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Merton Joseph Peck, 36, came to the Pentagon last July after teaching for five years at the Harvard Business School, now is assistant deputy comptroller for systems analysis under Dr. Enthoven. A graduate of Oberlin College and Harvard. Economist Peck, who looks strikingly like a younger McNamara, first got interested in defense problems at Harvard during a Ford Foundation study of the economic aspects of weapons procurement. Says he: "Defense is really the dominant problem of our times. If you're concerned about the world, naturally you get interested in this." His specialty is non-nuclear ground forces, but he also worked on National Guard reorganization. Another assignment that consumes his time: discovery of ways to reduce the U.S. gold outflow by cutting military expenditures abroad.
Adam Yarmolinsky, 40, is the elder statesman of the Whiz Kids. Short and unobtrusive in appearance, he is special assistant to McNamara and Deputy Secretary of Defense. He won grudging respect from the military recently by taking an unscheduled parachute jump with an Army Special Forces group he was inspecting ("It just seemed to be the thing to do"). He graduated from Harvard and Yale Law School, was once a clerk to retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed. Less a specialist than most Whiz Kids, he is a keen troubleshooter with a fluent pen and an eye for extracting the essential. He got the Administration's civil defense program (such as it was) under way.