhee, 48, Assistant Secretary of State for Policy Planning. Texas-born George McGhee is a millionaire oil gentleman (McGhee Production Co.) and a scholar (Rhodes), a geologist, a onetime U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs, and consultant, since 1958, to the National Security Council. As boss of the sensitive policy planning board, it will be his job to keep Secretary Rusk up to date on ideas as they bloom in foreign affairs institutes around the country, and to help formulate long-range policy.

Henry R. (for Richardson) Labouisse, 56,Director of the International Cooperation Administration. Owner of a distinguished record in the State Department, Labouisse (Princeton '26, Harvard Law School '29) served between 1941 and 1951 in a flock of key assignments, most of them involved with foreign aid, relief missions and economic affairs. After that he turned in an excellent performance for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, directing the aid program for Arab refugees. In 1959 he was President Eisenhower's choice for the ICA post, but Capitol Hill Republicans blocked the appointment because New Orleans-born Labouisse was a registered Connecticut Democrat. His second wife (the first died in 1945) is Eve Curie, author-daughter of the discoverers of radium.

Mortimer Caplin, Commissioner of Internal Revenue. When he got the phone call from the White House advising him of his appointment, University of Virginia Law School Professor Caplin, 44, was in his office with an Internal Revenue agent who was going over Caplin's last three tax returns. Not that there was anything wrong with Tax Expert Caplin's arithmetic ("I came out clean"); he was undergoing the customary procedure inflicted on all prospective Administration appointees. Caplin won a certain reputation as a classy middleweight boxer at the University of Virginia ('37). In later years Caplin's reputation was built on his record as a teacher (former pupils: Bobby and Ted Kennedy), authority on taxation and corporate law, and civic leader; he turned his Charlottesville basement playroom into an emergency classroom for schoolchildren during the "massive resistance" period in 1958, when Virginia closed its public schools. Long a proponent of tax reform, Caplin favors cutting upper-bracket income taxes to 65%, lower-bracket taxes to 10%.

Edward Roscoe (baptized Egbert Roscoe) Murrow, Director of the U.S. Information Agency. North Carolinian Murrow's apocalyptic voice and Delphic punditry first gained force during his CBS ''THIS . . . is London" newscasts during World War II. As CBS's top commentator, and later as a director and vice president in charge of news and special events, he lent the same organ-toned quality to such TV shows as Person to Person and See It Now (both programs have since been dropped). Because of apparent differences on policy with the network brass, he took a sabbatical in 1959, popped up again last year to take on a new documentary series, CBS Reports. To run the sensitive, widespread propaganda facilities of USIA, Murrow, 52, will take a big cut in pay, from something like $300,000 a year at CBS to $21,000 a year.

Thomas K. (for Knight) Finletter, U.S. Ambassador to NATO. A New York lawyer and investment banker from Philadelphia, urbane Tom Finletter, 63, has spread his interests from foreign affairs and defense down to local politics. He was a consultant to the U.S. delegation at the early U.N. meetings in San Francisco, head of the Marshall Plan mission to Britain in 1948-49, and Secretary of the Air Force under Harry Truman (1950-53); at the time of the big uproar over whether or not the U.S. ought to go on with the development of the H-bomb, Finletter was in the front rank of the go-aheaders. More recently, Stevensonite Finletter joined liberal Democrats in New York City in a still-broiling fight against Tammany Hall.

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