Just Your Average Aristocrat
Bird, Kai
Just Your Average Aristocrat David E. Bruce had money, charm, and an unoriginal mind by Kai Bird THE LATE AMERICAN DIPLOmat David K.E. Bruce was neither as important in a policy sense,...
...There is no quarreling with personal tastes...
...The communist monolith, in other words, sometimes could not control the actions of its own quislings...
...As Undersecretary of State during the height of the McCarthy period, Bruce expressed contempt for the senator’s tactics-but sanctioned the State Department’s loyalty board investigations which, of course, ruined the careers of hundreds of individuals...
...Lankford is enthralled by Bruce’s lifestyle-the Georgetown dinner parties, the wine cellar, the museum-quality art collection-all of which was made possible by inherited wealth and his first marriage to the daughter of a Mellon...
...Bruce embraced all the conventional wisdom about the early Cold War...
...Historians continue to argue these issues, but Lankford writes as if ignorant of the vast critical scholarship available today on the origins of the Cold War...
...Aka didn’t like sex and turned out to be a slightly batty hypochondriac...
...Just Your Average Aristocrat David E. Bruce had money, charm, and an unoriginal mind by Kai Bird THE LATE AMERICAN DIPLOmat David K.E...
...But like many Establishment figures, he decided that once a commitment had been made, Washington had to stick it out...
...ankford relates that the natives of Charlotte County used to say that there were three kinds of folks in that part of Virginia-white folks, black folks and the Bruces...
...I want Mammy to bring all of my shooting clothes and a perfectly good pair of leggings to the house-.I want you to prepare dinner...Please have all these things in readiness under pain of my great displeasure...
...When President Woodrow Wilson finally took the country into World War I, Bruce joined the army and was shipped to Europe...
...To his great disappointment, he arrived too late to experience the horrors of the Western Front...
...This is a shame, because Lankford has toiled arduously and obviously admires his man...
...Lankford writes of this incident with studied understatement that Bruce’s “emphasis on style had its limitations...
...Mer the war, Bruce wandered through Europe, and became enamored of upper-crust French society...
...David Kirkpatrick Este Bruce was born in 1898...
...commitment...
...he became an aide to ‘Wild’ Bill Donovan, chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS...
...He came to love his father-in-law more than his wife, and when a tax scandal enveloped Mellon in the 1930s, Bruce blamed Franklin Roosevelt, that traitor to his class...
...He punched another Establishment ticket by spending the summers of 1915 and 1916 at the Plattsburg, NX military ‘preparedness’ training camp where he played soldier with the likes of John J. McCloy, Hamilton Fish Jr., Elihu Root Jr...
...senator...
...Surely Bruce was in a position to know of this, but Lankford does not address the issue...
...and Teddy Roosevelt’s sons...
...Bruce was neither as important in a policy sense, nor as interesting a man, as Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, George Kennan, John J. McCloy or many other icons of the old Establishment...
...Sallie Pisani’s 1991 book, The CM nizd the Marshall Plan, among other sources, reports that something like five percent of the Marshall Plan’s local currency counter-part funds went to fmance Wisner’s army of European journalists, civil servants, politicians, and other agents of influence...
...Unfortunately, Lankford has written a nice society biography that, like its hero, manages to take the reader through some of the most contentious history of our times with barely a bump...
...This love marriage gave him access to one of the largest family fortunes in the world...
...Only World War I1 rescued him from boredom...
...But Lankford makes no effort to say what happened on Bruce’s watch...
...By this time, his father, a conservative Democrat, had become a U.S...
...Lankford writes that he “easily fit the definition of a frivolous reactionary in the eyes of the decade’s earnest intellectuals, who were themselves besotted by the Soviet and Fascist experiments.’’ (Lankford clearly thinks a “frivolous reactionary” compares favorably to those “earnest intellectuals...
...KAI BIRD, author of The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment, is writing a biography of William and McGeorge Bundy...
...Over the next 18 years, Bruce took to discreet philandering andever the dilettante-spent a little time in the Foreign Service, and then occupied himself with his investments and advising Andrew Mellon about his art acquisitions...
...After the war, by now in his late forties, he held a succession of diplomatic posts which kept him in Europe for nearly two decades...
...Lankford’s account of Bruce’s role in the Berlin crisis of 1958-61 is drearily conventional and ignores a wealth of Soviet and East German archival material released in recent years...
...Eventually Bruce returned to America, studied law, passed his bar exam, and in 1924 effortlessly got himself elected to the Maryland house of delegates...
...He never protested, and of course, he never went public with what Lankford calls his “conflicted feelings...
...Mellon had taken enormous tax deductions on paintings he had donated to a Mellon charitable trust-except the paintings remained hanging on Mellon’s (and Bruce’s) walls...
...Accessible through the Woodrow Wilson Center, these documents suggest it was the East German leadership-and not Nikita Khrushchev-that provoked the crisis...
...Ever the loyal apparatchik, Bruce agreed to work for the Nixonlssinger team as its Paris negotiator in 1970-71...
...Lankford writes uncritically of Bruce’s diplomatic career, even though the list of Bruce’s misjudgments and failures is not short...
...Bruce was a much over-rated figure...
...But he was certainly ubiquitous, a charming presence through many a Cold War crisis...
...Lankford provides numerous examples of the boy’s “unpremeditated arrogance...
...Finally, Bruce was also wrong on Vietnam...
...I am sorry to write such a sloppy letter, but my time is taken up with important business...
...Stationed in London, he fell in love with the ravishing Evangeline Bell and finally asked his wife for a divorce...
...So, as his biographer, Nelson D. Lankford could have made a useful contribution to the growing field of Establishment studies...
...Later in the OS, he had doubts about whether Viemam was worth a US...
...Long afterward,” Lankford writes, “he could hardly speak FDR’s name without anger...
...To be sure, part of what rankles me in his narrative is that what Lankford admires in David Bruce-his old-world, antebellum aristocratic style-strikes me as the least attractive aspect of the man’s character...
...In contrast to George Kennan, he inflated the Soviet military threat, misdiagnosed Soviet intentions and believed any steps towards German unification or neutrality would endanger European peace...
...Drawing on his OSS experience, Lankford quotes Bruce as favoring such covert actions as “subsidy of native papers” to counter Soviet propaganda...
...And in a detailed discussion of Bruce’s involvement in the Marshall Plan, he leaves the reader completely unaware of the tangled web of financial relationships between Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination (an early free-wheeling covert arm of the CIA) and the Marshall Plan...
...In 1926, he married the nation’s richest woman, Ailsa Mellon, daughter of Treasury Secretary Andrew W Mellon...
...An exaggerated notion of the Soviet menace led Bruce to countenance extraordinary -and sometimes extra-legal-means to thwart it...
...After visiting Alfried Krupp, he remarked that his host was “about the last man one would casually think of as a war criminall’ Convinced that Albert Speer was wrongly tried and convicted, Bruce went to Spandau prison, vigorously shook Speer’s hand and said, ‘You aren’t forgotten...
...Lankford, however, is so determined that Bruce’s view of the German problem was correct that he suggests, that “the fears Bruce expressed about German reunification and neutrality may yet prove prescient...
...The marriage quickly soured...
...It was obviously not his intention, but Lankford’s narrative will convince many readers that the Honorable David K.E...
...Private school was followed by college at Princeton where he partied with F. Scott Fitzgerald...
...His diplomacy was not only hitless, but he lent his “gravitas” to an administration that needlessly prolonged the war...
...He grew up in Baltimore, but spent many of his summers at the family’s V i a horse-country mansion, Staunton H~llL...
...Lankford acknowledges that Bruce “bore part of the burden, and the blame too, for the work of these tribunals...
...No doubt a gentleman, he hardly ever had an original thought in his head, and never, ever acted out of turn...
...At age 14, Bruce wrote home, “I will arrive Wednesday night, and I want the following preparations made for me...
...He fails to discuss, for instance, the well-documented CIA funds distributed in France and Italy to influence the elections of this period...
...In 1949, he urged Washington to extend military aid to the French in their colonial war agamst Ho Chi Minh...
...As ambassador to West Germany in the late 19SOs, Bruce displayed gross insensitivity on the issue of Nazi war crimes...
...In an early artidation of the ’domino theory,’ he cabled Washington that if France did not stop communism in Indochina, “Burma and Siam will fall like over-ripe apples...
...Even if you agree with the author’s “triumphalist” perspective on the Cold War, this book is neither very compelling biography nor original history...
...Young David grew up “imbibing the Old South mystique that the family’s plantation evoked...
...No wonder the Establishment of the 19SOs-when the premium on consensus was easily maintained-so liked this unflappable Virginian aristocrat that they gave him one plum job after another...
Vol. 29 • May 1997 • No. 5
