Word: knudsen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...these two ends, the first was more immediate. The President moved to answer criticisms of the Defense Commission, by a new organization. He turned laconic Commissioner William Knudsen into a pamphleteer to state the "terrible urgency." plead with the U. S. to "roll up their sleeves...
When was the President going to give the U. S. defense program an executive head with full executive powers? Franklin Roosevelt's regular Friday morning press conference came & went without definitive answer from the President. Big Bill Knudsen of the National Defense Advisory Commission had set the country ringing with his blast against the weekend "blackout" in U. S. industry, his plea to machine toolmen-management and labor-to speed up because of "terrible urgency...
...Baruch had had as head of the War Industries Board of 1918. Franklin Roosevelt's answer was a super-defense board, on which he had hung a cumbersome jawbreaker-Office for Production Management for Defense. (Later he referred to it as the "Big Four.") Its director: Big Bill Knudsen. Other members: Laborman Sidney Hillman (with the title of associate director), Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Secretary of War Henry Stimson...
Only amateurs in Government, said he, grinning, talk of putting a pooh-bah, a Tsar or an Akhund of Swat in charge of national defense. No one man knows enough for the job. Better, said he, to have on the board management (Knudsen), labor (Hillman) and the user-buyers of national defense products (Navy's Knox, Army's Stimson). Under their four-man chairmanship (if it works that way) will be planned the three big Ps of industrial defense: 1) Production, 2) Purchasing, 3) Priorities. The National Defense Advisory Commission will go on planning, advising...
...after their appointment they called upon the U. S. public "to recognize the full gravity of the crisis . . . pull off their coats and roll up their sleeves. . . . The contest which produced this crisis is irreconcilable in character and cannot be terminated by any methods of appeasement." With Bill Knudsen's "terrible urgency" becoming more actual every day, the Big Four's teamwork would be visible very soon...