ON POLITICAL BOOKS: The Coward and the Glory
Thomas, Evan
The Coward and the Glory How the Chairman of the Board toadied to the top of the establishment by Evan Thomas He was, in Richard Rovere’s famous characterzation, “The Chairman of the Board of...
...McCloy urged President Eisenhower to stand up to Senator Joe McCarthy, but the analogy he cited was revealing: He likened McCarthy ’s bullyboy tactics to those used by congressional investigators against Wall Street financiers in the thirties...
...It was later estimated that a few bomber raids could have saved 100,000 Jews from the gas chambers...
...Or was it...
...Precisely...
...McCloy never accepted responsibility for this tragedy, or earlier ones that occurred on his watch, like the Nisei internment...
...In many ways, his Horatio Alger story is admirable, even heartwarming: the poor boy who came to embody the American meritocracy without succumbing to hubris along the way...
...As a boy, hat in hand, McCloy knocked on doors in the WASP oasis of Northeast Harbor, Maine, offering to do chores for the summer magnates...
...This is in some ways too harsh a judgment...
...I was just a leg man,” he said...
...Offered an armchair that had belonged to Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, McCloy demurred...
...The book reads like a long term paper McCloy might have written about himself...
...Bird does take McCloy to task for specific errors of judgment on the Nisei internment and on Vietnam, where McCloy allowed himself to be seduced by the military and LBJ despite initial misgivings about the war...
...The Coward and the Glory How the Chairman of the Board toadied to the top of the establishment by Evan Thomas He was, in Richard Rovere’s famous characterzation, “The Chairman of the Board of the American Establishment...
...At the time, however, McCloy felt he could not afford to divert Allied airplanes from other targets...
...As a student at Amherst College and Harvard Law School, McCloy was a grind who plodded rather than shined...
...perceived betters...
...When he told President Kennedy that it was necessary for the oil companies to work together, the president picked up the phone and told the attorney general (Kennedy’s brother, Robert) to grant McCloy a blanket exemption from the antitrust laws...
...As chairman of Chase and then as senior partner of Milbank, Tweed, McCloy functioned as the de facto ambassador between major oil companies and the governments of both the United States and the Arab oil-producing nations...
...Simon & Schustec $27.50...
...His cheerful countenance always seemed to aim up at his betters-never down, the direction from which he came...
...After all, McCloy was a statesman, not a lawyer...
...At times, those bothersome rules included the Constitution...
...John J. McCloy was chairman also of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as Chase Bank (the Rockefellers’ bank), president of the World Bank during the Marshall Plan era, the American proconsul who rebuilt Germany after the war (traveling about in a private train that had belonged to Hitler), the Wall Street lawyer to the Seven Sisters oil companies during the sixties and seventies, and a kind of Grand Vizier to Cold War presidents from Truman to Nixon...
...Kai Bird...
...In the years after the war, McCloy was bitterly criticized by Japanese and Jewish groups for his insensitivity...
...Busily jotting notes, he could resolve an impasse by breaking down the various arguments and fitting them back together in a design that suited everyone...
...confided to a colleague that “McCloy knows so many people in government circles . . . he might be the way to get information from various quarters about the matter without seeking it or revealing his hand...
...McCloy regarded the bomb as a “primordial weapon” and, after the war, pushed, again vainly, for international control of the nuclear secret...
...they were merely concerned with the process-how to make the bureaucracy work better to face off against the Soviet Union...
...Yet one wonders, reading this thorough, careful, and overly long biography of McCloy*, whether our hero wasn’t a bit too humble-at least toward his * The Chairman: John J. McCloy: The Making of the American Establishment...
...The most revealing testament to his conceptual abilities were the Godkin lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1953, just as the Cold War was locking in...
...As with General Motors, what was good for McCloy was good for America...
...He was in his career a doer, not a thinker...
...But, judging from the evidence provided by Bird, he remained at heart a chore boy, tipping his forelock to Mr...
...But McCloy was genuinely humble...
...But when the interests of the oil companies and the United States diverged in the energy crises of the seventies, McCloy was left uncomfortably and unsuccessfully trying to referee...
...His motto was to “run with the swift” in the hopes that one day he would “finish second...
...He could sit at a conference table with a roomful of feuding government officials and amiably but firmly prod them into consensus...
...still, his moral sensitivities were a lot more likely to be aroused over the rights of the powerful than of the downtrodden...
...Throughout World War 11, he helped his boss, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, circumvent the various rules and regulations that stood in the way of mounting the war effort...
...Philadelphia egos McCloy could be principled...
...Organizing for victory was McCloy’s strength...
...Rockefeller as he asked for the tip...
...McCloy called it “yellow padding...
...But reading anew about McCloy makes me want to explore questions that merely nagged at me when I was writing about him some years ago...
...As a lawyer, McCloy was particularly adept at skirting the law...
...Rarely does he delve into McCloy’s character...
...McCloy could be blinkered, but he was not amoral...
...Rather, the author lays out his copious research in a clear and somewhat plodding fashion...
...she was a hairdresser to Philadelphia society matrons...
...Bird presents these facts yet refrains from passing too many judgments...
...the war effort came first, and in war, moral concerns become mere sentiment...
...McCloy was not overtly bigoted...
...It was McCloy who argued, albeit unsuccessfully, to warn the Japanese before striking them with the atom bomb...
...mother “did heads,” he liked to say...
...In our group biography of a half-dozen pillars of the old foreign policy establishment, Walter Isaacson and I did not delve too deeply into McCloy’s character and morality (and I should add that Bird’s research is more thorough than ours...
...It was McCloy, more than any official, who guided and sanctioned the internment of Japanese Americans...
...The same can be said about a book that I co-wrote in 1986, The Wise Men...
...At times, McCloy, the government servant, and McCloy, the Wall Street lawyer/dealmaker, seem indistinguishable...
...McCloy was a modest man from modest circumstances...
...But the larger questions about McCloy’s life remain for the most part unexamined...
...I felt as if I were very much a looter,” he recalled...
...In explaining why he wanted to retain McCloy to advise him on an antitrust matter, John D. Rockefeller Jr...
...The wartime devastation of Germany depressed him...
...Too often, however, he was less concerned with direction than with getting there...
...Confronted by reporters when the issue of Japanese-American reparations came up in the mid-eighties, McCloy protested...
...his personal life is barely mentioned...
...It was, so long as McCloy helped to keep a steady stream of cheap oil flowing into the American economy...
...For all that, he was surprisingly humble...
...His Evan Thomas is the Newsweek Washington bureau chief and coauthor of The Wise Men...
...The president feared that the mullahs would seize American hostages as a result, but he caved in to McCloy’s lobbying campaign on behalf of his client, the Shah-whose country had $6 billion in deposits in McCloy’s bank, Chase...
...In 1965, in a memo to Lyndon Johnson entitled “Backing from the Establishment,” National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote, “The key to these men is McCloy...
...Even after he became the establishment’s all-purpose chairman, he remained self-effacing...
...Self-effacement is often a WASP affectation, a subtle reminder that modesty best befits greatness...
...he was called by some, sotto voce, a racist and an anti-Semite...
...Two weeks later the hostage crisis began...
...McCloy seemed able to serve two masters, but his patrons, the Rockefellers, had a flinty-eyed view of whose interests came first...
...In this role, he was afforded extraordinary latitude...
...The lectures made no attempt to ask why...
...Believing, correctly, that Germany had to be rebuilt rather than permanently punished, McCloy as German High Commissioner released war criminals like the h p p s with an alacrity that some found unseemly...
...The nadir came when McCloy, along with Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, badgered Jimmy Carter to grant asylum to the Shah of Iran in 1979...
...These questions arise most disturbingly in the overlap between McCloy’s public career and his business career...
...Thus he felt obliged to advise a young lawyer attending a debutante ball in Washington during the war that he could bring some bachelor friends, but out of deference to the hostess, “no Jews, please...
...McCloy became known as a great statesman...
...He brushed aside the legal qualms of Attorney General Francis Biddle...
...Rather, he tended to reflect the attitude of his class and time...
...Thus, McCloy refused to allow American bombers to blow up the rail heads at Auschwitz and Buchenwald...
Vol. 24 • March 1992 • No. 3
