XVI

I could have stayed in the Appeals Bureau, but after a few months I had pretty well exhausted the variety of cases and had many times rehearsed work not terribly different from that of the law review or clerkship in doing meticulous research and then writing a brief. When the United States entered the war, Friedrich undertook to direct the Civil Affairs School at Harvard to train administrators for a future occupation of Germany; no one doubted that the Nazis would in due course be defeated. Friedrich asked me to take part, but I declined. My knowledge of Germany was slim, and I questioned my competence to be of help in such a school.

As an alternative, I had the idea of seeking a commission in some branch of the armed forces where I might learn something about business. The services turned down my application since I lacked business experience, and plenty of lawyers were already available. Casting about for opportunities, I was introduced by a friend to James Webb, treasurer of the Sperry Gryoscope Company (later head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), who asked me to become his assistant. He wanted to assign me to labor relations, but I pointed out that as a professor I would be regarded as friendly to labor and would hence possibly be given undue trust by the United Auto Workers local. I preferred to work on problems not directly involving personnel. My expectation was that with some experience at Sperry, if I then were drafted, I

could secure a commission where I would hope to be useful and also to learn something about organizational and business problems. Since I was not drafted but ended up as contract termination director after Webb left (to become a combat flier), I actually found myself dealing directly with the military for two and a half intense years.

Sperry was a small engineering firm of one thousand employees that had exploded to thirty-three thousand as a war contractor. The senior officers of the operating company were primarily engineers, patriotic and of high integrity. But with the enormous expansion much was out of their control. Sloppiness and waste occurred in the manufacturing process. Extramurally I confronted the familiar story of interservice rivalry. Intramurally some of my own effort was spent making clear to junior managers and workers on the shop floor (who thought that they were protecting Sperry against its naive and idealistic top officials) that the company could only lose, in reputation as well as through negotiation of profits later if materials were sequestered (this was not done for private gain) or contracts terminated with more than the considerable delays I had already explained to the military.^[20] I found several capable people (chief among them Elizabeth Klintrup, a brilliant lawyer trained at the University of Wisconsin) to help me make the quick judgments on the basis of limited information that the tasks required. The deficit of competent people, and changes in procurement as emphasis shifted from the European to the Pacific theater, added to my responsibilities.^[21]

I had to learn my way simultaneously among the military services (where I ran into the most difficulty with the shore Navy) and among the production control people and accountants in the company's Brooklyn and Long Island plants; I had no direct dealings with the hundreds of subcontractors whose contracts had to be canceled when Sperry's prime contracts were terminated. I worked hard under great pressure, with a kind of stubborn rationality. Negotiating a modus vivendi for settling Sperry's claims to recover for canceled contracts raised strategic and practical questions but not ones of intellectual substance; hence it surprised me that I was so intensely involved. It was, as I would remind myself, primarily only money (and occasionally matériel) that was involved, not people's fates—and the money itself, as already mentioned, was not Sperry's to keep but was subject to renegotiation. Sometimes anxious, sometimes exhilarated, and often both at once, I persevered in a way that I regarded as responsible both to the company and, in a microcosm, to the rational conduct of the war.

I had come to view the war as necessary, though after many hesita-

tions and without believing (like the interventionists) that the end of the war would be wholly benign or (like my friends among the isolationists) that America would become fascist. In terms of the way the war was fought, my sympathies were with positions Dwight Macdonald took in Politics: I opposed the mass air raids on German and Japanese cities, which Sperry's products were helping make less inaccurate. At the time and since, I regarded the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and, far more, on Nagasaki as the use of means wholly disproportionate, certainly vis-à-vis Japan, which could not directly threaten the United States. Moreover, I believed that the demand for Unconditional Surrender was wrong in principle and pragmatically, making it difficult for the emperor (always threatened by military fanatics) to negotiate a surrender that would keep him in place.^[22]