New Recruit

After Richard Nixon and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird decided in October to ease Selective Service Director Lewis Hershey out of his job, it appeared that the right successor would be hard to find. Forty names were considered for the position in what Administration aides came to call the great man hunt. Firm offers went to several men whose polite replies, when translated, amounted to "Hell, no, I won't go." The Selective Service System, after all, is vilified by many youngsters, attacked and second-guessed on Capitol Hill, and burdened with an archaic network of local boards that constitute an administrative nightmare.

Last week, finally, the Administration had a willing and able recruit. Though an official acceptance was not yet in hand, the firm word at the White House was that the new sender of greetings would be Charles DiBona, of Alexandria, Va., president of the Center for Naval Analyses. The center is a 450-man think tank operated by the University of Rochester and supported by Pentagon research funds.

Athletic Types. Nixon and Laird originally wanted a man without military persona, someone who, unlike Lieut. General Hershey, 76, would be youth-oriented and attractive to the reformist critics of the present draft system. A couple of university presidents refused outright when approached to take the job. David Maxwell, Pennsylvania's budget director, was not interested. Then the Administration's recruiting effort turned to athletic types. Talent scouts tried to get John Pont, former head coach of Yale and now at Indiana University. Pont, who actively supported Nixon and was the President's occasional golf companion, said that he wanted to "coach a little longer." A similar reply came from Paul Dietzel, head coach at the University of South Carolina.

DiBona, youthful and vigorous at 37, seems better qualified than some of the earlier choices. A Naval Academy graduate (second in the class of 1956) and a former submarine officer, he was also a Rhodes scholar who studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. Later he became one of Robert McNamara's whiz kids and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander before he left the Navy in 1967 and joined the center.

One of the center's more recent studies concerned a plan for abolishing the draft altogether in favor of an all-volunteer Army. Nixon hopes to accomplish this ultimately, and DiBona could be a knowledgeable advocate of the plan against the expected Congressional opposition.

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