Word: knudsen
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Last week a big part of the answer came from the best possible and most unexpected source : hulking, close-mouthed William S. Knudsen. who gave up the $300,000-a-year presidency of General Motors last summer to join the National Defense Advisory Commission (for nothing) as head of its production section. Big Bill Knudsen had kept his mouth shut while the press reported instances of slow delivery on airplanes, tanks & guns, of scrambled priorities for defense orders, of unexpected delays in such vital things as production of the Army Air Corps's Allison aircraft engine. But last week...
...official who had most to say about this state of affairs was Henry L. Stimson, Mr. Roosevelt's Republican Secretary of War. Undertaking to explain why the draft and National Guard mobilization had fallen behind schedule (TiME, Nov. 25), he was as blackly frank as William S. Knudsen was on industrial defense. With other dark bits in the news. Mr. Stimson's statement made a sorry record, sinisterly remindful of the British in Norway, the French in lost France...
...tycoons had gone to the dinner to hear William S. Knudsen tell them about the progress of defense. They had in fact been discussing defense for three days. The Congress' theme was "Total Preparedness for America's Future." Laying once and for all the ghostly fable that business is a united front on any subject, the subject of defense found the cream of American industry unable to make up its mind...
Charles Erwin Wilson is a soft-faced, hardheaded engineer and production man who became acting president of General Motors after William S. Knudsen joined the National Defense Advisory Commission. Last week Mr. Wilson made a speech to fellow alumni of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Like him, most of his hearers had jobs in industry; like him, they were deep in defense production. What they heard boiled down to one question-can the U. S. do its defense job on time?-and two answers...
...when he guested for Information, Please, fat, choleric, brain-trusting Defense Commissioner Leon ("Leon the Hen") Henderson reddened, mumbled: "The man who submitted that question can receive a $50 reward from a certain friend of mine, who wanted to see me embarrassed." The bounty-setter: William S. Knudsen...