A Baltimore woman wrote to Bernard Mannes Baruch last week: "I was in a market the other day and a, lot of women were complaining about the OPA and all its rationing rules, and finally the proprietor said: 'Well, I agree with you, but this fellow Baruch has been appointed to a job in Washington and he'll straighten everything out.'"
Bernie Baruch will not be such a miracle man. No one could be. But that is the kind of confidence, amounting to a fervent faith, that the U.S. has learned to place in Bernie Baruch, multimillionaire stock speculator, brilliant generalissimo of the World War I Industries Board, adviser to five Presidents, and a private citizen who has been a public servant for a quarter of a century.
Elder Statesman Baruch, finally become an official member of the Administration, did not have to change his working habits. He still drew a salary of nothing a year, which is all he needs. In his new job as consultant to Czar of Czars James F. Byrnes, he still operated from his rainy-day office in a Carlton Hotel suite, from his sunny-day office on a Lafayette Park bench, prodigally dispensing his wisdom, always counseling hope, always sticking to the fundamentals, talking torrentially in a rich mixture of Broadway words and the jargon of high finance. It is this talk, almost as much as his demonstrated ability, that has created the Baruch legend. No man can hear him and go away poorer, for the tall old man has a Lincolnian sense of the humanities, a tolerance enriched with wit.
Now Bernie Baruch was in a position where his voice would be heard. His first official act was to sit down and pen a statement.
"In taking on this work," he wrote, "I am assuming that the Office of War Mobilization will be effective, and that it is to be the final expression of the Commander in Chief, and therefore, it will not be bypassed or sidetracked. Justice Byrnes, if not blocked, will improve things by more clearly defining the work of each administrator and stopping all of this infernal bickering. . . ."
Mornings for the Biceps. At 72, Bernie Baruch is still eminently fit to serve his country. He holds his 6-ft.-3½-in. frame so erect that he always seems to tower. He weighs only about 20 lb. more than his best fighting weight (175). His clear blue eyes twinkle behind his pince-nez; his lean, patrician face is less wrinkled than the faces of many men 20 years younger; he has a healthy thatch of snow-white hair.
In his bedroom at the Shoreham Hotel where he has moved to be close to Jimmy Byrnes, he picks up a set of dumbbells every morning and goes through a vigorous bout of shadow boxing, shuffling over the carpet, tossing left hooks and right crosses.
His biceps are nearly as firm as in his favorite photograph. A few years ago, in the midst of the interventionist-isolationist debate, he knocked down a husky 40-year-old who cursed him on a Manhattan street.
After he has subdued his shadow, Bernie Baruch shaves himself with an old-fashioned straight razor. Then he climbs into old-fashioned long underwear (winter or summer), high-laced shoes with pull-straps at the back, and the suit his man Lacey has picked out for the day.