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In the 28 months since he took over from George Magoffin Humphrey as Treasury Secretary, Anderson has proved himself a man of iron determination, but he softens its rub with the gentlest velvet glove in Washington. He may well be the most unanimously admired man in the capital. A Democratic Representative who has clashed with him on economic policies freely concedes that he is a "very great American." A fellow Cabinet officer whose department has felt the paining pinch of Anderson's insistence on balanced budgets calls him "one of the very ablest men in public life during the past 20 years." Adds another Cabinet member: "In this Washington scramble, the most refined form of cannibalism ever devised, it's just about impossible to find anybody who has anything nasty to say about Bob Anderson." Says Economist Gabriel Hauge, White House economic adviser from 1953 until last year: "Intellect, character, dedication—these are words that it is almost embarrassing to use today. Cynics have all but destroyed them. But I have to say them about Bob Anderson. He is a man whom the old-fashioned words fit."
For a man so intimately involved in shaping the future, Anderson has an old-fashioned aura about him. He wears sober blue suits and a vest. He shuns Washington social life, preferring to spend his time with his family (Wife Ollie Mae, two sons, 23 and 19). He still treasures and quotes the faded poets, including Poe, Kipling and Edwin (The Man with the Hoe) Markham, whom he loved in his boyhood. In an age when public men tend to hedge their affirmations, he speaks out forthrightly for such notions as "the integrity of the dollar" and the value of individuality. A devout, Bible-reading Methodist, he last year kept a speaking date by unabashedly reading a 200-line poem he had composed to remind his audience that
A nation needs to pray:
For things it has—for things it has not earned,
For gifts from men now dead, some dead
So long ago we never knew they lived . . .
A nation needs to pray;
That in humility we see that greatness
Is not measured by industrial grandeur . . .
Nor by any other things that man may proudly say
Were made by mind or hand.
Bookish Football. Robert Anderson had an old-fashioned upbringing in a close-knit, pious, hard-working family in Johnson County. Texas, just south of Fort Worth. His father (who died fortnight ago at 81) was a storekeeper in the little town of Burleson, later took up farming on a 120-acre tract in Godley. Stricken at three with an attack of polio that left him with a limp, Bob grew up a bookish, unathletic lad, but he did his farm chores right along with the four other Anderson children. "He was serious-minded," his mother recalls. "From the time he was a very small child he wanted to be a lawyer."
After graduation from a local junior college, Anderson taught Spanish, history and mathematics at the high school in Burleson for two years while saving money to go to law school. Assigned to coach the football team despite the fact that he had never played football, he bought a couple of books on the game, coached his boys to an undefeated, untied season.