Foreign Trade: Sales Talk from the White House

Like a sales manager calling in his men for a pep talk, President Kennedy summoned 300 top businessmen to Washington to hear him and his top Cabinet officers whip up a bit of enthusiasm. His message: get out there—away out there—and sell. The two-day White House Conference on Export Expansion was attended last week by some pretty good salesmen, including IBM's Thomas Watson Jr., RCA's David Sarnoff, Raytheon's Charles Francis Adams and Gillette's Carl Gilbert—all of whom paid $50 for the privilege of attending. But the President complained that U.S. businessmen often...