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Show General P'S'fsJ HUGH s- ljJOHNSON Washington, D. C. WALTER CHRYSLER "Wherever the McGregor sits is the head of the table." During his prime that could well have been said of Walter Chrysler by the whole automobile industry excepting Henry Ford. Now Walter Wal-ter Chrysler is gone. He was one of the industrial giants of the magic period of expansion beginning with the World war. Industry isn't producing pro-ducing men of that type today. Maybe the new crop is a better type. It certainly is a more polished pol-ished type but it lacks the sturdi-ness, sturdi-ness, initiative and drive of the generation gen-eration that started working with its hands and knew in addition to business strategy and tactics acquired ac-quired later every operation in the shop. Eager to Do His Bit. I have worked with or across the table with him on many occasions in the past 22 years. His going wrenches me, as I think it does everyone who knew him well like the loss of an old army messmate. The first time I met him was in the old industrial relations days of the World war. Those were not unlike un-like those of NRA, in which we were very close. With a reputation for being about the toughest trooper in the industry, he was really a complete softy on the sentimental side. One evening when the gqing was toughest in NRA literally working 18 to 20 hours a day he asked me to go to dinner with the heads of his industry. When I complained that I didn't have time, he carried me off almost bodily bod-ily on a compromise that it would only be an hour. With the coffee, he pushed his chair back and said: "I want to take a minute to tell you about an experience ex-perience of my early youth. It started off innocently enough about a prospecting trip in the Rocky mountains with an old sourdough named Deadeye Dick. In about five minutes he had that bunch of hard-shells hard-shells either rocking with laughter or dizzy with astonishment. It was a masterpiece of old-time frontier lying that would have made Mark Twain green with envy. It went on and on with never a flagging of interest, inter-est, a pause for breath or a failure of each succeeding whopper to top the earlier ones ifrith fantastic imagery. imag-ery. When he stopped I suddenly awoke to the fact that it was after midnight and I swore fluently in the language we both understood so well. "Aw shut up," he said gently. "You needed that letting-down to keep from blowing up. That was the only way I could think of to get you to take it." Shouldered Too Much. But he never learned to take his own medicine. Like Franklin Roosevelt Roose-velt and like Wendell Willkie I fear he insisted, until recent years, on doing everything important himself, delegating little or no responsibility and driving himself without mercy. I sadly believe that if Walter Chrysler Chrys-ler had himself done more letting down to keep from blowing up, I wouldn't be writing this piece for many years and his country would have had the services in this crisis of one of the greatest masters of industrial in-dustrial production the world has seen. He was only 65. MUST BE MORE DEFINITE Mr. Willkie has a right and duty to make one last utterance in general gen-eral terms. He has used that privilege priv-ilege up in his acceptance. Now he must be definite. Considering all the difficulties of the times and the circumstances, his opener was a good job. It reads better than it sounded. But these sympathetic qualifications won't do the candidate any good except with people who are for him anyway. It was his job to win over the independents, inde-pendents, the luke-warm and some opponents. None of these will make excuses for anything less than perfection per-fection as each individual voter measures perfection. With all its textual excellence there were two deadly but correctable correct-able slips, possibly resulting from an effort to condense. Mr. Willkie neglected specifically to guarantee labor against "employer" interference interfer-ence with collective bargaining. On agriculture he slipped back as far as Harding, Coolidge and Hoover into a generality offensive to farmers farm-ers because it was used to fool them for 12 years. In these two fields certain words and short phrases have become symbols of whole economic eco-nomic essays and Mr. Willkie, new to this kind of language, adopted poisonous phrasing., That error can be retrieved in his speeches on these issues. I feci sure that his thinking there is straight. t HATCHET MAN IC'KKS The New Deal campaign against Willkie started with a barrage of gas, mud and fireworks which reveals re-veals nearly all its weapons and ammunition am-munition in one triple blast Bullitt, I'lynn and Ickes. I know that Mr. Ickes would not deliberately lie. Eut he should have known that whether Mr. Willkie belonged be-longed to Tammany, whether he had not opposed Insull, whether he opposed op-posed La Guardia, whether he is still head of any utility, are cold utatements of fact easily checked |