The General Manager

Standing under an olive tree in Sicily in September 1943, an unsmiling American general accepted Italy's unconditional surrender. Just 20 months later, the same general, still stiff and frozen faced, met in a French schoolhouse with the emissaries of defeated Nazi Germany, and without outward emotion scribbled his name on the document that ended World War II in Europe. Those two rustic but historic occasions marked the climax of a brilliant military career for Walter Bedell Smith. In the postwar years, he served his nation notably as a diplomat and as chief of intelligence. But it is in his role as the able military planner who helped map the great campaigns of World War II that "Beedle" Smith must be long remembered.

Smith's career was closely meshed with that of Dwight Eisenhower, a man he served in peace and war. Ike called him "the general manager" of World War II in the European theater. It was a well-earned title: as Ike's chief of staff, Smith had as big a hand as anyone in the planning and execution of every military action from the invasion of North Africa to the final defeat of the Nazis. His was the tedious job of overseeing every elaborate detail, committing fact and figure to memory, and then distilling the plans for the final decision of his commanding officer.

The Bulldog. During those perilous years, Smith won the esteem of such fractious military men as Britain's Montgomery, France's De Gaulle and the U.S.'s General Mark Clark. When Eisenhower was preparing to leave for London to direct the Normandy invasion, Winston Churchill (who dubbed Smith "the Bulldog") begged him to leave Smith in the Mediterranean theater as chief of staff. "But," recalled Ike in Crusade in Europe, "to this I could not agree . . . General Smith suited me so completely that I felt it would be unwise to break up the combination just as we were on the eve of the war's greatest venture."

Beedle Smith was a bootstrap soldier. He rose to the top of his profession without ever attending either West Point or college. As a small boy in Indianapolis, he listened to the vivid recollections of his German grandfather, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, and decided he would become a soldier. At 15, he joined the Indiana National Guard. When World War I began in Europe, Sergeant Major Smith reluctantly refused a commission in the Regular Army because his family could not afford to buy his uniforms. But after the U.S. entered the war, he won his shoulder bars, and as a young shavetail, he fought at Chateau-Thierry and in the third Battle of the Marne.

After the long, humdrum postwar years of peacetime garrison and army schools. Smith was marked as a comer in 1931 by Lieut. Colonel George Marshall, then assistant commandant of the Army's infantry school at Fort Benning, Ga. A decade later, Beedle Smith was at Marshall's side, as Secretary to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when the U.S. entered World War II.

After V-E day, Smith returned to the U.S. in 1946, laden with honors. But his public life was far from over: that same year, Harry Truman appointed Smith U.S. Ambassador to Russia. In that cold war outpost, Smith was a frustrated forward observer. Emerging from the Kremlin one day, he snapped to reporters: "Molotov, three hours. No Stalin. No comment." But his analysis of the Russians was shrewd. The Communists, said Beedle Smith, "have read Von Clausewitz and they believe that war is merely politics transferred to another sphere."

In 1950, Truman assigned Smith to another tour of duty--to clean up the Central Intelligence Agency, then under a cloud because of inept intelligence in the Korean war. Smith swept house ruthlessly (in his first month as CIA chief, he fired 600 employees). Three years later, when Dwight Eisenhower became President, he transferred his old friend and aide to the State Department, as John Foster Dulles' under secretary and general manager of the U.S. Foreign Service. In 1954, after 44 years of public service, Beedle Smith retired to civilian life, as vice chairman of American Machine & Foundry Co.

Trout & Needlepoint. In his rare moments of repose. Beedle Smith was a warm man of catholic tastes. He was an admitted raconteur, a passionate hunter and trout fisherman (he made his own skillfully fashioned rods), a talented chess and bridge player, and a voracious reader who wolfed Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad along with the military classics. He was also an unabashed needlepoint craftsman and the grower of prize roses. But it was his job, and especially his military job, that always absorbed him. His merciless schedule eventually broke Smith's health. Last week Beedle Smith died, at 65, of a heart attack.

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