Conscripting a Chief

With a $38,000 salary, a chauffeured limousine and a huge office on F Street --not to mention a fiefdom of almost 10,000 deskmen--the job sounds like a bureaucrat's dream. Recently, though, it seemed as if no one in the country was willing to take the burdensome post mired in controversy. It was fitting that the Nixon Administration finally had to conscript a man to head the Selective Service System.

First time around, in fact, Curtis Tarr turned the job down flat. "I told them," he informed reporters, "that if it was satisfactory to them I had rather stay" in the Pentagon. After several more prospects had rejected the position and one contender had been unofficially vetoed by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Tarr's number was drawn again. Tarr, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs and at 6 ft. 6 in. perhaps the tallest member of the Nixon team, was called into the Oval Office and given the word by the President. "He said he wanted me to do it," Tarr explained, "and I accepted." His nomination went to Congress last week.

Enlisted Man. So well does Tarr, 45, fit the Administration's specifications that the only wonder is why it took so long and required so much fumbling before the word was given. The former president (1963-69) of Wisconsin's Lawrence University, a school respected for its academic standing, Tarr can claim rapport with the young and considerable sympathy for their problems. While his own children will probably never have to worry about the draft --he has two daughters, twelve and eleven--Tarr as president of a small university knew firsthand the anguish the draft can cause. "I think I can talk with the young," he said. "I'd at least like to be as close to young people in the service as possible."

At the same time, his Republican credentials are impeccable, including an unsuccessful run as the party's candidate for Congressman from California in 1958, when he was vice president of his family's farm-equipment company in Chico. A World War II draftee--he ended up as technician fourth grade --Tarr knows the draft system from the bottom up, without having been a professional soldier like his predecessor Lieut. General Lewis Hershey. After the war, Tarr received an A.B. from Stanford University and a master's degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He returned to Stanford for his Ph.D.; his doctoral thesis: Unification of America's Armed Forces: A Century and a Half of Conflict, 1798-1947.

Careful Enough. The talents most needed by the director of Selective Service are tact, discretion and a sense of fairness. In his later years, Hershey, who was draft chief from 1941 until last month, became a symbol of the arbitrary imposition of punitive regulations on the young. Tarr seems careful enough to avoid being labeled doctrinaire. For example, on the question of Richard Nixon's proposed all-volunteer army--about whose virtues Congress is split--he has scarcely said a word, suggesting that a matter so important should be the decision of the President. The Administration has taken soundings, and it is confident that Capitol Hill is willing to accept the new recruit.

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