The Professor with the Power

PEERING at the world from behind gold-rimmed glasses and beneath a thatch of gray hair, Arthur Burns is a model of the modern professor in Government. He is seldom found on the Washington cocktail circuit, and perhaps with some reason. "Being at a dinner with Burns is like being back in the high school classroom," says an acquaintance. His manner is relentlessly professorial; even his doodlings while he talks on the telephone are architecturally precise. But he occasionally shows a dry wit; he has been heard to speak of one politician as "a gentleman and a demagogue."

Though Burns seems in many respects to be a typical New England Yankee, he was born in Eastern Galicia, then a region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but now part of the Ukraine. An earnest scholar, he was able to translate the Talmud into Polish and German by the time he was six. His family emigrated to the U.S. when he was nine and settled at Bayonne, N.J., where his father became a paperhanger, a trade that Burns learned as a schoolboy.

When Burns decided on Columbia as the college of his choice, he went about applying with typical directness; he marched straight to the office of the president. Advised that the college had closed its admissions for the year, he nonetheless so impressed the authorities that they made room for him--and gave him a scholarship as well. To help put himself through college, he worked as a postal clerk, waiter, shoe salesman and mess boy on an oil tanker; he also wrote business articles for the New York Herald Tribune.

After going to Rutgers as an assistant professor of economics, he married the former Helen Bernstein, a onetime schoolteacher. Burns became an expert on business cycles, tracing 600 economic indicators through their ups and downs, and isolated 21 that gave an early guide to the direction of the economy as a whole. By the time Eisenhower entered the White House, Burns was an idea man whose time had come. A recession had begun, and

Ike ordered a search for the man who knew most about depressions and their causes to head the President's Council of Economic Advisers. The search soon narrowed to Burns.

As head of the council, he also made a lasting impression on the Vice President, Richard Nixon. Burns left in 1956 to become president of the privately endowed National Bureau of Economic Research, but continued as Nixon's personal economic adviser. Last winter, just before being named Special Counsellor to the President, he suggested that the tax increases and spending cuts then contemplated would not be enough to contain inflation. Once ensconced in the White House, he optimistically judged in April that it would be reasonable to expect the Administration to bring the rate of inflation down to 3% for 1969. It is now running at 6%. Nevertheless, Burns brings to his new job a formidable reputation for being right more often than wrong, and the power that comes from being a longtime trusted adviser of the President.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.