University Daily Kansan
Page 2
Monday, May 7, 1962
The HOPE Award
The fourth HOPE award was presented today. The recipient was Vaclav Mudroch, assistant professor of history. He was chosen from among 46 nominees. The annual award is given by the senior class on the basis of a faculty member's willingness to help students, success in stimulating students toward thinking, devotion to his profession, contribution to the general cultural life of the University and publications and creative work.
THE HOPE award includes a $100 honorarium, which is the interest on $2,500 given by the class of 1959. The award was created by the class of 1959 and is the only official student recognition of the faculty members whom the students think are the University's best. The faculty members
who have received the award have thus been honored in a special way.
THE FOUR MEN who have received the award since 1959 are good examples of the high caliber of faculty members who are nominated for the HOPE award. By looking at the lists of the people who have been nominated, you can see the names of faculty members whom students admire and respect.
This annual award has become one of the most worthwhile events the graduating class participates in. The outstanding faculty members who are dedicated to teaching receive too little attention for their labors.The HOPE award helps to correct that.
-William H. Mullins
The Missile Profiteers
Eighteen months of tedious probing by Senate investigators have shown that to many Americans the missile race isn't so much a race to build national defense as it is a race to make big money, big profits. To some segments of labor as well as industry, the nation's $8.5 billion programs to construct missile sites and to produce missiles and rockets have provided opportunities for lush profiteering. In some cases, profiteering has amounted to brazen gouging of the taxpayer...
The most serious effort to look into the field began somewhat accidentally eighteen months ago, when the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations began to receive reports that workers at missile bases were engaging in crippling strikes and walkouts. A probe began which astonished the Senators; they found that the reports greatly understated the true conditions.
The subcommittee is headed by Sen. McClellan, who has achieved something of a reputation as a labor-racketeering investigator and is obviously no raving liberal out to make a reputation for exposing a "munitions lobby," as Sen. Gerald P. Nye did in the 1930s. But he is a hard-headed, relentless investigator who likes to hear facts, not theories. And he is dedicated to conserving taxpayers' dollars.
ONCE THE subcommittee showed a disposition to explore labor profiteering in the missile field, it was natural enough that reports began to filter in regarding activities of management. No one on the subcommittee claims that anything more than a "spot check" has so far been made in either field. But subcommittee staff members believe that they have turned up conditions that probably exist throughout the defense program. As Jerome Adlerman, chief counsel for the subcommittee, puts it: "We've simply selected samples."
At the missile bases — Cape Canaveral, Fla., and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. — the subcommittee found a pattern of wildcat strikes, often engineered to build up overtime pay at fantastic rates. There was the case, for example, of Joseph H. Baker, a journeyman electrician from Daytona Beach, Fla. He averaged $538 a week over a three-month period. His lowest weekly wage was $426 and it ranged as high as $772. Or there was the case of James H. Wynn, an apprentice electrician, whose brother-in-law happened to be Robert Palmer, business manager of Electrical Workers Local Union 756 at Cape Canaveral. In one week, Wynn had four hours of straight time and 80 hours of overtime as a result of strikes — and earned $748. This sum, one subcommittee investigator noted, was considerably more than the combined salaries paid to Dr. Wernher von Braun and Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover...
NO ONE seemed able to guess what the slowdowns and work stoppages were costing the government, but James D. Esary Jr., corporate manager of labor relations for the Boeing Airplane Co., told the subcommittee: "I say let's talk about the over-all program, not just the Boeing program. I don't
think we are talking in millions of dollars. I think we are talking in tens and tens of millions of dollars, in the excess costs that have gone on."
In its final report, the subcommittee noted:
In general, the testimony was that the contractors were sometimes willing to participate in the waste because they were operating under cost-plus contracts. Working for a fixed fee, they were able to let the government reimburse them for the excessive wages and overtime pay.
HAVING completed hearings on labor problems, the subcommittees in May of 1961 began to turn its attention to profitering by management. Largely on the basis of a General Accounting Office study, it selected the Nike program—a multibillion-dollar program to place Nike-Ajax and Nike-Hercules anti-aircraft missiles adjacent to American cities as a defense against bomber attacks. From the beginning, the subcommittee was interested in what it came to call the "pyramiding of profits" in the program, and this subject soon became the heart of its investigation. Chief Counsel Adlerman says the Nike program furnishes only an isolated example of how profits can multiply in complex subcontracting structures common at the Pentagon.
An understanding of "pyramiding" requires at least some general knowledge of common Pentagon contracting procedures, particularly a system known as the "systems prime contractor." Under this arrangement, a single company is given the job of "prime contractor" for an elaborate weapons system and thus takes the responsibility for supplying the whole package. The prime contractor then lets subcontracts for parts of the job. Subcontractors, in turn, can let subsubcontracts. This results in in "tiers" of subcontractors—perhaps eight or ten, sometimes more. In any modern, complex weapons system like the Nike, there are likely to be hundreds of subcontractors, arranged in "tiers." In Nike's case, no one knows how many.
The prime contractor for the Nike program since its inception more than ten years ago has been Western Electric. Its chief "first tier" subcontractor has been Douglas Aircraft. The principal questions posed by the subcommittee involved the amount of work Douglas and Western Electric did on the subcontracts they gave out. How much profit did they take in those situations? Were they entitled to the profits?
A GRAPHIC example was furnished by a study of the procurement of "launcher loaders"—mechanisms from which Nike missiles are actually aimed and launched. Testimony showed that in the years 1952-60, the Consolidated Western Co., a division of U.S. Steel, actually built the launcher loaders, under a subcontract from Douglas, in its own plants. Consolidated Western also designed the launcher loader, with some help and guidance from Douglas. In many instances, Consolidated Western shipped the completed product directly to the Army, by-passing both Douglas and Western Electric.
Consolidated Western's bill for
the launcher loaders in this period came to about $155 million, on which it earned a profit of $9,285,000. But both Douglas and Western Electric "pyramided" profits of their own on top of that figure. Even though the loaders were built in Consolidated Western plants, with Douglas performing only general supervisory functions, Douglas charged the government $10,354,659 in profits on them. And Western Electric — even farther removed from the actual fabrication — also charged a profit on them, the total coming to $9,840,000. Both Douglas and Western Electric asked for, and collected, more profit on the launcher loaders than the company that built them.
THE POINT, according to subcommittee staff investigator Robert E. Dunne, was that if the Army had bought the launcher loaders directly from Consolidated Western, it could have had them for $155 million. But the total bill to the Army, after all the other profits were added in, came to $182 million. Dunne testified that the profits on the contracts in the top three tiers totaled about 20 per cent . . .
Executives of Douglas and Western Electric hotly disputed the subcommittee's conclusions, but not its figures. Nor did they challenge the allegation that, on specific projects, their firms had actually done little work in their own plants. They justified their profits on two grounds, essentially: (1) that the markup systems they followed are common to American industry and (2) that they contributed over-all planning and supervision. They said they assigned their profits on specific projects somewhat arbitrarily so that their total profit in the overall project would be "reasonable."
THE QUESTION at the hearings then turned to why it was necessary, year after year, for the government to continue buying everything through the prime contractor and the first-tier subcontractor. Why couldn't the government buy directly from the builder and thus avoid the payment of "pyramided" profits? At the Pentagon the removal of a subcontractor from the contracting hierarchy is called "breaking out." Why, it was now asked, couldn't Consolidated Western's launcher-loader contracts have been "broken out?"
Several days of hearings revolved around this question and the answer slowly emerged. It developed that Army Ordnance, as early as 1954, wanted to "break out" Consolidated Western, and tried to do so. But in the last analysis, Western Electric exercised a veto that was approved by top Army officials. In all of the discussion on this point, there was a strange absence of the naming of names and the fixing of responsibility. But it became clear that Western Electric, in effect, had threatened to back out of the whole Nike program if "break outs" were approved. And Army witnesses testified that they didn't feel they could get along without Western Electric.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
(Excerpted from an article by James McCartney in the May 5 issue of The Nation.)
"HEY, BOLIVAR!-JIVE FOUND ANOTHER SPECIMEN!"
the took world
By Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
S N
One may assume that in the opinion of some editors this novel has achieved the stature of a modern classic—which it has. Forget the fact that Norman Mailer went beatnik and knifed his wife and has written nothing but junk since "The Naked and the Dead." He may no longer be a major writer but his first book is a major novel of the period since World War II.
THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, by Norman Mailer. Modern Library. $1.95.
It is a simple tale, really, not as simple as Harry Brown's "A Walk in the Sun" but far simpler than "The Young Lions." It is mainly about a platoon and its men and their attempt to take a Japanese-held island called Anopopei. The tale is a brutal one, punctuated by violent deaths and violent language. Rotting, swollen bodies are on the landscape; men are dying gruesomely and killing viciously, like Sergeant Croft, who kills a Japanese after playing cat-and-mouse with him as readily as he crushes to death a bird.
THERE IS NOT ONE REALLY WHOLESOME character in the novel, and we have here all the types who since "The Naked and the Dead" have populated war novels and war movies. The central characters are treated brilliantly in flashback fashion—a rhetorical device Mailer calls "The Time Machine" and one which reveals his clear—and self-admitted—debt to Dos Passos, who pioneered with such tricks in "U.S.A."
"The Time Machine" gives us Croft, the Texan who hates so bitterly and coldly and who hunts men the way he hunts deer; Brown, the Midwestern Joe College type; Rothstein, the Jew from the New York ghetto; Gallagher, the ugly and vicious Jew-hating shanty Irish Catholic from the slums of Boston; Cummings, the general who has everything figured out; Hearn, the liberal idealist who engages in sharp dialectics with Cummings; Red Felsen, the hobo from a small mining town in Montana; Wilson, the lazy southerner who thinks only of liquor and women.
It beat "The Young Lions," "From Here to Eternity" and "The Caine Mutiny" to the bookshelves by some time. Its approach and its characterizations provided the prototype—stereotype may be a better word—for war novels that followed.
Mailer uses another interesting device—the "chorus," in which his characters deal with, in brief dramatic form, such matters as rotation, the chow line, and what it'll be like when the war is over. But the novel is chiefly interesting as a realistic piece of writing that leans heavily on the naturalistic tradition of Dos Passos and James T. Farrell.
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