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Baruch is immune to panic and impervious to hot-flush enthusiasm, a stranger to mercurial emotions, remorseless in decision. Henderson is a walking panic, either marrow-frozen or running a death-watch fever, and is given to so many enthusiasms at once that he looks like the last 30 seconds of a Japanese tumbling act.
Baruch was a speculator and a creative investor who amassed enormous wealth outside of industry, who went to help his Government in time of need, and has made a later career as an adviser to five Presidents, an economic Nestor, a sage of war planning. Henderson was a research-foundation economist who has refused repeated offers to turn an honest business dollar, who has always felt his Government needed him, and has proved it. Both have a startling ability to deduce facts from figures, the event from the process. Each likes and respects the other.
Baruch can be powerfully simple and direct, but he is a person of extraordinary sophistication, a master of charmingly indirect talk which suddenly opens to leave an inference the size of a bomb crater. He has spent a great part of his years holding his tongue. Henderson is a great babbler who wakes up sounding his "A" and holds it all day, roaring through his work in a rich torrent of cuss words, grunts and bellows, like a bull of Bashan.
Henderson's Lesson. The first lesson of history is to read it. That Leon Henderson has done. Bernard Baruch is a man of peace, but of the 1918 U.S. economic effort, which Baruch managed, Field Marshal von Hindenburg wrote: "Her brilliant, if pitiless, war industry had entered the service of patriotism and had not failed it. ... They understood war."
The U.S. start in World War I was excruciatingly slow. The nation, living under the delusion that each war was the last, came unprepared, as usual, into another.
In 1915, after the sinking of the Lusitania, the word "preparedness" took hold. President Woodrow Wilson declared for a U.S. Navy second to none. Congress began to appropriate big sums for national defense; finally, in August 1916, set up a body called the Council of National Defense, a group composed of six Cabinet officers, gave them a $200,000 appropriation. This bill was debated for six full months.
In October 1916 President Wilson appointed a Defense Advisory Commission headed by Daniel Willard, then and until last week president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (see p. 86). The white heat of necessity shriveled up the Council itself; the Advisory Commission became the real executive branch.
The Commission, under Willard's chairmanship, worked steadily through the vital winter months of 1916-17. Before the declaration of war, when the nation and the President thought there was still a chance of peace, the seven men devised a system of purchasing war supplies, planned a press censorship, designed a system of food control (even selected Herbert Hoover as its director), determined on daylight saving (then revolutionary), discussed the draft, and in effect, revised the Government for war.