The Real (John J.) McCloy?
Whitfield, Steve
THE REAL (JOHN J.) McCLOY? A partial view of the man who advocated incarceration of Japanese-Americans, counselled clemency for Nazi war criminals, and has been called "the most influential private...
...The best way to aid the "victims of enemy persecution," the Operations Division added, "is the early defeat of the Axis, an undertaking to which we must devote every resource at our disposal...
...Two days later the Operations Division dismissed the proposal as "impracticable," because the bombing "could be executed only by diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations...
...But even in his post as High Commissioner, McCloy managed to generate controversy that to this day has not entirely subsided: his response to the appeals of convicted Nazi war criminals...
...The firestorm of criticism that McCloy's clemency law provoked suggests that McCloy was not being condemned only by callow youths animated by the presumably stiffer ethics of 1983...
...I don't need any of them . . . There is no way to determine their loyalty...
...He still points to the security considerations mentioned by the War Department in its 1943 "final report," even though Cornell's Richard Polenberg, after citing numerous scholarly studies, has concluded that "virtually every word written about the episode goes to refute the official explanation...
...Only the surrender of the German government could stop the slaughter of European Jewry...
...A partial view of the man who advocated incarceration of Japanese-Americans, counselled clemency for Nazi war criminals, and has been called "the most influential private citizen in America" STEVE WHITFIEID Soon after Pearl Harbor was attacked, more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans—of whom two-thirds were citizens—were evacuated from their homes on the West Coast and confined to barracks behind barbed wire...
...McCloy himself, in 1983, called Feingold's observation "silly"—but did not explain what was silly about it...
...No evidence has yet come to light that McCloy disagreed with the policy of evacuation and detention, nor did he express reservations about its wisdom or justice...
...The Western democracies, to say nothing of the Soviet Union, invariably brought far fewer resources to bear on saving the Jews than did the perpetrators of the Final Solution...
...Walter Lippmann advocated the policy...
...A few of the bombs unloaded on the synthetic rubber factories of Buna might have saved many lives five miles to the west without lengthening the war by a minute...
...The logical extension of Allison's argument would be to endorse black slavery, since a century and a half ago such bondage was deemed widely compatible with the ethical sensitivities of most white Americans...
...But it is not necessary, in McCloy's case, to have recourse to later definitions of right conduct in public office...
...Nahum Goldmann, the decisive Jewish representative in the reparations negotiations with West Germany in the early 1950s, praised McCloy for his "great sympathy for Jewish problems...
...But the fact that Auschwitz was not only an industrial facility, not only a labor camp, but also the largest killing center on the continent was not known to the American and British governments until June 1944...
...The Polish Home Army, which was saturated with rightist anti-Semitism, had no chance against the Wehrmacht...
...Army Air Force had been involved in the decision to skip the bombing of the extermination camp...
...This controversy was an occasion to engage in what Confucius, six centuries before the common era, considered the first task of politics: "the rectification of names...
...he was a weakling...
...that sort of reasoning usually loses its force by the sixth grade...
...Nevertheless most Hungarian Jews had not yet been transported to Auschwitz, and it was largely for their sake that Jewish organizations in particular urged the Allies to bomb the gas chambers, the crematoria, the rail lines—whatever might decelerate the Final Solution...
...This is a question that the Assistant Secretary of War faced in the summer and fall of 1944, while Jews were being murdered around the clock at Auschwitz, sometimes at a rate of 12,000 per day...
...McCloy accepted and continued to refer to this conclusion, even though the Operations Division did not in fact study the feasibility of bombing the rail links, or the gas chambers, or the crematoria, in the light of actual Army Air Force operations in Europe...
...Just as Stimson had removed the Japanese city of Kyoto from the list of air force targets because of its art treasures, so too McCloy persuaded the air force to spare the German town of Rothenburg, because of its superb medieval architecture...
...In October 1944, Goldmann had in vain tried to persuade McCloy to have the camps bombed...
...In 1944, even though Jewish organizations clamored for bombing even at the risk of killing prisoners, who were otherwise doomed anyway, McCloy claimed that leaving the exterminaSeptember 7, 1945: President Harry Truman receives Stimson, Marshall, Truman, Admiral King, Secretary tion apparatus unimpaired would in fact be better for the Jews themselves...
...McCloy told a number of interviewers that the decision to reduce Krupp's sentence to time served and to restore him to his vast property and power was based upon the dictates of "conscience...
...Neither Franklin D. Roosevelt, nor Winston Churchill, nor Earl Warren, for example, would meet the test the students propose be applied in the case of John McCloy...
...Others still wonder...
...He has advised presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan and served, after Kennedy's assassination, on the Warren Commission...
...The political judgment that American foreign policy might be too sympathetic to Israel cannot be decided on moral grounds, and reasonable and patriotic Americans differ on how their government might strengthen its relationships with other nations of the Middle East...
...A Jap's a Jap," the general announced...
...With regard to the rescue of those "in imminent danger of death," McCloy told the Office of the Chief of Staff: "I am very chary of getting the Army involved in this while the war is on...
...Yet when Krupp walked out of Landsberg prison a free man on February 3, 1951, he found that the High Commissioner had refused to confiscate his property, making the baron once again the richest man in Europe...
...General Haig received the message on October 12, which happened to be two days after the Soviet Union had begun a massive resupply of the Egyptian and Syrian armies, just as Iraqi forces were rushing to the front...
...Ever since January 1944, when Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board, it had been American policy "to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death," when such measures were "consistent with the successful prosecution of the war...
...had to make among unattractive options...
...The fact that McCloy, the Volkswagen Foundation and Harvard University have certified the worthiness of that career need not prevent others from judging it differently...
...On September 13, December 18 and December 26, the industrial areas of Auschwitz—but not the death camp itself—reeled under the attacks of American bombers...
...How far McCloy was willing to go with such gestures can be seen in the case of Dr...
...she had volunteered...
...In the late summer of 1944, when the Polish Home Army rose up against the German occupiers, British and American bombers engaged in costly relief expeditions which could not have affected the outcome of the war...
...The elimination of the killing facilities would have saved countless thousands of Jewish lives (possibly including, Wyman speculates, Anne Frank's...
...So too McCloy pretended that a decision not to bomb Auschwitz was based only upon military criteria of feasibility rather than upon a political formulation of war aims—which accorded the specific rescue of Jewish lives a disturbingly low priority...
...Although McCloy told Alan Brinkley, a Harvard historian whose article in the February 1983 Harper's is the fullest account of McCloy's life, that "when I was young, the idea of serving in Washington was the most exciting prospect I could imagine," McCloy waited until he was 44 before doing so...
...cle, "Why Auschwitz was Never Bombed" (1978...
...But the Polish soldiers were helped anyway...
...So long as Hitler dominated Germany and Europe, the only hope for Jews targeted for extermination lay in the quickest military victory of the Allies...
...A Republican who was never a New Dealer, McCloy served under the septuagenarian Stimson as Assistant Secretary of War, supervising the relations between civilian populations and the military in the United States and abroad...
...Between July 7 and November 20, fleets of heavy bombers on ten separate occasions pounded the Blechhammer oil-refining complex, 47 miles from Auschwitz...
...According to the New York Times, "Mr...
...McGloy explained to William Manchester that "Alfried was a playboy...
...of State Dean Acheson...
...McCloy had earlier accepted General DeWitt's racist views of social policy, which were mislabelled a military assessment of security dangers...
...He warned that increased military aid to Israel would "have a critical and adverse effect on our relations with the moderate Arab [oil] producing countries...
...Nixon and Henry Kissinger, disturbed by Israel's military predicament and by the resupplying of its enemies, authorized increased American aid anyway...
...McCloy released her in 1952, even though Dr...
...But Roosevelt appointed Stimson, who appointed McCloy, who was treated— and entreated—as though he were responsible...
...But McCloy's vision of the future is not the only measure by which his public life might be assessed...
...The American official who bore heavy responsibility for this wholesale violation of civil liberties, and who continues to justify that policy, is John J. McCloy...
...Military Governor and then High Commissioner for Germany from 1949 until 1952, and it is for this service that both the Volkswagen Foundation and the Kennedy School of Government have wished to honor him...
...Such questions are especially urgent in totalitarian regimes, but democratic societies are not immune from these problems...
...Testifying before the Congressional Commission in 1981, McCloy called the detention "reasonably undertaken and thoughtfully and humanely conducted"—as though the principle of punishing people according to race were itself justified...
...This relocation from the West Coast may be the most studied domestic episode during World War II...
...Left to right: McCloy...
...and a much-decorated, segregated unit of Nisei (American-born sons of Japanese immigrants) fought in Italy, sustaining enormous losses...
...The American official who granted such clemency was John J. McCloy...
...But would such bombing runs have been effective in impeding the genoci-dal ambitions of the Nazis...
...That day dawned for very few of the perpetrators...
...If the charge is to be made, it should be directed towards Roosevelt and Churchill and their immediate advisors and subordinates, and not at the former Assistant Secretary of War...
...How then can bureaucrats be held more politically accountable, more morally responsible, more aware of the human consequences of their actions—and sometimes of their failure to act...
...But once again McCloy managed to take a position that was adverse to the interests and sensitivities of Jews...
...None charges him with unique responsibility for traducing the rights of Japanese Americans and for failing to help European Jews threatened with imminent death...
...But the suspension of the rights and liberties of Japanese Americans was not uniformly supported, especially as the war progressed and whatever danger existed of an invasion receded...
...the invasion of Normandy in early June and the subsequent drive across France did not require the services of the 15th Army Air Force...
...It was...
...This controversy deserves close scrutiny, because the career that triggered it raises significant and troublesome questions about the rights of ethnic minorities, about the limitations of American Jewish power and influence, and about the standards to which public servants in a democracy should be held...
...and the Supreme Court endorsed it, with Justice Hugh Black writing the key opinion for the majority...
...I felt that he had expiated whatever he'd done by the time he'd already served in jail [five years...
...That is the duty of government officials, who wisely rejected McCloy's warning when an American ally was being threatened by enemies who alone were being resupplied...
...No wonder then that a protest erupted at Harvard University this spring when its Kennedy School ^of Government chose to honor him...
...But could that slaughter have been interfered with, without deflecting the military operations of the Allied forces...
...and while the responsibility for the Holocaust falls squarely upon the Third Reich, the consequences of Allied indifference to the Jews trapped in Europe were to be lethal...
...McCloy was not obligated to accept their recommendations, and could— and did—examine the cases on his own...
...nor did Dean Allison indicate which specific actions should, for the sake of consistency, have required student condemnation...
...Even more surprising is that, to this day, McCloy defends that policy...
...McCloy's "Arabist" views were deservedly ignored or minimized by Harvard students who objected to scholarships that would bear his name...
...Nevertheless, throughout the summer the gas chambers were usually working at full capacity, and the crematoria were so overloaded that corpses were being burned in open pits...
...On August 20, 127 American bombers, dropping 1,336 high-explosive bombs, smashed industrial facilities at Auschwitz, less than five miles from the gas chambers...
...Much of the failure was cognitive...
...That attorney was John J. McCloy...
...The Peck Commission understandably recommended reductions of sentences in most cases...
...Oberhauser was reported practicing as a family physician in West Germany, a country whose judicial tolerance for Nazi murderers and sadists was not discredited by the sorts of clemency that McCloy offered...
...McCloy was in charge of supervising the evacuation and of overseeing the internment (although the first head of the War Relocation Authority was Milton Eisenhower...
...Even at the age of 88, McCloy is capable of offering a vigorous vindication of his career...
...The senior partner of the law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hope, Hadley and McCloy even went so far as to describe conditions in the camps as "very pleasant"—a remark that elicited sarcastic laughter and hisses from survivors who were attending the 1981 hearings...
...General Lucius Clay, McCloy's predecessor as military governor, had usually allowed to stand the Nuremberg sentences that McCloy reduced, a decision that neither the law nor policy directives required him to make...
...In effect, only one side was heard...
...Rabbi Eugene Borowitz therefore spoke not only for Jews, but for any citizen believing in equal justice under law, when he observed: "McCloy is right...
...But his strangest statement might well send a chill down the spine of anyone who is not, as McCloy is, graced with Anglo-Saxon ancestry or white skin...
...The most prominent of these criminals was Baron Alfried Krupp von Bohlen, a recent employer of slave labor...
...In his 1981 testimony before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment, he claimed that the evacuation of the Japanese Americans was for their own good...
...The American official who consistently rejected such requests, despite the military feasibility of interrupting this mass murder, was John J. McCloy...
...in that capacity he served the major petroleum companies, the so-called Seven Sisters...
...The answer must be conjectural...
...However imperfectly and hesitantly, other Americans—in and out of office— were troubled or outraged by the treatment of Japanese Americans...
...But it is clearly being judged in retrospect, according to moral and political criteria which may have changed over time and about which honorable citizens have often differed...
...In this respect Dean Allison and others have imitated McCloy himself, who is doggedly unrepentant in his effort to exonerate himself even when asked about his most controversial actions...
...This particular question has also been addressed by two historians: Martin Gilbert in his book, Auschwitz and the Allies (1981), and David Wyman in his Commentary artiGeorge C. Marshall, teavinx the White House...
...The President-elect noted that one constituency to whom he owed no political gratitude was American Jewry, and he thus seemed to be reassuring...
...In 1962, one of the shrewdest Washington journalists, the New Yorker's Richard Rovere, called McCloy the leader of "the American Establishment," an identification that John Kenneth Galbraith had arrived at independently...
...McCloy refused to be interviewed by Professor Wyman, but the former Assistant Secretary of War told Morton Mintz of the Washington Post that General "Hap" Arnold of the U.S...
...Since the number of truly villainous persons in the world is fairly small, how do we devise a political structure in which decent, honest, upright officials exercise judgment and power in a manner that reduces evil instead of contributing to it...
...McCloy cautioned the Commission . . . not to advocate policies that might someday prevent the forcible relocation of other American citizens because of ethnic background...
...The man touted as "the most influential private citizen in America" was born in Philadelphia in 1895...
...But fortunately for Israel, Haig took his time replying to McCloy and the oilmen...
...The inmates as well as their tormenters might well have wondered why the Allies seemed to be acquiescing in the Nazi doctrine of the superfluousness of Jewish life...
...His historical memorandum helped buttress the case for the "exemplary" public record that Dean Allison claims to have discovered in McCloy's career...
...Otherwise the task of the historian would merely be to ratify whatever governments in the past have done, to echo with indiscriminate fidelity whatever standards of conduct can be located in the past...
...A curious footnote to the history of these encounters is that Goldmann's son, Guido Goldman, serves as the director of the Kennedy School's McCloy Scholars Program...
...Jewish organizations, British officials and the War Refugee Board all went to McCloy, who never claimed that the decision was up to the Secretary of War and to the President...
...The Dean of the Kennedy School, Graham Allison, claimed that McCloy's record has been "exemplary" and described him as the embodiment of "the essential and enduring ideal of public service...
...That] remained the secret of the War Department...
...away from the bigotry aggravated by the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the detainees could find "a healthier and more advantageous environment...
...In the case of Alfried Krupp, for example, the defense arguments that had been rejected at his Nuremberg trial were resurrected, but this time they were uncontradicted...
...It was in a private capacity that his career again intersected with the destiny of the Jewish people...
...But here too there is a pattern...
...For the Japanese American population never posed a threat to the military security of the United States...
...The racism of figures like General De Witt was implicitly endorsed rather than challenged...
...In his message to a mass rally, the President had announced that "perpetrators" of war crimes and crimes against humanity would be held "to strict accountability in a day of reckoning which will surely come...
...The operations of the 15th Army Air Force are unmentioned either in Professor Brinkley's generally sympathetic Harper's profile, or in Edward T. Chase's Op-Ed piece defending McCloy's decision not to bomb the killing facilities (Washington Post, May 21, 1983...
...He did nothing that was improper, unethical or illegitimate, nor was it a significant part of the controversy at Harvard this spring...
...On August 14,1944, he told the World Jewish Congress that, even if such an attack were "practicable," the bombing "might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans...
...But those are tests that Harvard apparently believes John McCloy would pass as well...
...they were Gentiles...
...By now it is a commonplace among historians of the Holocaust to note that the Nazis' desire to kill the Jews was far more intense than the Allies' willingness to prevent such genocide...
...About two million persons—nearly all of them Jews—were annihilated in the hellish camp in southwest Poland...
...There she had selected inmates to be deliberately infected with gangrene or tetanus, had deliberately allowed diseases to spread in otherwise healthy women, had removed sound limbs and vital organs, and in the post-operative period had rubbed sawdust of even ground glass into the open wounds...
...Twenty had already completed their sentences by that date...
...As "the most influential private citizen in America," McCloy was the obvious candidate to become chief counsel for the corporations whose business was deeply entangled in politics...
...and they spent the war languishing in tarpaper shacks...
...In his 1962 memoir, Biddle wrote: "If, instead of dealing almost exclusively with McCloy and [Major Karl] Bendetsen, I had urged [Stimson] to resist the pressure of his subordinates, the result might have been different...
...Stimson's memoirs do not even mention Auschwitz, and no document has yet surfaced to prove that Roosevelt was even aware of the question of whether the crematoria or gas chambers should be bombed...
...Without being obligated to do so, McCloy had impaneled an advisory board of three American officials, the Peck Commission...
...For despite the Constitutional assurance that neither liberty nor property would be taken away without due process of law, Japanese Americans who had neither been charged nor convicted of any crime whatsoever had their property confiscated (or had to sell it at absurdly low prices...
...Krupp might have avoided the use of slave labor, as other industrialists had done—without penalty—in the Third Reich...
...He asked the Operations Division of the War Department, which was engaged in strategic planning and in the direction of military operations, to investigate the matter...
...Within the government, Harold Ickes and Archibald MacLeish unsuccessfully called attention to the injustice of the policy, as did—from the outside—Norman Thomas, the Christian Century, Eugene V. Rostow and (by 1944) even Fortune magazine...
...And with the surprise attack upon Pearl Harbor, panic ensued...
...It is psychologically understandable, even if it is not admirable, for McCloy himself to acknowledge no errors—even though he is thereby required to advance arguments that reputable scholars can skewer...
...Historians such as Henry Feingold, Saul Friedman and David Wyman have shown how reluctant the Roosevelt administration was to permit the United States to serve as a haven for Jewish refugees...
...No one accuses him of having committed any crimes...
...McCloy's position made him the object of appeals from Japanese Americans and their advocates for the restoration of rights, but he tended to reject such appeals until the war was nearly over...
...Yet McCloy himself made no effort to do so, and even sabotaged the attempt by the War Refugee Board to execute its own mandate...
...Surely, it would not be unfair to judge McCloy by "today's sensitivities and standards...
...Oh, I don't doubt that he'd supported the Nazis early...
...When Harvard honored a man who was harsh toward Asian Americans on the West Coast, lenient toward Nazi criminals in West Germany and unwilling to inconvenience the administration of the greatest crime in human history, that first task was not fulfilled...
...Late in the Second World War, the Department of War was urged to consider the bombing of gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz, the most lethal killing factory in all of human history...
...Nevertheless the clemency act he signed in January 1951 was remarkable for its leniency...
...But there is no doubt that the High Commissioner's eagerness to let bygones be bygones was the sort of gesture that many West Germans appreciated...
...and the more quickly the Nazi past could be buried and its representatives rehabilitated, the smoother would be the German alignment with the West...
...Hertha Oberhauser, who had been sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment because of the medical experiments she performed on inmates at Ravensbriick...
...the American Civil Liberties Union did not initially oppose it...
...McCloy, Mintz wrote on April 17, 1983, said that in 1944 he "must have known" or "probably heard of" the destruction of the Reich's economic resources that the 15th Army Air Force was wreaking in southwest Poland...
...If we don't let it happen to the Japanese, then it won't legally be possible to do it to anyone else...
...Perhaps it would be unfair to condemn McCloy for administering a policy he did not invent, a policy that subjugated all other objectives—no matter how worthy or humanitarian—to the goal of crushing Axis military power as swiftly as possible...
...The Peck Commission was essentially a clemency board, since pressure had been mounting within West Germany for a tempering of "victors' justice...
...Such acts of clemency did not directly affect Jewish lives, but the High Commissioner had picked an odd way to fulfill the pledge that Roosevelt had given to American Jewish organizations in July 1944...
...Besides Churchill himself, some American members of the War Refugee Board— Benjamin Akzin, Roswell McClelland, eventually John Pehle— favored the bombing of Auschwitz...
...The origins of that policy lay in the nativist hostility that many white Californians felt toward an ethnically distinct, culturally isolated, economically productive minority...
...West German appreciation for McCloy's role in legitimating their post-war society is therefore understandable, but Jews seeking some solace in the remembrance of unspeakable torment and martyrdom could not be expected to share that appreciation...
...Although no Japanese American had committed a single verifiable act of sabotage, fears of future acts prompted Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 9066 on February 14, 1942—a day that civil libertarians later claimed would live in infamy...
...The seven largest American oil companies therefore hired as their chief counsel a figure whose experience and eminence in Washington would reinforce their warnings about undue American support of Israel...
...Within six years of her release, Dr...
...By defending McCloy's reputation so vigorously, the Kennedy School may have missed an educational opportunity to clarify—and elevate—the standards by which public servants might be judged...
...The only right that the Assistant Secretary of War firmly supported was the right to bear arms...
...In part because of that misunderstanding, the war against the Jews was typically one-sided...
...Steve Whitfield, a moment contributing editor and the author o/Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism, teaches American Studies at Brandeis University...
...The Japanese Americans never committed nor conspired to commit acts of sabotage, but were guilty instead, in John P. Roche's phrase, of possessing "enemy chromosomes...
...On June 24, 1944, McCloy was first asked to explore the possibility of bombing the rail lines on which the Hungarian Jews would be shipped to the gas chambers...
...And Churchill, even though he failed to follow through, encouraged British strategists to ascertain how the bombing of Auschwitz might be effectuated...
...Of the 104 defendants convicted in the Nuremberg successor trials, McCloy confirmed the sentences of ten (including the death penalty for five) and drastically reduced the sentences of 74...
...McCloy's resume' is indeed as long and as impressive as virtually anyone's in public life...
...Apparently without qualm and without remorse, he became one of the crudest taskmasters in European history...
...Attorney General Francis Biddle was initially troubled by the proposal, and later regretted his role in the incarceration...
...But the human race ought to be permitted to refine its ethical standards and to improve its definition of justice, even at the risk of tarnishing some reputations...
...In the bombing of the death camp, many Jews might have escaped, perhaps joining the partisans and taking up arms against German power...
...Even when the War Refugee Board urged that such rescue efforts be undertaken when consistent with military operations, McCloy balked at transmitting such a message to war theater commanders, because he believed that "the most effective relief which can be given victims of enemy persecution is to insure the speedy defeat of the Axis...
...In ordinary situations, few of us try to exculpate ourselves by claiming that others were doing it too...
...A few of the survivors later expressed wonder as to why the bombers passing overhead never discharged their devastating explosives...
...But the services he has attempted to render for the Seven Sisters, and therefore for nations refusing to acknowledge Israel's right to exist, help explain why Martin Peretz of the New Republic could charge that "McCloy's callousness about the fate of Jews had become a habit...
...In any event the Harvard statement smacks of the sort of hero-worship that would exempt "statesmen of the past" from criticism, placing the sanctity of their reputations ahead of the historical effort to discover the truth...
...Nazi racism was so unprecedented in its fury that decent human beings were slow to realize the two-front war to which the Third Reich was committed: one against the military might of the Allies, the other against the physical existence of the Jewish people...
...In that phase of the Yom Kippur War, Egypt was opposed to a cease-fire...
...Such air operations would have forced the enemy to defer the military struggle against the Allies for the sake of the Final Solution, accelerating the very defeat at which American policy aimed...
...None of the American officials who favored the bombing of the killing facilities proposed doing so at the expense of "the successful prosecution of war," nor would it have been...
...It may be surmised that, had the latter minority been treated as McCloy treated the Nisei and their families, a West German foundation might not have wished to honor him with its scholarships...
...and Goldmann's autobiography records the diplomatic role McCloy played in reinforcing the Jews' moral and material cfaims against Germany...
...His sentence was not only commuted...
...It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not...
...Until 1940, when Secretary of War Henry Stimson brought McCloy to Washington, he worked for two of the most prestigious Wall Street law firms (Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft, and then Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine and Wood...
...By then most of the Jewish communities of Europe had been decimated...
...Allegations about McCloy's involvement in the incarceration of Japanese Americans, in the failure to bomb Auschwitz and in the commutation of the sentences of Nazi war criminals nevertheless surfaced after the Kennedy School announced the purpose of the West German grant...
...The Luftwaffe could no longer challenge the Allied command of the skies...
...Moreover, the Allies themselves were not consistent in their policy of opposing any diversion of military operations...
...Nisei civil rights may not be very high on the Jewish list of survival priorities, but to ignore them is to imperil our survival...
...So if other ethnic groups abandon the Japanese, they open themselves up to similar treatment...
...The historians' findings are consistent with one another, and tend to contradict the conclusions—both then and now—of John McCloy...
...most of the Jews and other foreigners he employed in his factories were worked to death...
...who] hadn't had much responsibility...
...McCloy continues to bristle at the suggestion that the heating up of the Cold War affected his decision...
...A Kennedy School statement denies that a decision on the bombing of Auschwitz was "McCloy's to make...
...The July-August issue of moment contained "Kafka's (Comic) Legacy," his most recent contribution to these pages...
...In the aftermath of a war that cost 51 million lives, a program of German denazification was short-circuited in part by the award of clemency granted to most of the war criminals convicted at Nuremberg and still serving their sentences...
...Stimson actively favored it, and Roosevelt signed the executive order without qualms...
...and the liberation of Krupp in particular provoked indignation from Churchill and Clement Attlee, from the Jewish War Veterans and from Jacob Javits—to whom McCloy explained (contrary to reams of evidence) that Alfried Krupp bore no "responsibility for the use of slave labor...
...General John L. DeWitt, the Army's commander on the West Coast, recommended that the Japanese American population there be relocated...
...Several of the state's politicians, including Attorney General Earl Warren, were willing to exploit such racial prejudice...
...Dean Allison of the Kennedy School has claimed that student criticism failed to take into account the choices that "statesmen of the past" the surrender documents...
...It was in this capacity that he became involved in the evacuation and detention of Japanese Americans...
...Knocking out the gas chambers would have eliminated what the Nazis themselves believed was the most efficacious method for eliminating Untermenschen, and repairing the facilities would have required the Germans to divert resources used elsewhere...
...His role in helping to integrate West Germany into the European community and the Atlantic alliance is widely acknowledged...
...In his testimony before the Congressional Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in 1981, and in his Op-Ed piece in the New York Times this past April 10, McCloy continues to justify the policy on grounds of military necessity...
...But he could not explain to Mintz why, as late as November 18, 1944, he was still denying the request to bomb Auschwitz by claiming that American bombers would have to fly, unescorted, from as far away as Britain...
...He has not admitted that certain decisions now appear, in the light of new evidence, to have been wrong or mistaken...
...and he opposed further payments because the war "caused disruption in all our lives...
...None of McCloy's critics claims that the Assistant Secretary of War acted alone...
...What is at issue is how the past— for many, a nightmarish past—is to be judged...
...A willful disregard of the facts that had been gathered by the prosecution, combined with the outbreak of the Korean War six months earlier, fueled speculation that McCloy's generosity was due to the need to strengthen the German economy and encourage the German people to oppose Communism...
...The Kennedy School of Government claims that McCloy's involvement in the reconstruction of postwar Germany merits the use of his name on its scholarships...
...Even as the War Department was telling desperate Jewish organizations that striking Auschwitz would divert air power from "decisive operations elsewhere," Professor Wyman notes, this very area and industrial complex was "a hotbed of United States bombing activity...
...To have regarded the Jews deported to Auschwitz in as precious a light as the medieval buildings of Rothenburg might have required a little imagination, but it would not have obliged McCloy to alter the priority of a quick military victory...
...It is disappointing, even though it is assumed that institutions behave that way, that Harvard professes to impugn historical evidence that clouds "an otherwise exemplary reputation...
...But the student pleas to erase McCloy's name from the scholarship program were rejected...
...Sort of like protective custody...
...For there is a simple answer to the question of why Auschwitz was never bombed...
...The dean further objected to the application of "today's sensitivities and standards of conduct to evidence available after the fact, to condemn choices made by statesmen of the past...
...Perhaps Alan Brinkley put it most concisely: "Long before the term became fashionable, McCloy had become a leading 'Arabist,' issuing warnings—which fell, at the time, on deaf ears—that American support of Israel should be tempered by a recognition of the economic importance of the oil-producing countries...
...McCloy returned to the United States in 1952, performing a number of important political tasks while practicing both banking and law...
...His decisions and actions could be found wanting even by the standards of the 1940s and early 1950s...
...Although historians of the 1940s, such as Yale's John Morton Blum and Williams' James MacGregor Burns, have characterized the treatment of the Japanese Americans as the worst single violation of Constitutional rights in American history, McCloy expresses no regret, no remorse...
...McCloy himself had left Wall Street for a sub-Cabinet position, while Japanese Americans lived behind barbed wire, sharing rooms with strangers, using communal toilets and showers, in some of the most desolate areas of the United States...
...Dean Allison concluded that the charges against McCloy were "unfounded" and "no more than a familiar litany of exaggerations," and added that the grievances voiced by the Jewish and Asian-American students were "truly unworthy of informed debate in an educated community...
...No documents support this...
...Had the White House complied with the advice that McCloy and his Aramco clients proposed, the debacle that might have befallen America's ally can only be imagined...
...But McCloy was hardly alone in his belief in the necessity and justice of the incarceration...
...one survivor told Martin Gilbert of "the sensation of being totally abandoned...
...But the Assistant Secretary of War was much more ingenious in coming up with reasons for inaction than in perceiving military and humanitarian advantages in bombing Auschwitz...
...The careers of Roosevelt, Churchill and Warren are not under review in this controversy...
...In a letter to the High Commissioner, Eleanor Roosevelt asked why so many Nazis were being released from prison...
...The protests radiated beyond the Harvard campus and were amplified in the New York Times and the Washington Post...
...Far more important has been his actual response to the German racism that produced what Churchill called "probably the greatest and most horrible single crime ever committed in the whole history of the world...
...The judgment was based upon the primacy of a policy formulated that January by the War Department itself, which maintained that "victims of enemy oppression" would not be rescued unless as "the direct result of military operations conducted with the objective of defeating the armed forces of the enemy...
...In 19S0 victims had been paid $38 million in damage claims and for loss of property...
...By the late spring or early summer of 1944, when full knowledge of the nature of Auschwitz finally coincided with the Allied capacity to rain destruction upon it, most of the European Jews had already been annihilated...
...Yet McCloy balked at doing so...
...The system within which McCloy and his clients moved so easily is also one that permits AIPAC to press a pro-Zionist viewpoint as forcefully as it can, and neither side is obliged to see the entire picture...
...one of its historians, Professor Roger Daniels of the University of Cincinnati, has identified McCloy as "the key figure in the decision for mass evacuation...
...But it might be noted that Warren came to regret his advocacy of the Japanese American incarceration, to the point of tears—in sharp contrast to McCloy's remorseless justification of that policy...
...Oberhauser had not professed to being coerced into working at the women's concentration camp...
...Industrial facilities slightly further away were constantly pounded...
...He was educated in private schools and at Amherst, fought bravely in the First World War and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1921...
...The prison sentences of all the convicted industrialists were reduced to time already served, even though they had freely chosen to do what would have been unimaginable in the European civilization prior to the Nazi era: the employment of slave labor...
...If McCloy was not responsible for the decision, then he was directly involved in a deceitful bureaucratic run-around that only obstructed Jewish rescue efforts...
...But they were Gentiles...
...In considering the appeals of 104 defendants in 12 cases, the commission acted with such astonishing speed (less than four months) that it did not bother to consult with prosecutors like Brigadier General Telford Taylor, nor did it re-examine the crates of documentary evidence against the defendants that the Nuremberg prosecution had so painstakingly amassed...
...In the 1970s American foreign policy was increasingly shaped by dependence upon oil from the Middle East, and the international oil companies wanted that policy to appear less sympathetic toward Israel...
...Ever since May 1944, the Americans' 15th Army Air Force, operating from its base in Loggia, Italy, was striking at industrial targets in the area of Auschwitz...
...The most notorious case was that of Krupp, who had been affiliated with the SS as early as 1931 (a year before Adolf Eichmann joined it) and who had succeeded his senile father as head of the armaments combine in 1943...
...Professional responsibility required that he represent his clients' interests as vigorously as possible...
...As Wyman has pointed out, "a severe transportation shortage" did not prevent American and British forces from transporting 150,000 Polish, Yugoslavian and Greek war refugees to safety in North Africa and the Middle East...
...After that war McCloy served as U.S...
...Rather than limit praise to that particular diplomatic achievement, however, the Harvard spokesmen have felt compelled to defend without qualification the entirety of McCloy's public record...
...That is precisely why his public service raises vexing issues, questions that cannot be suppressed...
...But this defense of McCloy's conduct also collapses under the weight of the evidence...
...Soon after the unprovoked Egyptian attack on Israel that began on Yom Kippur, McCloy sent a memorandum to the White House in the name of all four chairmen of the Aramco oil group...
...Professor Feingold has called this letter "one of the most tragic documents to come out of the Holocaust," and wondered "what 'more vindictive action' than Auschwitz was possible...
...but McCloy on that occasion had advised Goldmann to try his luck with the British representative of the Allied High Command...
...McCloy's assertion—then and now—that the bombing of the killing facilities would have been "impracticable" and a diversion from regular military operations is therefore false...
...Such stubbornness makes little strategic sense, because the Asian-American and Jewish student protesters have demanded neither infallibility nor sainthood...
...The explosions were so severe that the industrial plants at Auschwitz itself shook...
...and shortly after the 1968 election, McCloy joined a delegation of oilmen that called on Richard Nixon and explained to him the need to mollify the Arab regimes...
...He has served as president of the World Bank, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, chairman of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, Chairman of the board of the Ford Foundation...
...It was charged with the task of reviewing the sentences passed down at Nuremberg, to hear new evidence and to ensure that similar punishments were meted out for similar crimes...
...In his reaffirmation of the decision to honor McCloy, Graham Allison stated that "every public official who has exercised significant responsibility has taken actions that were controversial at the time, and appear questionable in hindsight...
...Neither Italian Americans nor German Americans were charged with group guilt...
...This denial of Krupp's culpability suggested to Tom Bower, a British student of denazification, that "McCloy had clearly not read the evidence...
...he was also restored to control of the largest privately-owned company in Europe...
...Only one of the Flying Fortresses was brought down by enemy fire...
...Less well-known is the pressure he applied to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to increase the reparations sums to be owed to the Jewish survivors of Nazi oppression and brutality...
...Both Jewish and Asian-American student groups voiced opposition to the Kennedy School's decision to use a $2 million grant from the Volkswagen Foundation for John J. McCloy Scholarships for West German students...
Vol. 8 • September 1983 • No. 8
