Bernard Baruch: The Adventures of a Wall Street Legend

by James Grant

  While the Administration kept him at arm’s length in 1941, Arthur Krock praised him as the “Socrates of defense,” the columnist George Sokolsky called for his reappointment as chairman of a new War Industries Board, and Frank Kent, in his column, asserted that “things are in a mess and he [Baruch] is the only man who remotely knows the answers.” At the Gridiron Dinner that year the Washington press corps parodied OPM by making out William S. Knudsen and Sidney Hillman, its joint directors, to be Siamese twins and giving them topical lyrics to sing to the tune of “Oh! Susanna”:

  HILLMAN:

  When any problem gets so large

  It might end in a fluke.

  We take it straight to F.D.R.—

  Who takes it to Baruch!

  Both: (Slowly and in harmony)

  OPM, that is the place for me,

  We’ll take our troubles to Baruch

  AND SAVE DEMOCRACY!

  One reason for Baruch’s unique success as a freelance critic was that he refused not to be helpful. Another was that so many people were grateful to him. Sokolsky, Kent, and Krock, for instance, each saw him through friendly, nonobjective eyes; in March 1941 Kent sent him a copy of an adulatory column he had written about his economic-mobilization ideas with a letter containing equally effusive thanks for his help in wangling some steamship tickets for Frank Kent Jr. and his fiancée. In his Washington gift-giving, Baruch remembered people of all ranks, from the President and Mrs. Roosevelt to the President’s military aide, General Watson, to innumerable senators and congressmen to the office staff of the White House press secretary (who at Christmas 1941 received $50 each in cash). The press secretary himself, Stephen Early, was a bosom friend of Baruch’s and a past recipient of his largess. In December 1940 had come a gold dress set; in May 1941, some money that had gone to buy screens for the Early house before the onslaught of the Washington gnats. Once Baruch had pulled strings after Early had allegedly assaulted a New York City police officer, which prompted an appreciative note. “I am familiar with your quiet but effective methods of ‘operation’ during troublous times,” the press secretary wrote. “I am grateful.”

  Because Roosevelt sometimes clashed with Baruch, Early was occasionally pitted for professional reasons on the side of his employer against his benefactor. There was one such run-in in October 1941 after Baruch sent William Randolph Hearst a letter in praise of the publisher’s patriotic stand on military preparedness—“How well I remember your efforts to have this country look forward to preparedness and how your papers were among those who advocated this as strongly as I did. Alas our efforts were of no avail.” Roosevelt, seeing the letter on page one of the New York Journal American, was revolted. He dictated a telegram to Baruch to be sent over Early’s name, as follows:

  THE PRESIDENT IS AT HYDE PARK BUT SHOULD LIKE TO KNOW IF IT IS REALLY TRUE THAT YOU SENT TO MR. HEARST THE LETTER WHICH APPEARS ON THE FRONT PAGE OF TODAYS NEW YORK JOURNAL AMERICAN.

  Baruch dashed off a letter to Early, assuring him that it was his letter and that at all hazards he would continue to speak his mind. But he didn’t write that letter; Swope did, and Early, at least, agreed that it was a fine job.

  Not everyone around the President wanted Baruch. Harry Hopkins, perhaps the President’s closest adviser, was responsible (or so Baruch thought) for keeping him out of the war effort. A social worker by profession, frail and chronically ill, Hopkins was the head of the Works Progress Administration, later of the Commerce Department, and in the war served at Roosevelt’s side as planner and strategist. Baruch ran hot and cold on the New Deal, but he did conceive a relatively fixed opinion of Hopkins’ end of it, the federal relief program. He thought that the WPA had reduced personal initiative and had thereby perpetuated joblessness, and he told Hopkins so. Sometimes as he sat on a park bench the sight of a pigeon would put him in mind of Hopkins, or the thought of Hopkins would cause him to notice a pigeon, and he would disdainfully call the bird a WPA worker.

  However, Baruch was not so artless as to intentionally make enemies of men in high office. As a matter of policy and instinct he cultivated them, and as the war drew near he redoubled his efforts to keep personal animosities out of the nation’s business. Moreover, he had the facility of speaking in tongues, and just as he could seem liberal to Eleanor Roosevelt and conservative to Frank Kent, so he could appear pro-Hopkins to Roosevelt and fiercely anti- to Ickes, Hopkins’ bureaucratic enemy. On balance, Baruch was probably anti-Hopkins—he blamed him for needless and costly slipups in the conduct of the war—yet when Hopkins’ body was borne down the steps of St. Bartholomew’s Church in February 1946 Baruch was one of the honorary pallbearers.

  In any event, Baruch was characteristically generous to Hopkins in the prewar and early war years. He entertained him at Hobcaw, bought him a lifetime membership in the Jefferson Islands Club, and in 1938 helped him with a delicate personal matter. Hopkins, then between wives, had been seeing a lot of Mrs. Dorothy Donovan Hale, a pretty and impecunious widow who danced and acted a little and stayed in debt. Mrs. Hale thought that Hopkins was going to marry her, but he didn’t. Compounding her despondency over this failed romance was one of her regular financial crises. Baruch, a friend of hers, advised her not to try to make a career but to land a rich husband, and he gave her a check to apply to sprucing up her wardrobe. One night she came home from a party, sat down at a typewriter, composed instructions for her burial and notes to her friends (to Baruch she wrote that she was sorry she wouldn’t be able to take his good advice). Before dawn she jumped to her death from her apartment on the sixteenth floor of the Hampshire House on Central Park South. What happened next is unclear. According to the late Thomas G. Corcoran, Hopkins believed that Baruch had used his influence with the press to see that the story of the suicide was muted.[56] He related that he had conveyed Hopkins’ thanks to Baruch for a job sensitively done.

  When Hopkins did remarry, four years later, Baruch gave his wife and him a buffet supper at the Carlton Hotel and invited sixty of the most prominent people in Washington. There was perfume for the ladies, champagne for all and a menu as long as the host’s arm. The gaiety of the evening presented a journalistically exploitable paradox to the wartime austerity being preached by Hopkins, along with others in the Administration, and the anti-Roosevelt press made the most of it. In answer to a hostile report in the Washington Times-Herald, Baruch protested to its publisher, Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson, that the food had come from the hotel menu, that he had paid only for what was eaten, that the cost per person had amounted to less than $5, that he had specifically instructed the maître d’hôtel not to serve anything in short supply, and that the champagne was some of his own stock, given to him ten years before, that was about to go corky anyway. Hopkins’ biographer writes that the event turned into a “first-rate scandal. And oddly enough, Hopkins got more blame than Baruch.” The oddity was that Baruch’s public-relations sense, or Swope’s, had failed even for one night. The lapse was short-lived, however, and a week or so later Baruch was back in the papers in a positive light. He had, he announced, made a $1 million Christmas present to the war-relief agencies of the United States and a half-dozen allied nations.

  Baruch suffered another dinnertime embarrassment with Hopkins that Harold Ickes alertly recorded in his diary. The entry was dated February 1, 1942:

  Baruch also told me of a dinner or supper at the White House when Mrs. Roosevelt turned to him and in her penetrating voice said: “Mr. Baruch, I think you are the wisest man in the world.” Baruch did not think that this would do him much good in that particular presence, and so he tried to silence her but she became more emphatic. It seemed that Baruch had advised her how to prepare for income taxes that year and she had followed his advice. Bernie said that the president didn’t look any too pleased, and that Harry Hopkins’ face was very dark.

  Baruch could imagine what would happen to him if Hitler won, and after the war, in fact, his name did turn up on a list of the Nazis’ most-want
ed men. A crude Nazi propaganda broadside of 1940 vintage posed the question “Who profits by war?” and answered that, in large part, Baruch did, he being “one of the richest Jews in the world” and “President Roosevelt’s confidential adviseror [sic].”

  To anyone who made an overture to him on the basis of his being a Jewish-American, Baruch’s response was invariably the assertion that he was an American, not a “hyphenate” (Woodrow Wilson’s contemptuous designation for ethnic Americans who put the welfare of their former homelands above that of their adopted one). This nomenclatural touchiness was a symptom of the uneasiness that Baruch felt about his own Jewishness. He was not a religious man, and he held some unflattering stereotypes of Jews, particularly East Europeans. On the other hand, there was a strain of “foul weather” Jew in him too, the kind who rallied to Jewry when trouble was brewing.

  Some of the trouble touched him personally. He still had relatives in Germany and he did what he could to help them get out safely. (In 1938 a German citizen by the name Bernard Baruch wrote to Treasury Secretary Morgenthau to ask for help; this Baruch claimed to be a relative of Bernard M. Baruch, whom he mistakenly identified, perhaps under the influence of Nazi propaganda, as Morgenthau’s predecessor in office.) In December 1939 a German woman credited Baruch with helping her reach England and with saving her husband from a concentration camp. In June 1940, two German aunts of Baruch’s, both more than ninety years of age, were making their way to Barcelona thanks to him and the Red Cross.

  Late in October 1938 he confronted a financial and moral dilemma. Cyprus Mines Corporation, which owned copper deposits on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, had been doing a lot of business with the Germans. Baruch had owned stock in the company for twenty-five years. While he would not presume to dictate with whom it could deal, he was sure that he personally wanted no truck with the Third Reich. Inasmuch as there was no public market for the company’s shares, he wrote to the president, Harvey S. Mudd (the son of Seeley Mudd, of Texas Gulf days), to offer his stock to him or his family.

  Mudd replied that it would be a shame to sell. The company was only just beginning to come into its own, the future looked rich in dividends, and it was difficult to say at the moment just what his stock was worth. He explained that there was another practical consideration. The only smelter in Europe that could handle the company’s ore was situated in Hamburg.

  When Baruch persisted, Mudd, in March 1939, expanded his argument:

  I am very distressed and unhappy over the situation but I do not want to breach our sales contracts and take the consequences, whatever they may be. The company’s shareholders may not demur but there are hundreds of workmen in Cyprus who would lose their jobs and they are the ones who would suffer most. I feel as responsible to them as I do to the shareholders. We can decline to ship copper concentrates and pyrites to Germany and Germany will find other sellers but no one is going to find work for the men we lay off.

  According to the company history, “This apparently satisfied Mr. Baruch.”

  When there was a big problem at hand, Baruch like to have a big answer. What he proposed for the plight of European Jewry and of refugees of all religious stripes in the late 1930s was a new nation. He would call it the United States of Africa.

  This was no Zionist scheme for the settlement of Palestine. Baruch was no Zionist, and he wanted a catholic, not an exclusively Jewish, solution to the dilemma of homeless people. He thought that a very large mass of central Africa should be appropriated, placed under a British protectorate, and settled by pioneers with all the modern implements. Men would go first, with bulldozers, insecticides, and construction materials to carve out a foothold. What might have taken generations with an ax and flintlock could be accomplished in relatively short order with up-to-date technology; women and children would follow in due course. Colonization would be financed privately. Jews could tithe themselves, and Baruch, for one, offered to put up $3 million.

  At Hobcaw, Baruch put the idea to Representative Hamilton Fish, a New York Republican, and Fish, being sold on it, traveled to Europe in the summer of 1939 to try to drum up interest among the British and the French. In Paris he saw Georges Bonnet, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Georges Mandel, Minister of Colonies. He outlined the proposed settlement of an area south and west of Lake Chad, mentioned that he had already seen Lord Edward Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary, on the matter and was trying to see Herr Hitler. Fish identified Baruch as the source of the idea and quoted him to the effect that $100 million might be raised to finance it. All this information came back to Roosevelt from the American embassy in London. Roosevelt forwarded the embassy’s report, along with a covering note of his own, to Baruch.

  “. . . I am quite certain,” wrote the President, not being certain at all, “that neither you nor I, who belong to the more practical schools of thought, would ever have commissioned Honorable Ham to represent us or speak for us. I wish this great Pooh-Bah would go back to Harvard and play tackle on the football team. He is qualified for that job.” According to Fish, the French were enthusiastic about the idea, but war broke out before anything could be done about it.

  Late in May 1941, when Hitler was on his best behavior toward the United States in order to avoid an expanded war, two official directives went out to the German press. The first, dated May 23, was to suspend personal attacks on President Roosevelt. The second, on May 30, was to lay off Bernard Baruch.

  Whatever Baruch’s standing in the Roosevelt White House happened to be, there were always a number of people, friends and enemies, who assumed it was lofty. Herbert Hoover, who in the main was a friend, valued Baruch not least for his access to Democratic officeholders. Late in November 1941 it was the former President who brought Baruch together with a lawyer named Raoul E. Desvernine. Desvernine’s business was most urgent: he was trying to head off a war with Japan.

  His client was Saburo Kurusu, Japanese special envoy, who had been engaged in fateful talks with Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Kurusu had found Hull to be hostile, while the American thought Kurusu evasive. Desvernine, who was identified with the Liberty League and was therefore presumably short of high-level Administration contacts, wanted to find a way for Kurusu to reach Roosevelt directly, bypassing Hull. On either December 1 or December 3 (Hoover’s notes indicate the former date, Baruch’s memoirs the latter) Baruch, Desvernine, and Kurusu sat down together at the Mayflower Hotel.

  Unlike the Japanese, Baruch had been loath to go outside channels. He checked with General Watson to get White House clearance. Watson, after checking with Roosevelt, had told him to go ahead with the meeting, and Baruch proceeded. He asked Kurusu what was on his mind.

  The envoy explained that the Emperor wanted peace and that a direct appeal to him by Roosevelt might stymie the militarists. He laid out some general proposals, including the withdrawal of most, but not all, Japanese troops from China (the United States had asked for a complete evacuation) and an end to the American trade embargo of the previous July. Unbeknownst to either Baruch, Kurusu, or Desvernine, however, it was already too late. The Japanese cabinet council, meeting in the imperial presence on December 1, had elected war.

  Like millions of other Americans, Baruch got the news at home while reading the Sunday papers. Unlike the great mass of his countrymen, however, at the time he was dressed in morning clothes, his customary Sunday-morning attire, and he heard the news from a private nurse in the second-floor living room of a Fifth Avenue mansion. (Perhaps he opened his newspaper to the financial section to glance at the price of International Telephone & Telegraph common, which he’d been urging his friends to buy; it had closed Saturday at 2⅜, up from 2¼ on Friday.) The telephone rang. His nurse, Miss Higgins, picked it up, listened a moment and relayed the shocking message that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. All at once Baruch was out of his chair, saying, “I told them!”—meaning, as she reflected later, that he had predicted war and had told the government exactly what to do to prepa
re for it. Next he got on the phone to a succession of Washington officials, cursing, advising, and encouraging. He was mad at the Administration and at no one more than the President, to whom, however, he apparently did not speak that December 7.

  For a long time Baruch worked as a volunteer adviser and a one-man morale officer to the chiefs of the home front. In the first full month of the war he made a reconnaissance of ordnance production in New York and Philadelphia (“I found considerable lethargy and lack of urgency which I think you will now find overcome . . . ,” he wrote the President) and submitted a list of five candidates to head the new War Production Board, which was to be the approximate reincarnation of the old War Industries Board. Roosevelt chose not to reappoint Baruch to his old post; nor did he pick one of his men. His choice was Donald M. Nelson, chief of the unprepossessing outfit called SPAB. As usual in such circumstances, Baruch behaved handsomely. On the evening of Nelson’s first day in office he took him out to dinner.

  Baruch was a good soldier. Though jobless at a moment of national peril, he took offense at only two things. First, the claim that he was a “Presidential adviser”; and second, the preposterous Nazi propaganda that he was running the American war effort. The latter charge, he told Krock, hurt his professional pride. (“Of course they [the Nazis] put out all this war-mongering, anti-Semitism about me because they do not want to see men like me who understand the job put in charge.”) As Baruch devoted himself to his work, he inspired others. He was a constant counselor to Donald Nelson on technical and organizational matters. To Harold Ickes, the Interior Secretary, he offered advice on metals, strategic minerals, and self-motivation. He told him to stand in front of a mirror twice a day, draw up his chin, and repeat to himself, “Hell, of course I can take it.” When Arthur Krock began to feel sorry for himself in the role of Administration critic, Baruch bucked him up. Once he jotted a note to General Watson explaining his presence in Washington: “I am here since yesterday holding hands and trying to prop up the weak and faltering.”