Word: opm
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Planless Plan. The meeting began hopefully at 10 o'clock one morning. As the delegates sat down around OPM's long walnut conference table, a sense of urgency filled the room. From the side walls blazed posters: TIME IS SHORT; UNITED WE STAND. From the far end of the long room, a new portrait of Winston Churchill gazed down, stern and steadfast...
...OPM's carnation-pink William Knudsen made one of his simple we-can-do-the-job speeches, punctuated by the sees with which he likes to end sentences. OPM announced that it wanted the industry to double its scheduled 1942 arms output to $5,000,000,000, that it would set up a joint management-labor board to speed conversion. The Army & Navy announced that they had $5,000,000,000 worth of orders for the industry to take over immediately...
Bill Knudsen got some of the orders accepted-but by no means all. Even after six months of gradually decreasing automobile quotas, long months when it was clear that conversion must come, OPM still had no plan for conversion, still did not know who could or would make what. The best Bill Knudsen could do at this late date was try to auction off the orders, hit or miss...
After dinner the committee split into armed camps. The industrialists went off with Knudsen. The labor men went off with OPM's Sidney Hillman. For two hours they passed notes back & forth, then adjourned for the night to let tempers cool...
...Assist" was an OPM weasel word which seemed to mean less than supervise and more than advise. What it actually meant, if anything, nobody knew...