Word: gsa
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...Government's purchasing, housekeeping and property-managing agency, the General Services Administration has a multitude of business operations. Last week the GSA got a boss with experience in a multitude of business fields. Sworn in as General Services Administrator was big (6 ft. 3 in., 198 Ibs.), gruff Franklin Floete (pronounced floaty), who has been a banker, real estate dealer, lumber retailer, construction company operator, automobile distributor, tractor and farm implement dealer, rancher (he lives on what he believes to be the only farm within the Des Moines city limits) and, most recently, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Properties...
Replacing Edmund Mansure, who resigned under fire (TIME, Feb. 20), South Dakota-born Franklin Floete, 66, promptly let it be known that GSA is in for some changes. He snorted with disgust upon entering his dark, cavernous office, modeled after the hall of an English manor house, where Albert B. Fall once sat as Harding's Interior Secretary and where Harold Ickes ruled before working himself a new building. "You don't call this an office," snapped Floete. "I'm going down the hall a few doors, where there is a human-sized office...
Moving to a reception room, he called a staff meeting, said he would wait "until I have had a chance to learn more about GSA" before making specific changes. But he added pointedly that when he moved from the Pentagon, he left "a better organization than the one I had found there. What did it was new blood. New blood always improves an organization." Floete admits that he has done a lot of floating about in the business world. "But," he points out, "none of my enterprises flopped." He does not, he makes clear, intend GSA to be the exception...
...Hand. His closest political pal was one William J. Balmer, a Republican power in Chicago since the second corrupt reign (1927-31) of "Big Bill" Thompson. An old hand at doing business with GSA (the Justice Department is suing him for $400,000 on the ground that he used fraudulent means to buy surplus Government property), Balmer sponsored Mansure for the GSA job, and then began to advise him frequently on important contracts. At just the right time Balmer registered as an insurance broker and obtained, through Mansure's GSA, a whopping insurance contract at the U.S. Government...
When these and other curious events and operations in GSA came to light, Congress, the White House and the Department of Justice began to take a quizzical look at Mansure's managership. The eventual result was the polite and pointed exchange of letters. As he cleaned out his desk last week, Mansure expressed a bit of philosophy that explained a great deal. "I stand by my friends," he said. "I felt about Balmer the same way Harry Truman felt about Pendergast...