Into their handsome board room on the 26th floor of Manhattan's spike-topped Chrysler Building last week strode 15 grave directors of $661,067,033 Texas Corp. Eleven of them were there to debate the fate of their $100,000-a-year chairman — hardheaded Torkild Rieber, Norwegian-born onetime tanker master. Three, officers of the company, had come to listen. In the witness chair was Oilman Rieber. Out side, in the anteroom, were war and Adolf Hitler.
For seven violent, often distressing, sometimes incoherent hours the eleven directors wrangled over ways & means of piloting Texas Corp. out of the search light beam its chairman had attracted by seeming to be friends with Nazi Germany. All were agreed that the New York Herald Tribune's three-week-old revelation of the connection between Rieber and Hitler's cumbersome ambassador-off-the-record to U. S. businessmen, Dr. Gerhardt Alois Westrick (TIME, Aug. 12), threatened to hit Texas Corp. in the cash register. Those who knew Cap Rieber were sure he was no pro-Nazi, although he had been keen to do business with Germany before the war. But they also felt his indiscretions and bad handling of the press had stirred prejudice and hysteria against him. Their explanation of the scandal was best put by Torkild Rieber himself: "My fault. I talk too much."
Debate. As talk cleared the way for more talk, the battle lines developed in the board room. On one side were the New Yorkers, more sensitive to the foreign issue. They were led by potent Manhattan Attorney Walter G. Dunnington, who had nursed Torkild Rieber along from promotion to promotion in his 36 years with Texas Corp., felt responsible. As the representative of Texas Corp.'s biggest single stockholder (estate of Empire Builder James J. Hill's son), Director Dunnington's opinion was important. Reluctantly, he felt that the chairman's tongue-wagging had made him unfit for so responsible a job. Solidly behind him were the company's other Manhattan directors, particularly Banker William Steele Gray Jr., Broker Henry Upham Harris, Charitarian Barklie Henry.
Squared off on the other side of the table were Texas Corp.'s hinterland directors—principally John H. Lapham (of San Antonio, Tex., whose father was one of Texas Corp.'s founders), Chicago Banker Walter Joseph Cummings. Sensing the nervousness of the New York crowd, they were willing to weasel the whole matter. Perhaps the chairman could go to White Sulphur, or somewhere, for his health until the unlucky incident blew over? Completely out of sympathy with such fantasies was Texas Corp.'s No. 2 head—reticent, Yale-bred, Anglophile President William Starling Sullivant Rodgers, chief executive of the company and responsible for Texaco's U. S. sales.