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Treasury's present boss may well be the most paradoxical picket on President Kennedy's New Frontier. For the past 8½-years, shy, spare (6 ft. 2 in.. 185 Ibs.) Clarence Douglas Dillon. 51, has ably served the public in posts of enormous influence and responsibility, but he is virtually unknown, and even less understood, by the public he serves. Dillon is a pragmatic, liberal Republican who holds down one of the most sensitive jobs in a Democratic Administration (not all Republicans can forgive him that). He can coldly and calmly approve a $6 billion deficit for the nation; he can also fret over the health of the honey locust trees near his home. Steeled in Wall Street's rough and tumble, Dillon preserves a diffident professorial manner, and revels in tastes that few of his countrymen share: vintage wines. Savile Row suits (from Henry Poole & Co.). fine paintings and finer porcelain.
Ghettos & Genius. For all his aura of patrician wellbeing. Douglas Dillon is only two generations removed from the ghettos of Poland, where Samuel Lapowski. his paternal grandfather, was born. Migrating to Texas after the Civil War. Lapowski set up shop as a clothier, first in San Antonio and later in Abilene, took his mother's maiden name of Dillon, prospered enough to send his only son Clarence to Harvard. Shrewd, smart and blessed with a good poker player's sense of timing, Clarence ("Baron") Dillon was the only boy in his class ('05 ) to own a car—and the one who perhaps drove ahead the farthest. The Baron was an authentic Wall Street genius: he built Dillon. Read & Co. into one of the nation's largest investment firms, retired with a personal fortune of more than $100 million.
Clarence Dillon's only son was born Aug. 21, 1909 in Geneva, while the Baron and his bride were on a two-year post-honeymoon "health tour" of Europe. "My father was injured in a bizarre accident just before his marriage," Doug Dillon explains. "He was at a railroad station in a small resort outside Milwaukee when an express went by the station at full speed. A Saint Bernard had wandered onto the tracks; the train hit him and threw him into the crowd. The dog's body knocked my father against a pillar, breaking his skull. He was unconscious for a week."
Doug Dillon spent a secluded, affluent childhood in a series of suburban homes around New York City. The grandest o'i them all was Dunwalke. an estate in Far Hills. N.J.. that his father has owned since 1920. A wiry child who could read swiftly and understandingly at the age of four, Dillon was sent to be educated in private schools. The most challenging was the Pine Lodge School in Lakehurst. N.J., whose headmaster insisted that his every pupil learn the art of reading fast—and Dillon today riffles through even technical papers at 400 words a minute. While at Pine Lodge. Dillon met and became friends with three heirs to another no table fortune: Nelson. Laurance and John Rockefeller III.