Putting on the Freeze

The task of making the wage-price freeze work--deciding who and what is covered by it, improvising compromises, enforcing the rules--will be one of the most complex of bureaucratic exercises. Who's Who in running the show for the Administration:

TREASURY SECRETARY JOHN CONNALLY, as head of the Cost of Living Council, has overall authority to wheedle, cajole, crack heads and otherwise employ his considerable political skills in imposing the freeze. He has moved briskly. When the Pentagon announced that certain servicemen's pay raises would go through on schedule, Connally called Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard and said: "You rescind those raises or I will." After Texas Governor Preston Smith declared that his state employees would receive their regular pay increases, Connally signed an order directing the Attorney General to see that Texas complied with the freeze.

A thoroughly practical activist with a lawyer's talent for bending the System to his advantage, Connally, 54, has become one of the strong men of the Nixon Cabinet since he joined it last February. Although a Democrat and former L.BJ. man, Texan Connally is increasingly mentioned as the man who may replace Spiro Agnew on the G.O.P. ticket next year.

ARNOLD WEBER, executive director of the Cost of Living Council, is acting as policy and planning coordinator, overseeing the council's staff of about 40. A wry, 41-year-old labor economist, Weber is a protege of George Shultz, the Administration's director of the Office of Management and Budget; he worked for Shultz as Assistant Secretary of Labor for Manpower. Weber had already packed his family off and was preparing to return to his University of Chicago teaching post when he was tapped for the council job. "We froze my leave of absence," Weber says.

GEORGE LINCOLN, 64, a retired Army brigadier general, will disseminate the policy guidelines framed by the Cost of Living Council. He will also monitor the questions and complaints that flow in, administer the information and investigative network, which now includes the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Agriculture as well as the Office of Emergency Preparedness.

White-haired and scholarly, Lincoln spent 15 years as a professor and head of the social sciences department at West Point before becoming director of the OEP in the Nixon Administration's first year. His work at OEP, notably in the wake of Hurricane Camille two years ago, gained him a reputation as an able administrator. But as director of the President's Oil Policy Committee, he has been criticized by some as too sympathetic to the oil industry.

LOUIS PATRICK GRAY III, 55, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division, will be responsible for enforcing the council's policies. Under Gray, Jus tice Department attorneys, one assigned to each of the OEP's ten regional offices, will ask for the injunctions and fines required by the law and Nixon's executive order. They will concentrate on cases involving substantial violations.

An Annapolis graduate and onetime submarine commander, Gray is preeminently a Nixon man, an old friend who has known the President since they met at a Washington party in 1947. Since he left the Navy in 1960, he has alternated between practicing law in New London, Conn., and working for Nixon. Skilled at negotiation, he is so self-confident that this week he is going ahead with a planned vacation in Connecticut, where he will give his house a coat of price-frozen paint.

HERBERT STEIN, 55, an owlish and acerb economic theoretician, is a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. He is now responsible for planning Phase 2 of the Nixon strategy: what comes after the 90-day freeze. Known for an intellectual agility that some dismiss as sophistry, he will need to be nimble in the task; for several years he has been a determined spokesman against the sort of policy Nixon finally adopted.

Before joining the Council of Economic Advisers, Stein was chief economist for the Committee for Economic Development, an organization of business leaders. He is the author of The Fiscal Revolution in America, an elegantly written study that reflects among other things a distaste for economists who confuse rhetoric with action. In his present job he will need both.

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