(See Cover)
That table-thumping, hell-raising, commonsensical Republican, Charles Gates Dawes, could have had just about any job in Washington when Warren G. Harding was elected President in 1920. But Dawes, a banker by training and a rebel by instinct, wanted a job that didn't exist. "As much as I would like to see your Administration a success," he told Harding, "nothing could tempt me into public life now, except possibly Director of the Budget, if that office is created—and that
I would take only for a year for the purpose of putting it in running order."
Dawes got the job on his terms, and under the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 the U.S. got the first semblance of formal balancing of revenue and expenditures in its 132 years. With all his Hell 'n' Maria* fiscal evangelism, Charlie Dawes moved fast to establish the prestige of the Budget Bureau. At his urging, the President called a special Cabinet meeting. Said Dawes to the assemblage: "A Cabinet officer, as I see him, is on the bridge with the President, advising him on the direction in which the ship shall sail. He will not properly serve the captain of the ship or its passengers, the public, if he resents the call of the Director of the Budget from the stokehole, put there by the captain to see that coal is not wasted . . . The way coal is handled and conserved determines how far in a given direction the ship will sail."
By the end of his year, the first Budget Director was so thoroughly in control that he had inspired cuts of $1.7 billion in Government expenses from the preceding fiscal year. Then, with the pattern set (he hoped), he quit as he had said he would, "for I detest this life ... As one who must be used to upset the status quo, I am not the logical man to continue the operation of the Budget Bureau."
Figures Talk. The logical man moved into office 31 years and five Administrations later. He is Rowland Roberts Hughes, 59, President Eisenhower's Director of the Budget. Dawes, dead these five years, would have been delighted to know that Hughes, who is about as far a cry from Hell 'n' Maria as a man can be, loves the job. Rowland Hughes came to Washington in 1953, a political innocent. A conscientious Christian Scientist since boyhood, he has never been known to raise his voice or slap a back—despite the swashbuckling appearance of an eyepatch that covers an eyelid injury.* By nature and by dint of 37 years' unbroken service with New York's National City Bank, he is that increasingly valuable U.S. type, the comptroller—or, as an honorary degree from his alma mater (Brown University) put it last June: "One of those rare individuals to whom figures speak in clear tones."