by James Grant
Matriarchy, as opposed to matrimony, was a favorite institution of Baruch’s. Miss Boyle, the petite, elegantly dressed secretary whom Byrnes addressed as “General,” looked after his money, managed his office, aggressively collected overdue debts from his friends, and watched the stock market for him in his absence. At home, Miss Higgins guarded his health and steered his social life, which became perfunctory. As his deafness worsened, his world closed in. Old friendships went untended and loneliness weighed on him. (Offering his advisory services to General Marshall in the summer of 1944, Baruch reported that he was summering in Port Washington, Long Island, and that he was all alone.) Swope and he had been seeing less of each other, a situation that Baruch explained had stemmed from his loss of hearing. He wrote him on Armistice Day 1943:
My increasing deafness saps my physical and nervous system and it is making me more of a recluse—not by wish—but because of the strain in carrying on my work. The ordinary amenities, contacts, meals at which several persons are present, and evenings at the theatre at which large assemblies are present are entirely denied to me. I recognize that I can preserve a certain amount of usefulness, but when the evening comes I am tired. I still am able to function as well, or even better than I ever did, up to the late afternoon.
Even while running on reduced capacity Baruch got an extraordinary amount of work done. After the rubber report he turned to studies of manpower and ordnance production, and he successfully joined in opposing an Administration scheme to conscript labor. Hancock and he surveyed the West Coast labor situation in 1943, and they drafted a report on postwar economic conversion in 1944. Following the postwar report, which took the then-controversial line that peace would bring prosperity, not bust, he contributed $1.1 million for research into rehabilitative medicine and made suggestions for the treatment of returning veterans. Accompanied by physician, nurse, and publicist, he flew to London for talks with the British government and to Germany for a fast look at the Third Army early in 1945. General George S. Patton Jr. pronounced his seventy-four-year-old visitor “just as keen as can be” and amusedly watched him briefing the correspondents, telling them “nothing for a long time.”
Consulting is an ethereal business, and it isn’t always easy to assess results. Judging by the testimonials of top officials, however, Baruch made a genuine contribution to the war effort by giving advice, making peace among jealous factions, and expediting bureaucratic processes. Donald Nelson, for instance, wrote that his advice on priorities was utterly vindicated by events; Rosenman called him “a kind of Mecca for troubled officials.” Admiral Emory S. Land, chairman of the Maritime Commission, said that he got him the steel he needed—“The greatest asset I ever had in my maritime career was Mr. Baruch. . . .” In 1945 Under Secretary of War Patterson paid him this tribute:
Dear Chief—
I am thinking of you this Christmas Day, and of the great help you have so freely given me for more than five years, ever since I came to the War Department. I made many mistakes—mostly when I did not follow your advice or when I acted without getting it. I cannot recall a single case where you gave me a bad steer. The thought that you would give me an approving nod has always been a great source of strength.
Encomia flowed in from private citizens too, and from foreign leaders. When Herman Baruch took up duties as American ambassador to Portugal in 1945, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the Portuguese ruler, hastened to express the opinion that Bernard Baruch was one of the “great modern thinkers.” Earlier, a listener to Fulton Lewis had responded to some on-the-air praise of Baruch with a telegraphic suggestion:
THIS BARAUCH [sic] GUYS OPINION HAS BEEN REQUESTED SEVERAL TIMES AND IN THE LAST PRESENT IMPORTANT OCCASION WARRANTS OR TO ME INDICATES IF HE IS NOT A JESUSCHRIST HE AT LEAST MUST HAVE SOMETHING ON THE BALL AND IF HE HAS IT DARNED GOOD TIME TO PUT HIM IN THE WHITEHOUSE AND PUT THIS MONKEY EX-ASSEMBLYMAN OUT IN THE PARK FEEDING THE SQUIRRELS AND THE BIRDS IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.
As peace came into view, Baruch made an assortment of statements and predictions on a variety of subjects. Some of his best predictive work was contained in his and Hancock’s postwar report, which they wrote for Jimmy Byrnes, then head of the Office of War Mobilization. (This is not to be confused with the Office of Economic Stabilization, which Baruch had declined to direct. On his recommendation, Byrnes was appointed instead; when Byrnes resigned to head OWM, he suggested Baruch to succeed him at OES. Again Baruch refused, but he did agree to serve as Byrne’s official adviser at OWM.) In their report, Baruch and Hancock proposed a speedy liquidation of surplus government property at war’s end. Interestingly, they warned against sales to “speculators.” They put in a good word for capitalism—“There has been too much loose parroting of the slogan, that if individual enterprise fails to provide jobs for everyone, it must be replaced by some one of the other systems that are around”—and they issued a bullish forecast. It was that five to seven years of good times were in the offing despite the parade of returning veterans and the scaling down of government spending. Coming as it did amid numerous predictions of renewed depression, this idea was considered daringly optimistic.
What Baruch hoped most to contribute late in the war was a policy-making voice in the forging of the peace, but it was not to be. He held firm opinions on the diplomatic situation. For instance, he agreed with Henry Morgenthau that Germany should be “deindustrialized” and for a time he endorsed the Secretary’s Carthaginian scheme to reduce the enemy to a life of farming and husbandry. Fearing a revival of “sweated labor” and “subsidized exports,” he prescribed harsh controls for Japan too. Toward the Soviet Union he asked cooperation and restraint. He had none of his friend Churchill’s loathing of Bolsheviks. On the other hand, the advances scored by the British socialists did give him a turn, and he opposed England’s application for a large American loan, or gift, on the grounds that the proceeds would merely serve to underwrite the collectivization of British industry. With the exception of his mission to London in March 1945, no important diplomatic assignment was proffered him. He sat out the Yalta Conference at home amidst his collection of documents from Versailles. These he had had bound, indexed, and cross-indexed for ease of reference in case he were ever called to service in a time like 1919, but the call didn’t come.
Baruch was in London, in his rooms at Claridge’s, chatting with his doctor, when he heard the news of Roosevelt’s death. The next day, April 13, 1945, he and his party, augmented by Sam Rosenman, boarded a plane for the flight home. Shortly after the Roosevelt funeral, Baruch visited President Truman to report on his talks with the British. He saw Truman intermittently after that—he spent an hour with him on May 8, the President’s sixty-first birthday and V-E Day rolled into one—but it was clear that his influence at the White House was on the wane. In the summer of 1945, in a conversation with Henry A. Wallace, Baruch repeatedly mentioned “the President.” Interrupting himself, he would say, “By the President, I am referring to Roosevelt, of course.”
54. He said that the money was to bring wounded Americans home.
55. The young man stayed in the Army and became a hero. In Europe in the Second World War he commanded infantry battalions and was decorated with the Purple Heart and Silver Star. He retired as a colonel in 1955. “In my opinion,” he wrote when asked about the incident, “were it not for the efforts of the great Mr. Bernard M. Baruch, I would not have graduated USMA. . . .” He asked that his name not be divulged; his family knew nothing about the row.
56. The New York Times carried it, complete with a reference to her friendship with Hopkins, but without mention of the suicide note to Baruch, on page 34 of the edition of Saturday, October 22, 1938.
57. Baruch was distressed to read, or perhaps to be informed, that The New Yorker had put his exact words inside quotation marks. At eight in the morning on the day the piece appeared he called Hellman to complain and to threaten to report him to the magazine’s publisher, Raoul Fleischmann. “You have quoted me dir
ectly,” said Baruch, as Hellman subsequently quoted him directly again. “I am never quoted directly.”
58. As the most visible member of the committee, Baruch was the recipient of unsolicited technical suggestions from the public. A man who identified himself as a Rothschild and a former Manhattan neighbor of Baruch’s ventured: “Though in rather poor health and not getting about much I have however not very long ago visited several large Hotels and Clubs and everywhere noticed acres of rubber mats on the floors that could be dispensed with.” Baruch replied that he was given to understand that there was little scrap value in doormats.
59. Turner Catledge of The New York Times was offered a public-relations job during the war by Byrnes. When Catledge demurred, pointing out that the government paid only $9,000 a year which he couldn’t afford, Byrnes said not to worry about that. Baruch would provide a supplement. Not wishing to be in anybody’s pay but the government’s, if he were going to work for the government, Catledge refused.
Fifteen
The Atom and All
On March 16, 1946, following a long interview with his Secretary of State, President Harry S. Truman made a decision about a high-level appointment and jotted a cautionary note to himself about the appointee. The note said, “Asked old man Baruch to act as US representative on UNO Atomic Committee. He wants to run the world, the moon, and maybe Jupiter—but we’ll see.”
Notwithstanding what the President took to be Baruch’s extraterrestrial ambition, Baruch himself was disposed to decline the job. When the commission was offered, he was five months away from his seventy-sixth birthday and was tired from the strains of the war. He was capable of doing some work in the morning and some more in the afternoon, but he was unavailable in the evening. Sometimes he napped after lunch. He wore a hearing aid, with which he fidgeted. Late in 1945 he had suffered a gastric-ulcer attack and had been put on a bland diet. Because he was old, people mistook some of his lifelong eccentricities for senility or balminess. (Treasury Secretary Morgenthau once briefed some subordinates on a baffling conversation he had had with Baruch concerning the postwar world: “I am confused because the man would talk about ten different things, and really wouldn’t complete any thought, and the only thought I really got out of him was that reparations is more important and everything else has to wait. Do I leave you people confused?” A voice: “Yes, sir.” But Baruch had probably confused his collocutors on the Unlisted Committee of the New York Stock Exchange in the same way forty years earlier.) There was also the problem of the rustiness of his physics, a subject which he had last studied in 1888.
However, there was nothing bigger in the world than the atomic bomb and nothing closer to the dream of Woodrow Wilson than the new United Nations Organization. Baruch, who had been hurt by his omission from postwar planning at Yalta and Potsdam, was moved to accept. Then he almost resigned before he really started.
The broad outline of American atomic policy had been enunciated by Jimmy Byrnes, the Secretary of State, in January 1946. Byrnes declared that so monstrous a weapon as those that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki should belong to no nation and that the United States was prepared to surrender its bombs and secrets to a properly constituted international authority. The job of working this idea into policy fell to a blue-ribbon committee, which made a report in March. It proposed creation of a new Atomic Development Authority to exercise world control over atomic energy. The Authority would take title to uranium mines, processing works, and manufacturing plants, including the only three A-bomb factories in existence, all in the United States. It would disperse atomic stockpiles and laboratories to ensure that no one nation gained a strategic monopoly. The committee, which was headed by Dean Acheson, Under Secretary of State, and David E. Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, put national security in new, atomic-age terms:
The real protection will lie in the fact that if any nation seizes the plants or the stockpiles that are situated in its territory, other nations will have similar facilities and materials situated within their own borders so that the act of seizure need not place them at a disadvantage.
The committee acknowledged that its plan might seem Utopian, but it anticipated that objection with two points. In the first place the United States was bound to lose its bomb monopoly sooner or later, and it was better to surrender it sooner on advantageous terms. And in the second, no one had proposed a better idea.
Early in March Baruch was in Hobcaw to rest, to plan some congressional testimony he was about to give on inflation, and to escape the begging telephone calls of his relatives, which oppressed him. By the middle of the month he had weighed the atomic-energy invitation and told Byrnes he would take it. Later he had a turn. On the morning of Tuesday, March 26, the newspapers carried a leaked account of the new Acheson-Lilienthal report (as the committee’s brief was called). A few days later Baruch was informed by Sir Alexander Cadogan, the British delegate to the United Nations atomic-energy talks, that the report would be offered as a basis of discussion by the United States in the forthcoming session. Baruch, who thought he had a right to learn American policy from his own government first, approached Acheson for an explanation. The Under Secretary replied that Cadogan was right, to which Baruch replied that Acheson would have to find “another messenger boy, because Western Union didn’t take anybody at my age.”
Next Baruch sought clarification from the White House. To his question of who was to formulate policy on the bomb, the Acheson-Lilienthal group or the representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, the President genially answered, “Hell, you are!” The crisis was skirted.
Truman thought Baruch was egocentric and devious, but he must have sensed his utility as a political salesman. In March 1946, when the United States proposed to relinquish its secret weapon, the Soviet Union’s wartime military strength was largely intact and East European nations were beginning to fall victim to Communist subversion. In February Stalin had charged that the forces of “monopoly capitalism” had made the first two world wars inevitable, and he announced an ambitious new five-year plan to prepare his country for any future struggle.
Baruch was an ideal proponent for a policy as controversial as the Truman A-bomb initiative because what he had said in the past was so often unobjectionable. He was a patriot, an elder statesman, and an advocate both of capital and labor. He championed preparedness for war, winning the peace, stable prices, a balanced budget, hard work, and humanity in the conduct of affairs. There was something comforting in the sight of him sitting cross-legged on a park bench, one pants leg hiked up to reveal an old-fashioned, high-topped black shoe, which (although the fact had not been publicized) he had bought from Sears. John Francis Neylan, an attorney friend of his from San Francisco, could write Baruch with as much truth as flattery that “the people of this country may disagree with some of your views, but they believe overwhelmingly in your intelligence, your integrity, and your courage. . . .”
Almost everybody could agree with him on something. Just before calling on Truman, for instance, he had testified on inflation before the House Banking and Currency Committee. Almost simultaneously he managed to endorse “free enterprise” on the one hand and an extension of wartime wage-price controls, a ukase against strikes and lockouts, and a “High Court of Commerce” on the other. (Once, in a feat of concision, he distilled this contradiction into a single sentence: “I have unlimited faith in the American people taking care of themselves—if they are told what to do and why.”) Coincidentally Baruch testified on the same day as Acheson presented the Acheson-Lilienthal report to an executive session of the joint Senate-House Committee on Atomic Energy. Next day The New York Times printed stories of both events on the front page, but it displayed a report of Baruch’s testimony more prominently than it did a leaked account of Acheson’s.
At a press conference in March the atomic ambassador-designate jokingly reminded newsmen that he never did his own work and that he had already assembled a tea
m of associates to help him with his new job. He introduced Swope and Hancock, his wheelhorses, both of whom he had known since the First World War; Ferdinand Eberstadt, the Wall Streeter whom Donald Nelson had fired from the War Production Board and who had since returned to investment banking; and Fred Searls Jr., president of Newmont Mining Corporation. The Acheson-Lilienthal committee had had no mining man; the Baruch team as yet had no scientist.
At the beginning there was more friction between the two American groups than there was between either one of them and the Soviets. Acheson, Lilienthal, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the committee’s top scientific consultant, all regretted Baruch’s appointment. Lilienthal’s diarial reaction to the news was, “. . . I was quite sick.”