A Private Dynamo in the Public Service Named by President Eisenhower to a chair on the Atomic Energy Commission: California Industrialist John Alex McCone.
Beginnings. His Scots-Irish family has been in the machinery-manufacturing business since 1860, when grandfather John McCone started an iron foundry in Virginia City, Nev. His father opened branch plants in Reno, Los Angeles and San Francisco, where John Alex McCone was born Jan. 4, 1902. He studied engineering at the University of California, at Berkeley (B.S., '22), took his first job that year as a riveter and boilermaker with Los Angeles' Llewellyn Iron Works.
Development. A good man with a slide rule, and a born boss, he advanced to superintendent at Llewellyn, stayed with the company after a merger formed the Consolidated Steel Corp. in 1929, was executive vice president and director before his 32nd birthday. In 1937 he quit his job to set out on his own. First step: he helped organize the Los Angeles engineering firm of Bechtel-McCone Corp., which he headed. Second step: he married Idaho-born Rosemary Cooper. During World War II, Bechtel-McCone operated an Army Air Forces modification center for B-24s and B-29s. At the same time, McCone became president and director of the California Shipbuilding Corp., and wearing two hats, launched himself into a 15-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week schedule. At Calship, Engineer McCone found ways to set production goals higher than anyone thought possible, saw to it that they were met. Result: Calship produced 467 ships worth a billion dollars. Since World War II's end he has taken over and built up a onetime iron works into the Joshua Hendy Corp., which operates a fleet of 40 to 50 tankers and cargo ships. To avoid conflict of interest with his AEC job, McCone has agreed to resign from Hendy and dispose of conflicting business holdings.
The Full Life. Handsome, well-knit (5 ft. 10 in., 165 Ibs.), professorial-looking in his rimless glasses, McCone quietly but energetically pursued a career of public service while advancing his private fortunes, became a director of the Stanford Research Institute, a trustee of Caltech, a regent of Loyola University of Los Angeles, helped form the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, took up gardening, golf. First role in national affairs came when Democrat Harry Truman appointed Republican McCone to the Air Policy Commission, where he helped Thomas K. Finletter write the farseeing 1948 report on the need for U.S. airpower, Survival in the Air Age. He was appointed Air Force Under Secretary under Finletter in 1950, for 16 months campaigned tirelessly for a bigger Air Force slice of the defense budget.