The Chairman
Bird, Kai
Among the men endlessly credited with shaping this American Century, John J. McCloy is a muted figure. During nearly five decades in and out of public life, he never attained cabinet rank. He lacked...
...When Dulles went down with cancer, McCloy was left in the wings again...
...After Pearl Harbor, Stimson asked him to oversee the internment of all American Japanese citizens...
...He lacked Dean Acheson's panache...
...He tabled plans to bomb Auschwitz because the planes couldn't be spared...
...John McCloy, in pure historical terms, was a marginal figure...
...But this is a plodding book...
...His contributions to his times and country were often ineffable and, finally, emblematic...
...He became Kennedy's disarmament chief instead, but left the job before his major achievement, the Test Ban Treaty, was ever signed...
...Black Water is a potboiler with pretensions, a stew of tabloid TV and Stephen King Grand Guignol transformed into something acceptable, even Important, because of its author's unwarranted literary eminence...
...That McCloy, in person, was a happy, unremarkable man, "a jovial gnome," as Henry Kissinger called him, does not help...
...He made his legal name extracting reparations from the German government on behalf of claimants for the Black Tom shipyard, sabotaged during the First World War...
...Within months of assuming the chairmanship of Chase bank, he presided over what was then the largest bank merger in the country's history...
...Bird's main rhetorical line—McCloy's place atop the elite ruling Establishment—is not so much evoked as listed...
...As High Commissioner for Occupied Germany, McCloy buckled under local pressure and pardoned a number of Nazis, including the arms merchant Alfred Krupp...
...The son of a Philadelphia hairdresser, McCloy attended Amherst and Harvard Law...
...Unlike the other so-called Wise Men, he played no central policy role in the Truman Administration...
...Their recreation requires the kind of literary conjuring that Bird either could not or refused to do...
...When you or I have a few hours to kill, we generally go to a movie or watch some TV...
...He negotiated for Kennedy the actual withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba...
...The only praiseworthy thing about it is its brevity—perhaps 30,000 words—which allows its readers to feel virtuous for spending an hour or so keeping up with the latest in contemporary fiction...
...He didn't have Bob Lovett's wit, or George Kennan's mystic intellect...
...Eisenhower wanted him as secretary of state, but thought Dulles would appease the Republican right...
...As a banker (Chase), proconsul (Germany), and foundation chief (Ford), he moved quietly through the gray, convergent worlds of high policy and high finance...
...The Chairman himself comes off as a chalky, cardboard character, which perhaps he was...
...When Joyce Carol Oates has a few hours to kill, she knocks off a book...
...Adam Platt is co-author of Joseph W. Al-sop's memoirs "I've Seen the Best of It" (W W Norton...
...THE CHAIRMAN JOHN J. McCLOY: THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT Kai Bird Simon & Schuster/800 pages/$30 reviewed by ADAM PLATT The American Spectator July 1992 59 Bird documents McCloy's achievements in a workmanlike, judicious way...
...But McCloy, as Kai Bird's diligent, colorless biography makes clear, was everywhere...
...Perhaps he was right...
...McCloy had a lawyer's ability to break down problems and find common ground...
...Stimson instilled in his men a rabid sense of decency and disinterest, but McCloy was not above expediency...
...He described himself as a "legman": an expediter, a steady hand at the wheel...
...The big themes, like the big men who peopled McCloy's world, stay flat on the page...
...John Podhoretz, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, is writing a book about the Bush White House to be published next year by Simon & Schuster Part of Bird's problem is his subject...
...In Washington, McCloy, who, like many straight men, had a furtive, adventurous side, busied himself with counterespionage work...
...Like Clark Clifford, who in many ways was an evil twin, he flourished as a backroom adviser and "hidden vizier...
...Bird means to set McCloy up as an archetype for this country's vanished postwar "Establishment," and I suppose this is fair...
...A devout clubman and ace tennis player, McCloy caught the eye of Colonel Henry Stimson, who brought him to the War Department as a consultant and trouble-shooter...
...He exuded what Kennedy called "cheerful wisdom and steady effectiveness...
...No great brooder or policy man, he nonetheless got things done...
...McCloy performed this distasteful task without batting an eye...
...The names, places, and clubs familiar to Wise Men fans everywhere appear again and again...
...Kennedy offered him Treasury or Defense, both of which McCloy turned down...
...The Rockefellers, like countless corporate clients, used his ancient inside connections to endless effect...
...The claim of Harper's magazine that Mc-Cloy was "the most influential private citizen in America," is even mentioned twice...
...Past 80, he helped them spring the Shah from exile in Mexico...
...n many ways, this tour of Germany was the closest Jack McCloy ever came to the history of his time...
...Oates has produced a pitch-perfect novel for the cultural moment...
...The Chairman" never cooperated fully with Bird, protesting that people made too much of his career...
...In New York, he found his way to the white-shoe firm of Cravath, Henderson, and de Gersdorff...
...At least, that's the impression you get from reading her latest novella, a bizarre and utterly pointless gloss on Chappaquiddick called Black Water...
Vol. 25 • July 1992 • No. 7
