Too Little, Too Late

Written as an op-ed in March 2020, during the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic. It was not published at the time.

My father William Yandell Elliott is now mostly remembered as the Harvard professor who launched both the academic and government careers of Henry Kissinger. His most notable historical achievement, however, is the role he played in alerting the United States to impending peril prior to Pearl Harbor, and in contributing to mobilizing America’s resources to respond to the crisis when war broke out. During the Korean War, while continuing to teach full time at Harvard, he reprised his WWII mobilization role as the assistant to the director of the newly created Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM), a scaled-down version of the War Production Board (WPB) which oversaw the U.S. economy during WWII.

Unexpectedly, a long-forgotten legacy of that period has resurfaced, as the Trump administration belatedly scrambles to find ways to provide the urgently needed medical supplies that are essential to meeting the impending health crisis triggered by the coronavirus outbreak. “A federal government plan to combat the coronavirus warned policymakers last week that a pandemic “will last 18 months or longer” and could include ‘multiple waves,’ resulting in widespread shortages that would strain consumers and the nation’s health care system.”

“The 100-page plan, dated Friday, the same day President Trump declared a national emergency, laid out a grim prognosis for the spread of the virus and outlined a response that would activate agencies across the government and potentially employ special presidential powers to mobilize the private sector. Among the ‘additional key federal decisions’ listed among the options for Mr. Trump was invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950, a Korean War-era law that authorizes a president to take extraordinary action to force American industry to ramp up production of critical equipment and supplies such as ventilators, respirators and protective gear for health care workers.”¹

However, the model for the type of command-economy mobilization that would be required to produce what would be needed in a full blown health crisis is not the relatively modest mobilization efforts resulting from the 1950 Defense Production Act, but the far more intrusive government intervention into the domestic economy that took place in World War II.

During World War II, Elliott held the position of Vice Chairman for Civilian Requirements, which made him the czar of the civilian economy, making decisions about the tradeoffs between tanks and refrigerators, and how much toilet paper would be available to American consumers. In a 1945 memorandum which sounds surprisingly current, Elliott wrote “The eternal shortage of toilet tissue appears to have hit the West Coast with unusual vigor… I think the matter should be given a careful follow-up with every effort to increase total production.”²

The Korean War reprise of this emergency mobilization program did not last long, but it is a gauge of the singularity of the current crisis that we must go back over half a century to find a model for the kind of crash mobilization that President Trump’s belated response to the current crisis has necessitated. Perhaps we need to go back even further, to the more relevant experience of World War II.

It is not clear that even the extraordinary Korean War-era mobilization approach would compensate for the crippling delays in responding to the coronavirus crisis. Rather than being an “extraordinary action to force American industry to ramp up production of critical equipment and supplies” a crash mobilization effort based on the 1950 model may be too little, too late.

President Truman stopped short of creating a replica of the powerful and all-encompassing command structure of the WWII War Production Board, and its direct intrusion into the management of the economy. Because Truman was keenly aware of public reluctance to prolong the hardships of the total mobilization economy that they had endured in WWII, the Office of Defense Mobilization took shape as much less than a reincarnation of the World War II War Production Board. Neither Truman nor the first director of the 1950 Office of Defense Mobilization, William Elliott’s boss “Electric Charlie” Wilson (the head of General Electric so named to distinguish him from “Engine Charlie” Wilson, Truman’s Secretary of Defense and former head of General Motors) “envisioned the ODM as a great government behemoth. Neither wanted the new organization to dominate the private sector or run roughshod over the administration.” Instead, they opted for an organizational format that “balanced centralizing and decentralizing impulses in a corporative pattern of collaboration that was compatible with the country’s free economy and democratic institutions.” Wilson decided that ODM “would not function as an operating agency or usurp responsibilities lodged in existing government departments. Instead, a new Defense Production Authority (DPA) would bring greater order to production planning as a whole while operational responsibilities would remain decentralized in the Commerce Department.”³

A promotional pamphlet put out by the Office of Defense Mobilization to explain itself to the public had a section titled, “A Small Headquarters.” “The Office of Defense Mobilization was conceived as a small headquarters where general policies of production and stabilization are determined.” The pamphlet proudly advertised the fact that the total personnel, including clerical and other help is less than a hundred persons. ODM is strictly a policy making, directing, and coordinating group, as distinguished from an operating agency. It gives out no detailed orders, but has the over-all supervision of the mobilization effort.”⁴

Even in a wartime crisis, Truman’s attempt to nationalize the steel industry to avert a shutdown of production in a strike was overturned by the Supreme Court. Following the Korean War, the ODM, once viewed as one of the most powerful agencies of government, gradually morphed into a toothless civil defense planning organization.

Since he first mentioned the Defense Production Act, it has become clear that President Trump never intended this as a serious policy proposal, but rather as a hyperbolic assertion of unlimited authority comparable to a president in wartime. The implication is that any shortages could be quickly remedied with the stroke of a Presidential pen. But on Wednesday March 18, 2020 the President tweeted that he only invoked the law to be used "in a worst case scenario in the future." and added, "Hopefully there will be no need." Even if he were to assert this authority, it would still require a mechanism in place to translate it into action – to say nothing of available supplies to produce the needed goods and a detailed production plan.

The idea that the moribund Defense Production Act could be magically reincarnated to “force American industry to ramp up production of critical equipment” is political theater on the part of a President who, unlike Truman, does not accept the idea that “the buck stops here.” Trump is trying to buy time with yet another distraction, in the hope that the problem will go away or, if it doesn’t, someone else can be blamed.