Word: wpb
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Dates: during 1942-1942
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...chance to fight sooner than he expected. On the second day that he walked into his office he landed smack in the middle of one of the senseless, directionless, back-biting family quarrels that have racked WPB from the start...
...front-page story in that morning's Washington Post bore a shocking headline: INEFFICIENCY, WASTE LAID TO WPB's IRON, STEEL BRANCH. Said the Post scoop: a young, $5,600-a-year WPB consultant named Frederick I. Libbey was cooking up a report which would blister the WPB's Iron & Steel Branch; after consultation around the country with steel experts he had found gross mismanagement in Washington; he was convinced the steel branch experts were second-rate ex-salesmen palmed off on the Government by steel companies who don't need salesmen any more. Only...
...responsible WPB official had seen the Libbey report; but it had "leaked" to the Post. There was doubtless some truth in it. No one has yet made a satisfactory explanation why the U.S., with half the world's steel capacity, is bogged in a steel "shortage." But the cure was not in intramural bickering in WPB's big undisciplined mob. A more likely solution had already been laid on Nelson's desk by big (6 ft. 3) hustling Reese Taylor, steel division chief: he wants a quota plan patterned after Bernard Baruch's World...
...WPB's iron & steel men took one look at the Post story, blew up. In groups and singly, dozens walked in to Reese Taylor and tossed resignations on his desk. They were in revolt. Taylor could not answer their angry argument that discipline was impossible if any WPB hireling could publicly indict everybody else. Taylor, too, was sore. He stomped off to Nelson...
...C.I.O. members of WPB's labor advisory committee promptly staged a counter-revolt, charging that their friend Libbey was fired "for telling the truth," that "vested interests" had blocked the steel program, that the interests were "given aid and comfort by certain dollar-a-year men." But everyone else, including Frederick Libbey, seemed pleased. Said he, as he started to look...