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CURRENT BIOGRAPHY

CISLER, WALKER- Continued 
his superiors considered him slightly expendable."

In the months preceding U.S. entry into World War II, however, and during the war as well, Cisler demonstrated uncommon executive talent. As head of what came to be the equipment production branch of the Office of War Utilities, War Production Board, from September 1941 until October 1943, he helped mobilize electric power for national defense by inducing manufacturers of electrical equipment to integrate their production schedules with the needs of the defense program. Within two year he had solved major problems of his assignment, and accepted an offer to become chief engineer of power plants for Detroit Edison Company.

Before he could begin his new job, however, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson "asked him to join the Army and rebuild power plants right behind the Allied armies in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. That he did..." Subsequently, with the rank of colonel and as chief of the public utilities section of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces), on the staff of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, he worked on the rehabilitation of other European power systems. 

 The "most dramatic" of his achievements in this connection, as Business Week (December 1, 1951) phrased it, was his work in Paris. Having learned from underground sources that when the Germans moved out of the city there would be no fuel for power, he devised a plan for relaying power over a badly damaged transmission line from the hydro installations in southern France held by resistance troops. "He organized fast-moving repair teams. Then he had Air Force planes fly reconnaissance over the line to find out where it was damaged. Whenever a section of the line fell into Allied hands, a team would move in and fix it. The first Allied troops arrived in Paris toward the end of August 1944. By September 6 Cisler's power was flowing into the city." 

Until December 1945 Cisler served in Europe and then he returned to the Detroit Edison Company, where he was chief engineer of power plants until 1947. The next year he became an executive vice-president. He was made chairman of Edison Electric Institute's electric power survey committee. Meanwhile, he served as a member of the public utilities panel that prepared the electric power program developed under the Marshall Plan.

As chief power expert of the ECA, he investigated the program of power rehabilitation in nine European countries, including Greece, in 1949. He was executive secretary of the AEC Industrial Advisory Group in 1947 and 1948. In September 1951 he was chosen a director of the Detroit company, and in December, succeeded James W. Parker as president of the firm.

"Seldom, if ever before," remarked Electrical World (December 10, 1951), "has an electric utility replaced a president so well known in the industry with another of equal prominence." Cisler faced formidable problems of administration 

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growing out of the company's postwar development. "Cisler must now reorganize the management," Business Week (December 1, 1951) reported, "create more middle-level managers, and delegate authority to them." He also presided over a four year $237,000,000 expansion program, designed to increase the company's capacity more than 50 per cent- to 2,500,000 kilowatts, which is its capacity in 1955 (Business Week, March 19, 1955)

Cisler has become absorbed in the problems of the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes, and has become one of the leading spokesmen for various interested groups. In 1953 he endorsed a National Security Resources Board recommendation that the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 be amended to allow wider industrial development of atomic power, and announced that his firm, in conjunction with the Dow Chemical Company, would use private funds to build a power reactor if legislation permitted. A few months later he suggested specific revisions of existing legislation for that purpose. The revised Atomic Energy Act (1954) provided, amount other things, for encouraging private business to participate in developing industrial uses for atomic energy.

In September 1953 Cisler became a co-founder and president of the Atomic Industrial Forum, Inc., a non-profit association for those interested in the peace-time development of atomic energy by all phases of industry; the forum in July 1955 had a membership of 320 organizations and over 1,000 individuals. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed in December 1953 the information of an international atomic energy pool to be administered for peaceful purposes under the United Nations, Cisler vigorously supported the plan. He reported the following month that atomic energy represented a power potential twenty-three times greater than the present generating capacity of the country. The Atomic Industrial Forum, after collaborating with the AEC, brought out in May 1955 a comprehensive forecast on the future of private atomic energy in the United States (See the Christian Science Monitor, May 16 1955 and Time May 23, 1955).

In December 1954, with an initial grant of $150,000 from the Ford Foundation, the Fund for Peaceful Atomic Development, Inc., was created to "bring together foreign and American scientists, industrialists, and other individuals, serve as an information clearinghouse, and provide scholarships and training in the field of atomic energy." Cisler was chosen president of the new organization. In Cisler's own words, the fund "seeks to put to work all of the private resources available in this country and abroad so as to improve the welfare of men and women throughout the world and raise their living standards by means of atomic energy." Cisler also heads Atomic Power Development Associates, a body which comprises thirty-three electric utility, manufacturing, engineering and researching companies.

Besides the connections already cites, Cisler is a director of a number of business firms, including the Holly Carburetor Company, the Detroit Bank, the Burroughs Corporation, and- 

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