He was starting over and determined to set aside his law-enforcement career and remake himself into a businessman. His wartime work had been low profile but successful. He had closed down more than seven hundred red-light districts and sent hundreds of prostitutes to training camps to learn vocational skills. When he took over the Social Protection Division, prostitutes were responsible for 75 percent of soldiers’ venereal-disease infections. Two years later, that infection rate had dropped to 20 percent, leading the director of Community War Services, Mark A. McCloskey, to tell him: “You had one of wartime’s tough jobs. You have done it well.” But Eliot knew all along it was a wartime job only, not a career. And by this point he wanted to make some real money, build up a nest egg for his old age. So when an opportunity arose at the Diebold Company—he’d been acquainted with the controlling Rex family for years—he jumped at it. He would be chairman of the board of the Canton, Ohio–based safe maker.
