Bernard Baruch

by James Grant

  Still Fulbright persisted, asking whether, in Baruch’s opinion, the committee had made a mistake in listening to Galbraith at all.

  Baruch answered indirectly.

  “It is like the fellow the bartender asked, ‘Is Mike good for a drink?’

  “He said, ‘Has he had it?’

  “He said, ‘Yes.’

  “ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he is good for it.’

  “I do not think there is any point in discussing it,” he went on. “I do not see any argument. I do not mean to be funny, but like all these things in life, we have got to accept them.” (In 1961, after Galbraith had been posted to India as US ambassador, Baruch wrote to confide his fears about the inflationary dangers of the Kennedy Administration’s policies. Some sixth sense stayed his hand, however, and the letter went unmailed.)

  Inflation worried Baruch as nothing else did in the 1950s and 1960s. He kept his stockbrokers on the phone to talk about it, and he once went on a one-man consumer strike against the price of red meat. He deplored the spinelessness of American institutions, especially colleges, in the face of the danger he saw so clearly. In 1949 he answered a fund-raising letter from the Stanford Medical School with the nonmedical complaint that most colleges were teaching Keynes and other economic faddists. Since he took such an eclectic approach to the cause of inflation—he lumped in greed, profiteering, interest-group politics, unsound money, and disregard of the national interest—he equated the creeping rise of prices with the all-around decline of standards. The world had gone bad, and inflation was the name he gave to the corrupting agent. After his death things took the turn he had predicted. For an instant in January 1980, the price of gold, which Alaska Juneau had mined for $20.67 an ounce, touched $875. By that time the purse in the annual Bernard Baruch Stakes at Saratoga was up to $50,000, double its size when the race was given his name in 1959.

  The Bernard Baruch Stakes was the second accolade that the sport of kings had presented to the adviser to Presidents within three years. On the eve of his eighty-sixth birthday, in August 1956, Saratoga had named the fifth race after Happy Argo, a ne’er-do-well colt that had been banned from racing in Ireland because of a proneness to “boring,” or cutting across a field; had landed in the United States and been bought by Baruch and reformed; and had excelled as a sprinter at Saratoga, Aqueduct, Jamaica, and Belmont in the late 1920s. (After he was put out to pasture Mary Boyle was given the job of searching the lists of entries on racing days for the names of his descendants so that Baruch could bet on them.) At Saratoga that August day a reporter had asked the guest of honor about his betting, and Baruch gave this answer: he was ahead of the game over the course of his life but not in 1956 and he had cut back on the size of his wagers. “I used to wait until I was convinced I was right, and then make a good bet,” he said. “Now my betting is very small.”

  In his eighties Baruch sometimes felt the need of more money. The estate he left was valued at $14,076,076.30,[61] but that was no more than he had before the First World War when prices were lower and income-tax rates nominal. He had given away some money—an estimate, probably a high one, from Robert Ruark in 1952 was $20 million—and since Texas Gulf he had made no more grand financial coups. Once he told his former nurse, Blanche Higgins, who had become Mrs. Jerome Van Ess, that he could no longer get by on his income: “It’s a terrible thing, you know, I have to draw into my principal.” Sometimes he talked about the money he might have made, saying, “You know, I could have been a really rich man.”

  In 1946, in the midst of the atomic-bomb negotiations, he sold his mansion at 1055 Fifth Avenue and bought what he described as a “small apartment” at 4 East 66th Street, overlooking Central Park. Baruch was speaking relatively. The mansion had had six stories, an elevator, ten baths, and thirty-two rooms, including an oval dining room, ballroom, smoking room lined with Norwegian pine, and solarium. The apartment had but a dozen rooms. A visitor in 1951 noticed that it contained a pair of exquisite Chinese Chippendale cabinets, two large oils by Chandor—one of Churchill, and the other of Baruch—a “eulogistic framed citation” from the Daughters of the Confederacy, a vase filled with yellow chrysanthemums, miscellaneous photographs of himself, and an inscribed photograph of Cardinal Spellman, who had been snapped in red vestments. In the bedroom there was a night table lined with bottles of pills.

  If he cut back at the racetrack (in 1948 a retired New York City fireman returned a roll of twenty-two $100 bills he had lost at the Turf & Field Club enclosure at Belmont) he was still capable in his eighties and nineties of buying and selling 10,000 shares in a single stock-market session. He talked to his best broker three or four times a day, and he could spend hours by the ticker in Miss Boyle’s office, feeding the tape through his hands. He read the papers as closely as he ever had—Swope, in 1955, called him the best newspaper reader of his acquaintance—and he knew where the market was.[62] If his broker reported offhandedly that such and such common had closed at 50¼, Baruch would be able to correct him emphatically—“It was an eighth.”

  When people asked him for money, an associate of Baruch’s remembered, “His eyes got very blue.” Annie Malone, his cook, was exposed to both the generous and the tightfisted sides of his personality. She was a friendly woman, and after the move to 4 East 66th Street she fell into the habit of giving leftover food to the elevator operator. Baruch, who had once or twice bailed her out of stock-market losses, was told of her generosity with his larder, and he asked her what she thought she was doing. She made the excuse that the food would only have gone to waste if she hadn’t given it away. Baruch said let it go to waste. For a while she followed orders, but then she resumed her old ways. One day Baruch inquired of the elevator man whether Annie was taking good care of him. He said that she certainly was—she’d just brought him his dinner. With that she was fired.

  The dismissal raised the question of what would become of a trust fund that Baruch had set up in her name. He consulted his lawyer, and together they decided that she could have the money if she really needed it. They asked Annie to come by to discuss the situation. She arrived, impeccably dressed. They told her that in order to receive the money, she would have to disclose her income. This she refused to do, and she flounced out of the office.

  Time passed, and Annie invited some friends to visit her in her new apartment. They arrived at a handsome building on West 72nd Street, off Central Park West, and announced to the doorman that they had come to see Miss Malone.

  “Oh,” he said, “Annie.”

  There was a cruel streak in Baruch that money could bring out. In the appraisal of his wife’s jewelry that was taken after her death, a sapphire ring for which she had paid the equivalent of $16,000 in London was valued at only $4,000. Baruch said it was impossible, but a second appraisal yielded that same result. This time the jeweler said that the sapphire was one of the finest synthetic cabochon stones he had ever seen. Annie had been duped.

  Some time after this discovery, Baruch happened to be sitting in his mansion with a secretary. On a nearby table was the ring, which he picked up and studied. For a moment, the secretary thought that he might give it to her.

  “You know,” he said finally, “Mrs. Baruch could wear an artificial stone and everybody would think it was real. You could wear a real one and everybody would think it was fake.”

  Yet when he did choose to be generous, Baruch could be forthcoming not only with money but also with extraordinary and spontaneous declarations of affection. E. D. Coblentz, editor of the San Francisco Call–Bulletin, and his wife heard from him out of the blue in March 1955—“You may wonder why I write you now. I don’t know. I was just thinking of you and what happy times we have had and what a wonderful tender friend you have been and that I love you both very much.”

  In November 1950 Baruch was the victim of an extortion attempt. An FBI agent who dropped by his apartment to investigate returned with a message from Baruch for the director of the Bureau in Washington: “Tell Mr.
Hoover that the Old Man is not afraid.”

  Devoted to his father in all things, Baruch had decided to die as well as he had. Simon Baruch had exacted a promise from his sons that no rabbi would be called to his deathbed, because “there is no use trying to fool God at this late date.” As he lay dying in 1921, at the age of eighty-one, his sons kept their word. Their mother, who thought it was never too late, and who was sick in her own bed, turned on her side and wept.

  Baruch suffered every common affliction of the long-lived male, from arthritis to loneliness. His feet hurt him, he slept badly, he had prostate trouble, his deafness embarrassed him, and he quarreled with his grown son. In 1957, the year in which the first volume of his autobiography, My Own Story, appeared (and became an instant best seller), he suffered a loss of weight and feared for his life.[63] In 1958, blaming doctors’ orders, he declined to travel to Chicago to accept the American Legion’s Distinguished Service Medal. In the spring of the same year, within ten weeks of each other, Swope and Kent died.

  With so many unhappy and disagreeable things happening to him, Baruch leaned for support on Elizabeth Navarro, his nurse and companion. She was by his side in the daytime and was up to make him comfortable at night, when he couldn’t sleep. When he entertained she was his hostess, which was no easy job because of the imperfections of his hearing aid. If another couple came to dinner, it was up to her to keep the woman quiet so that he could hear the man. Although forbearing in matters of statesmanship, Baruch could be peevish about little things. He demanded his lunch at 12:30 and his dinner at 7:30 sharp, and he could wolf down a meal in minutes. One night at dinner there was a lady who was immobilized by the artichoke on her plate. “Elizabeth,” said Baruch impatiently, “show her how to eat that thing so we can get it off the table.” At his death, in 1965, he owed Miss Navarro (on paper) $400,000 in canasta stakes, a legacy of the uncounted days and nights she had beaten him at one-tenth of a cent a point. But he disapproved of her gambling even for small sums of real money. “When Mr. Baruch found out I was playing cards for a quarter, he just about preached my funeral,” she said.

  While stoical about death, Baruch was in no hurry to get on with it, and he conscientiously continued to look after his health. He got a daily cream message from Miss Navarro. For exercise he waved his dumbbells and swam in a pool, although about the age of ninety he stopped entering the water headfirst. He hunted quail until his early nineties, when he found that he hadn’t the strength. “I can’t keep up with the birds,” he said, “and I can’t keep up with the people.” As heart-transplant surgery first made news, he asked a doctor to go to South Africa to investigate the technique in case he ever had need of it. While vacationing in Europe he patronized the clinic of Dr. Paul Niehans, a Swiss exponent of “cellular therapy.” Niehans reasoned that the essence of the liver of a pregnant sheep would restore the human liver, and that a bouillon of cow heart would restore the human heart, and so on, and he injected his patients with huge syringes of animal organ extracts. For whatever reason (Baruch himself doubted that the Niehans cure did him any good), Baruch’s heart lasted until 9:25 p.m. on June 20, 1965, fifty-nine days before his ninety-fifth birthday.

  Mentally, he kept going. To the end he made up his mind on issues and let people know what he thought. He endorsed the Kennedy Administration’s essay in price controls and the fifth and final war of his lifetime, in Vietnam. Reports that Canada was preparing to sell wheat to Communist China in 1961 pushed him into correspondence with Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Baruch wrote that the sale was wrong because it would help the Chinese “live and be strong to destroy us. I am sure that you are taking steps to stop this now.” At the age of ninety-one Baruch was still a sufficiently formidable figure that Rusk felt obliged to answer with a fourteen-page memorandum.

  Once Harold Epstein, the coauthor, along with Samuel Lubell, of the second volume of Baruch’s autobiography, The Public Years, found him engrossed with some reading over breakfast. The printed matter turned out to be a speech that Epstein had written for him. “That’s the best thing I ever read,” said Baruch, who sometimes quoted back lines to Epstein that Epstein had picked out of Stevenson’s Home Book of Quotations. (After Swope was gone, Baruch one day was worrying about a speech that somebody had written for him and that he thought should be getting more attention. “God damn it,” he said, “If Swope were alive he’d needle these guys and get this thing in the papers for me!”) Baruch continued to flower in the company of military officers, and he repeated his ideas on wartime priorities and price control as if they had only just occurred to him. Even world-weariness, when it came over him, had a robustness about it. In about his ninetieth year he received a call from Clare Luce, whom he had never stopped loving. To Epstein, who was within earshot of Baruch’s side of the conversation, it was obvious that she was unhappy in her marriage and that Baruch was trying to comfort her.

  Baruch advised her against hasty action, reminded her of what she had and mentioned her “well-feathered nest.” At last the conversation ended and Baruch put down the phone. There was a pause. Then he said, “Ah, who the hell cares.”

  On June 23, 1965, three days after his death, there was a memorial service at the old West End Synagogue, East 79th Street and Second Avenue. In his lifetime Baruch had been an irregular worshiper there, and he had asked for a simple funeral. He wanted to die as a Jew—“He wanted to make that statement,” Epstein said—but not to try to fool God. His body was cremated, in keeping with instructions, and there was also an unplanned event. Twenty minutes before the service began the temple’s air conditioning gave out, but this too might have pleased Baruch, who was always cold.

  Inside and outside the temple, the mourners, some seven hundred strong, were representative of all walks of his work and life. There were his two surviving children, Bernard M. Baruch Jr. and Mrs. Renée Samstag (Belle had died, at the age of sixty-four, in 1964); his confidante and secretary, Miss Boyle; and his companion and nurse, Miss Navarro. Ferdinand Eberstadt, of atomic-bomb days, was there, along with Mayor Wagner, Billy Rose, Senator Jacob Javits, Henry and Clare Luce, Dr. Buell Gallagher, president of City College, and Sir Patrick Dean, British Ambassador to the United States. Ernest Stresser, an eighty-two-year-old Austrian who lived on East 79th Street, had come to pay his respects to the man who had made it possible for him to reach America twenty-five years before. There were Governor Byrnes, who had been with Baruch when he died, and Adlai Stevenson, the Democrat whom he had not supported in 1952. Cardinal Spellman, with whom there had been a recent disagreement, was also on hand. A few months before his death, Baruch and Spellman had suffered a mutual mortification. The Cardinal, dropping by Baruch’s apartment for a visit, had come across his host napping. Jumping to conclusions, Spellman hurriedly began to administer last rites. Baruch awakened to the hubbub. He swore mightily and kicked the Cardinal out. But Baruch was never one for losing a friend, and somehow the two of them had patched it up. As usual, all was forgiven.

  60. When Baruch did turn eighty-five, on Friday, the nineteenth of August, the Herald Tribune published a “surprise party in print” to which it had asked celebrities, dignitaries, and other notables to contribute. There were many and diverse well-wishers, and the variety of Baruch’s acquaintances was evident in juxtaposition. Thus, Eleanor Roosevelt and Rocky Marciano; Billy Rose and Clare Luce; Adlai Stevenson, J. Edgar Hoover, Jack Dempsey, and Richard Nixon (“To Bernard Mannes Baruch—the sage of our age”).

  Also: General George C. Marshall, David Sarnoff, Lyndon Johnson (Senate majority leader), Joseph W. Martin (House minority leader), Edgar Faure (Premier of France), Thomas E. Dewey, James F. Byrnes, Omar N. Bradley (General of the Army), Herbert Brownell Jr. (US Attorney General), Mayor Robert F. Wagner of New York; Governor W. Averell Harriman, C. E. Wilson (Secretary of Defense), Louis St. Laurent (Prime Minister of Canada), Robert Moses, General Curtis LeMay, Lord Beaverbrook, and of course, Swope, who wrote, in part: “You have become the tribune; you are an e
mbodied and vital force in life.”

  Rose upstaged that with some Broadway doggerel:

  When your buck and luck are

  both small time,

  And your fake friends pass you by,

  Mr. B’s the standing

  sitting

  running

  jumping all-time

  Champeen stand-up guy.