The two men are of strong—and bitterly opposing—views. Missouri's Senator Stuart Symington is a millionaire businessman (Emerson Electric) turned liberal Democratic politician. Ohio's George Magoffin Humphrey is a millionaire businessman who served from 1953 to 1957 as Dwight Eisenhower's rock-solid conservative Treasury Secretary. Last week Symington and Humphrey faced each other at a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee hearing—and the result was an explosion of wrath and recrimination.
Under Symington's chairmanship, the subcommittee for months had been investigating the Government's stockpiling program under the Eisenhower Administration. Symington has enthusiastically built up charges that Cleveland's giant M. A. Hanna Co. made unconscionable profits out of a stockpiling deal. George Humphrey was Hanna's board chairman before entering the Eisenhower Cabinet; he held onto his thick portfolio of Hanna stock while in public office, and he returned to the company as honorary chairman upon leaving Washington.
Good Deal. The complex details of the disputed Hanna contracts seemed hardly the stuff for sensation. In 1952, with the Korean war dragging on, the U.S. Government needed great quantities of nickel for war production, especially for jet aircraft.
At that time, the U.S. produced no nickel at all; the entire supply was imported, largely from Canada. But Hanna owned an idle nickel mine in Oregon, and the Truman Administration began negotiating with the company to open the mine for production. On Jan. 16, 1953, just four days before the Eisenhower Administration took over, the Government and the Hanna Co. signed their contracts.
Those contracts undeniably added up to a good thing for Hanna. The Government agreed to buy Hanna's nickel ore at $6 per ton; it also agreed to advance the entire cost, some $22 million, of building a smelter to refine the ore. Although profit figures are in dispute, by George Humphrey's own reckoning they came to at least $7,500,000—roughly double Hanna's investment in the nickel operation. Moreover, under the terms of the contracts, Hanna last year took over ownership of the smelter for a mere $1,700,000. But the deal worked out pretty well for the Government too. As Humphrey pointed out last week, when the contracts expire in 1965, the U.S. will have accumulated an inventory of 94.7 million Ibs. of Hanna nickel at a total net cost of $67.2 million.
That works out to 71¢ per lb., against a current market price of about 75¢