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From Goodpaster the papers go through channels to appropriate officials, both on the staff and in the departments or agencies, for analysis and comment. Statistics are gathered, the implications of a subject are studied, recommendations are made, and final papers are prepared for Adams and the President. Thus there is not only the original proposal at hand, but also supplementary data from everyone whose views may be relevant. It is on the basis of this information that the decisions of the Eisenhower Administration are reached.
"Now, Ezra ..." Last week Sherman Adams was finishing up, at least for a while, one of his toughest and most important chores: the preparation of the Administration's annual legislative program, to be presented in the State of the Union Message.
Each fall, Adams begins a series of meetings with departmental officers, and outlines in general terms the Administration's hopes and plans for the next session of Congress. Then the departments go to work on the specifics of the program. Finally the drafts go back to Adams, who ruthlessly kills the impossible and the impractical.
This year's negotiations on farm policy furnish a prime example of Adams in operation. The farm program was first discussed at a Cabinet meeting while the President was sick and away. Adams suggested that the controversial subject be turned over to a special committee. As established, the committee included Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson, Vice President Richard Nixon, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. and Sherman Adams. The committee worked out, and unanimously recommended, a farm program far more responsive to farm pressures than any Ezra Benson would have considered three months before. This was in large part due to Adams, who said, time and again: "Now, Ezra, the Boss feels this way ..." And when Adams said that, everyone present believed him.
A Big Bass Voice. Adams has the respect of most top Administration officials, but his relationships with the Congress could hardly be worse. Much of the ill will is unavoidable; Adams is a perfectly postured whipping boy for politicians who do not care to match themselves against the President's popularity. A powerful Senator, who has known Adams a long while and dislikes him heartily, pays a lefthanded tribute: "When Adams gets a problem, he dedicates himself to it to the exclusion of everything else. Nothing else matters, not the common courtesies of life, not his friends, not the political niceties or even the common decencies. Nothing matters but the problem at hand."
It has always been like that with Sherman Adams.
Llewellyn Sherman Adams (he long ago dropped the first name) was born Jan. 8, 1899 in his maternal grandfather's Baptist parsonage in the hill town of East Dover, Vt. His father, Clyde Adams,* ran a small grocery; his mother, Winnie Sherman Adams, was a strong-willed young woman from whom Sherman Adams got an obsessive love of music.