Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2)

by Robert A. Caro

William S. Knudsen had just been named a Lieutenant General and placed in charge of all production for the Army, giving him authority therefore over hundreds of factories producing billions of dollars’ worth of war materiel (and over other Generals working on production). Johnson was lobbying to be placed in a similar position over all Navy production, and over the Admirals responsible for it. But Knudsen was a famous production genius, an immigrant’s son who had risen from the assembly line to the presidency of General Motors and had thereby been in administrative charge of one of the nation’s greatest industrial enterprises. The fact that Lyndon Johnson, who had never directed any industrial enterprise (unless one counts the Texas NYA, whose main function was to provide campus jobs for high school and college students), wanted a comparable job shows how lavish was his appraisal of his own abilities.