Word: nelson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Production Board, product of half a dozen earlier crises, went through another upheaval last week. Its Boss Donald Nelson, torn between his natural urge to compromise and his belated resolution to "get tough," had reorganized WPB again-and left it teetering on a higher precipice than ever before. No plain citizen could hope now to follow the tortured quarreling inside WPB; even Elder Statesman Bernard M. Baruch, out of his experience as World War I's one-man production board, could only shake his old grey head and gloom: "Tinkering, tinkering, always tinkering. Patching. They have no overall plan...
Czars were now a dime a dozen: the U.S. had Economic Czar James F. Byrnes, Production Czar Donald Nelson, Manpower Czar Paul McNutt, Food Czar Claude Wickard, Rubber Czar William Jeffers. But they were more like Grand Dukes than Czars: under their high-sounding titles, divided authority and lack of direction left them still snarled in invisible red tape...
...protagonist in Washington's latest fracas is tough, shrewd Ferdinand Eberstadt, artillery captain in World War I, outstanding independent investment banker of the '305, and currently charged with WPB's vital materials division. The other is Charles E. Wilson, whom Donald Nelson brought to Washington to take charge of WPB's production division...
...business enterprise, materials control and production should be Siamese twins. Not so in Washington. Week ago Donald Nelson touched off the row when he turned over to Wilson (on Wilson's threat of resignation) certain all-important "industry divisions" which Ferd Eberstadt has labored long and hard to build up. Function of these divisions is to see to it that, after raw materials have been divided up between the Army and Navy and other contenders, they flow smoothly to prime contractors and vital component parts manufacturers. They are the vital agencies on which WPB's control...
...chairman of their Joint Munitions Board, was switched over to WPB. Promptly he set up his Controlled Materials Plan (TIME, Nov. 9) and attempted to give his authority over raw materials practical force by staffing his production divisions with top-flight talent. To top off the new program Nelson, with Eberstadt's approval, called in Charlie Wilson, who should have become an expediter of particularly serious production bottlenecks...