1888-1959
Business Executive and Government Bureaucrat

The War Production Board.

During World War II Donald Nelson assumed the responsibility for the entire mobilization effort, making him one of the most powerful men in the country. Many of the nation's leaders, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Sen. Harry S Truman, saw a need for a single centralized authority to coordinate economic mobilization. To this end Roosevelt created a variety of agencies but finally vested much of the power over mobilization in the War Production Board (WPB), with Nelson in charge of the agency.

Good Relations.

Nelson was a gregarious, likable man, which proved to be both his strength and his weakness as an administrator. During the period that he was in the government, his easygoing nature endeared him to the New Dealers in the Roosevelt administration at a time when many veterans in the administration were...