(6 of 9)
"He Needs You." Dillon, with his banking and diplomatic experience, was obviously an excellent choice for Kennedy's purpose. They had first met in 1956 at Harvard, when Dillon was grand marshal at the 25th reunion of his class and Senator Kennedy the winner of an honorary degree. After the ceremony, they dropped by the select Spec Club (both men were members) to chat, later became friends and occasional golfing companions. But when President-elect Kennedy asked to come to Dillon's house (Dillon thought it should be the other way around) and came through several days later with an offer, Dillon, as a good Republican, had plenty of doubts. He got only lukewarm encouragement from Nixon. Ike also was cool, but told him: "You can hardly refuse if the President of the United States says he needs you and you can serve conscientiously." Aft er a week of soul searching, Dillon took the post.
Before the inauguration, questions about Treasury's new chief were plentiful. Republicans—and conservatives generally —wondered how Dillon could live with the free-spending Democratic platform commitments. Easy-money liberals asked whether Republican Dillon would stand in the way of the new Administration's efforts to get the country out of a recession. But at his senatorial confirmation hearing, Dillon managed to seem both fiscally sound and fiscally imaginative, came out in favor of the balanced budgets that conservatives wanted and the recession deficits that liberals felt necessary. He was approved without dissent.
A Free Hand. Moving into his spacious office in the grey, temple-fagaded Treasury building next door to the White House, Dillon called for every document since 1789 that provided a job description of the Secretary's portfolio, then set out to make the department his own. Unlike Secretary of State Rusk, Dillon did not have his top echelon of aides picked in advance by Kennedy. He took advantage of his free hand to build a Treasury staff that moneymen rate as possibly the best since the days of Alexander Hamilton. Dillon's right-hand men:
∙HENRY FOWLER, 52, Under Secretary. Witty, white-haired "Joe" Fowler is exactly the kind of tested, Washington-wise administrator that Dillon needs to run the daily routine of the department. A onetime lawyer for TVA, Fowler has served as counsel for a Senate subcom mittee, the Federal Power Commission and the War Production Board. He headed the Office of Defense Mobilization during the Korean war. Thorough, cautious and sound, Fowler worked on the task force that John Kennedy set up before his inauguration to consider antirecession plans.
∙ROBERT V. ROOSA, 43, Under Secretary for Monetary Affairs. The selection of bow-tied, scholarly Banker Roosa (pronounced Roza) to be Treasury's No. 3 man was audibly cheered by the U.S. financial community. A former teacher at both Harvard and M.I.T., Roosa was for four years research director for the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, earned a reputation in his trade as "the best central banker in the world." He has a good teacher's ability to talk lucidly on complex subjects, makes a brilliant congressional witness. Roosa has been the man behind Dillon's efforts to lower long-term interest rates, improve the management of the national debt.