Word: symingtons
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When a House select committee investigated surplus disposal in 1946, after Symington had moved on to the War Department, its report rapped him for "chaotic administrative conditions" and "favoritism if not downright corruption" in sales of surplus property. But Symington's SPA, as he pointed out to the committee, had only a policymaking function; actual sales of surplus property were handled by other agencies, mainly the Commerce Department and the Reconstruction Finance Corp. Symington had no operating control over sales, no way of seeing to it that his policies were carried out. After half a year of frustrations...
...Absolutely Relentless." After killing off SPA, Truman named Symington Assistant Secretary of War for Air. When the Air Force split off from the Army in the defense reorganization of 1947, Symington became the first Air Force Secretary. Like all strong Air Force partisans, he had fought fiercely for a strong unification of the services, which both the Army and Navy believed would undercut their traditional independence. In the battle, he tangled with his old Wall Street friend, Navy Secretary James Forrestal. When Forrestal became the first Defense Secretary and Symington's boss, Symington fought him again...
After Forrestal's death, Symington fought a continuing battle with his successor, Louis Johnson, to keep up Air Force group strength against the pressures of shrinking, pre-Korea defense budgets. Symington kept insisting that the U.S. needed 70 air groups for minimum safety, but he saw the Air Force dwindle to 50-odd. Early in 1950, when the new budget trimmed the Air Force to 48 groups, Symington resigned in protest...
Truman persuaded Symington to stay on in Washington as head of the National Security Resources Board. In April 1951, in the midst of the influence-peddling scandals that rocked the Administration, Truman asked Symington to take one more "load-of-coal" job for him: tidying up the scandal-ridden Reconstruction Finance Corp. Symington opened up RFC records to goldfish-bowl scrutiny by the press, fired employees tangled in the influence-peddling web. It was dreary, thankless work. In early 1952, his cleanup chores done, he resigned and went back to St. Louis, intending to get back into moneymaking...
...Main Streets. A band of influential Missourians led by St. Louis Lawyer Jacob M. Lashly, sometime president of the American Bar Association, urged Symington to run for the Senate in the 1952 election. "I don't think the world is in as bad shape as you do," Lashly told him. "But if it is, you have no right to go back to the pleasure of making money...