by Kai Bird
By 1957, it might easily have appeared to Chase stockholders that their chairman was moonlighting with the State Department, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Ford Foundation, and a half-dozen other institutions around the country. But if his outside activities were remarkably varied, no one doubted the impact of McCloy’s presence on the bank. Not only had he achieved the merger of Chase with the Bank of Manhattan, but he was now well on his way to creating both a new home for the bank and a distinctive architectural landmark on the tip of Manhattan Island. Back in 1953, he had found Chase’s operations distributed among nine different buildings around the city. Winthrop Aldrich told him he should make it a priority to consolidate all Chase employees under one roof. To do so, McCloy first had to decide whether to construct a new bank building in the downtown tip of Manhattan or to follow the migration of many other corporate headquarters to midtown Manhattan. It was a difficult decision. The wave of the future seemed to be the posh new Park Avenue business district uptown. “Every day one heard of a new concern that was moving uptown,” he recalled. But McCloy himself was sentimentally attached to the Wall Street district. “We had a big investment downtown,” he said a few years later. “The Stock Exchange was downtown, so was the Federal Reserve Bank. Besides, it was the hearthstone, so to speak, of the city.. . . The tip of Manhattan had a great tradition and it had real beauty at the confluence of two great rivers. It seemed to me that it had some significance not only to the city but to the nation to keep in existence this area, where, in and out of those narrow streets for a period of a century, the progress of the country had been financed.”34
Having decided to remain on Wall Street, McCloy had then determined that he wanted to construct a building so distinctive that it would “tend to fix the financial district downtown as well as adorn the City of New York.” Early in 1955, he authorized the payment of $4.4 million for an abandoned lot immediately behind 18 Pine Street. This was considered to be an enormous sum at the time, but he made the decision on his own and consulted with the Chase board only after the fact. As one Chase official said, “He didn’t hem or haw, he just did it.” Having committed the bank to this building site, he then delegated to David Rockefeller the task of dealing with William Zeckendorf, the city’s leading real-estate broker and developer. Architects from the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill were contracted to come up with a number of designs. “We told them we wanted a building of stature,” recalled McCloy. Early on, he and Rockefeller conceived of the idea that there should be an open plaza around the building, an architectural feature unseen at the time on Wall Street. The plaza would create some much-needed open space in a part of the city characterized by narrow streets and dark skyscraper canyons. In return for creating a little public space with the plaza, McCloy thought he could obtain some concessions from City Hall on the building’s specifications. In particular, the city’s most powerful planning official, Robert Moses, agreed to waive the requirement that new skyscrapers be built with “setbacks.” This concession was necessary if the bank wished to construct a building with a modern “flush” exterior, straight up and down. The combination of a “flush” exterior and the ability to build underground, beneath the plaza, would more than make up for the space lost to the public plaza. As McCloy put it, “. . . what, so to speak, we lost on the ‘oranges,’ we could make on the bananas.” Rockefeller in particular pushed for an ultramodern glass-and-aluminum skin for the building, a look at least half of the board thought inappropriate. But after much debate, McCloy sided with Rockefeller, and soon the architects came up with a plan for a towering shaft of glass and steel, the most distinctive feature of which was rows of aluminum-sheathed columns rising sixty stories from the plaza.35
McCloy enjoyed one aspect of the construction of One Chase Plaza: the building’s art program. The building’s interior layout provided a large central open area on each floor with blank walls devoid of the plaster moldings one saw in traditional office buildings. The architects intended that some warmth would be given to these cold, austere interiors by modern furnishings and displays of abstract art. An avid collector of abstract art, Rockefeller enthusiastically endorsed this scheme.36 McCloy agreed that David should serve as chairman of the art-selection committee, but he specified that both he and George Champion would also serve on the committee. The considerable sum of $500,000 was set aside to acquire original paintings and sculptures. Chase’s art program had a major impact on the New York art world, benefiting such leading artists as Pierre Soulages, Adolph Gottlieb, Jack Youngerman, Larry Rivers, and Alfred Jensen, as well as other, lesser-known artists.
McCloy had to admit to Rockefeller that there was much abstract art that he didn’t understand. But he enjoyed listening to the leading art curators’ appraisals. “The more they talked and the more they judged,” McCloy recalled, “the more confidence I gained.” George Champion, however, never reconciled himself to the abstract works of art so favored by Rockefeller, and McCloy often found himself mediating between the two. In deference to Champion’s tastes, some of the more avant-garde pieces of sculpture were kept out of view of his office.37
When the building was finally finished, it received rave reviews in the press. It was then the seventh-tallest building in the world and housed a 985-ton bank vault, longer than a football field. Architectural Forum ran a thirty-page spread on the building, which it said “is already proving to be one of the boldest, and quite possibly one of the soundest, investments to be made on Wall Street in many years.” To the surprise of not a few skeptics, including some on Chase’s board, twenty-four of the building’s sixty floors were profitably leased out to more than fifty major Wall Street business and legal firms. Forbes editorialized that One Chase Plaza had given a “hopeful cast. . . to the old financial district,” and Time ran color photos highlighting the modern artworks adorning the walls of the bank. Senior Chase bank officers wryly referred to the building as “the house that Jack built.” It was indeed a personal triumph for the chairman.38
Disagreements between McCloy’s two most senior colleagues—Rockefeller and Champion—extended beyond art. As one Chase executive put it, “Champion worries about where the bank will be ten minutes from now and Rockefeller about where it will be ten years from now.” Their personalities and contrasting banking strategies fueled an open rivalry. Champion was a stickler for details. He could glance down a column of numbers and pick out the footnote with a typo in it. Rockefeller was invariably annoyed by Champion’s probing questions, which seemed to reflect his general unhappiness with whatever project was at hand. Not surprisingly, each man developed his own group of loyal associates within the bank, which would sometimes accuse the other group of “cronyism.” This situation created natural tensions. In the words of one Chase official, “There would have to be, if not clashes, a lot of strain and tension.”39
McCloy got along with both men, in part by compartmentalizing their responsibilities. But Rockefeller, who at the time served as one of four executive vice-presidents, was clearly tagged to head the bank someday. As early as 1955, Business Week had observed, “Among the top men, it is David Rockefeller who is heir apparent.”40
For the moment, however, Champion was still the most experienced and senior of McCloy’s executives. He could display a prickly personality, and McCloy did not share his Christian fundamentalism. (Champion regularly contributed to Reverend Billy Graham’s crusades.) But on a professional level, McCloy made it clear to Champion that he could largely run his own show in the U.S. department of the bank. “If we had any policy decision,” recalled Champion, “that we felt he ought to have a part in, why, we’d take them to him. But there weren’t too many of them.”41
On the international side, McCloy found Rockefeller an ally for his view that Chase should expand its branches and clients abroad. By the end of the 1950s, Chase had twenty-five branches operating in eleven foreign countries, many of them in the Caribbean. In addition, McCloy and Rockefeller believed the bank not only s
hould act in the national interest, but could help define the national interest. Rockefeller would later say that it “was impossible to be involved in business with a great international bank without being involved in government and politics.”42 In this respect, they were taking their lead from Winthrop Aldrich, who had sometimes run the Chase as if it were an arm of the U.S. government. During the war, when Eisenhower’s troops in North Africa needed banking facilities, Aldrich opened a branch for them. When Tito broke with Stalin, and Washington wished to encourage his independence, Chase—not without Washington’s concurrence—became the principal corresponding bank for the National Bank of Yugoslavia.43
McCloy always acted in close collusion with Washington, even when this might benefit Chase’s competitors. In the summer of 1957, the Paris branches of First National City Bank and the Bank of America were handling short-term “acceptances” for the Soviet Union to purchase Western goods. Chase had an opportunity to get a cut of the same business with the Soviets, but before proceeding, McCloy called Washington and made it clear that he would not approve the transactions without the State Department’s approval.44 Dulles, of course, discouraged the idea.
The fact that Rockefeller had early on cast himself as an ally of McCloy in the decision to expand the bank’s branches abroad did not by itself explain their close relationship. Despite their differences in age and background, the two men shared habits and values. Like McCloy, Rockefeller was never brusque, never confrontational, and always polite in his dealings with people. His favorite word was “appropriate.” He was always a good listener. As one friend explained, “David could listen to a bore go on and on explaining something which was obvious to everyone listening and still give that bore his whole undivided attention because he just might say something which David would not know.” His slow, stolid temperament caused one colleague to call him a “phlegmatic forty-year-old.” Of the five Rockefeller sons, David most resembled his father. His bland, open-faced demeanor masked a willingness to work eighteen-hour days. Such patience matched McCloy’s characteristic persistence. Rockefeller’s stamina was motivated by a desire to prove that “there was something there besides a famous family name.” The chemistry was thus perfect: with McCloy as chairman, David could prove his professional worth as a banker under the supervision of an individual who respected the Rockefeller name. The relationship was only helped by McCloy’s personal friendship with David’s father. In addition, they shared extracurricular interests: David gave not only his money ($25,000 annually) but a great deal of his time to the Council on Foreign Relations, where he served as a vice-president and participated every year in one of the Council’s study groups. It was plain for all to see that Rockefeller was a McCloy protégé.45
In addition to serving as vice-president of the Council, Rockefeller chaired the Council on Foreign Relations’ membership committee. Virtually the youngest officer in the Council, he used his position to lobby for the admission of more and younger members. In this he was supported by the Council’s executive director, George Franklin, Jr., a sometime lawyer who had been his college roommate and later married a Rockefeller cousin.46 Rockefeller’s views were not always endorsed by his elders within the Council. On one occasion in 1954, Hamilton Fish Armstrong vigorously opposed his suggestion that they should “seek out younger men.” (The Council’s membership until 1969 was all male.) Armstrong thought that, for the Council’s purposes, men in their late thirties or early forties could be considered young. At a board meeting, Rockefeller submitted a list of prospective candidates only to have them rejected out of hand because they were all corporate executives. Frank Altschul told Rockefeller that his list “would be more appropriate for an organization like the National Association of Manufacturers. . . .”47
McCloy favored broadening the CFR’s membership to include academicians and men from professions outside law and business. But he certainly did not wish to dilute the “select” quality of the Council’s deliberations at Pratt House. Conferring resident-membership status on any individual was a serious matter; some candidates found their nominations deferred from one year to the next. This happened even to such well-connected individuals as Leo Cherne, the executive director of the Research Institute of America, whose partner, William Casey—the future CIA director—was then a close acquaintance of McCloy’s.48
Resident members (those living or working within fifty miles of Manhattan) were limited to 675 men, whereas the less prestigious nonresident category could number as high as five hundred. Dues ran a hefty $200 annually for resident members. In 1956, the elite inner circle of this exclusive club included, besides McCloy and Rockefeller, such influential men as Henry M. Wriston, Frank Altschul, Allen Dulles, Arthur Dean, Grayson L. Kirk, Lewis W. Douglas, and Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who also served as the editor of the Council’s well-read quarterly, Foreign Affairs. The list of resident members included men from a wide range of New York’s leading business, legal, and cultural institutions. There were, of course, many lawyers, bankers, and corporate executives. But there were also such men as Simon Michael Bessie and Cass Canfield, both highly influential book editors. Ralph Bunche was one of the few blacks.I Also included were such academics as Professor J. C. Hurewitz, a Middle East specialist, and Henry Kissinger, then a lecturer at Harvard University. To the outsider, it might seem that the same old Wall Street crowd still dominated the Council’s membership in these years. But there were subtle differences in the Council’s makeup from the 1920s and ’30s, when the Council was both smaller and less diverse.
Many members gave voluntary contributions of $1,000 or more annually. But the Council’s needs were now growing so rapidly that McCloy inaugurated a “Corporation Service,” whereby various corporations were persuaded to pay $1,000 or more for special corporate memberships. By 1956, this program was contributing $50,000 a year to the CFR’s budget. As the Council’s activities mushroomed in the 1950s, McCloy used his foundation connections to raise large sums for a budget that quickly grew to more than $700,000 annually. In 1955, the Rockefeller Foundation gave $500,000, and the Ford Foundation regularly funded specific study projects until early 1958, when it gave $1.1 million in unearmarked grants to cover general operating expenses. (McCloy also persuaded the board in 1954 to transfer the Council’s $1-million investment portfolio from the New York Trust Company to Chase.50)
McCloy devoted a great deal of his intellectual energy to the Council’s meetings and study groups. He could be found at the Council’s Harold Pratt (of Standard Oil) House on East 68th Street at Park Avenue several afternoons each month. With its book-lined walls, worn Persian carpets, and Old World elegance, Pratt House created an atmosphere of weightiness. The Council usually scheduled two or three events each week, which often began in the late afternoon and broke up in time for those attending to catch their trains to their suburban homes. (In 1955, McCloy himself began to commute to Connecticut, where he had built a comfortable but not particularly ostentatious home on a plot of five acres in Cos Cob.) The chosen speaker would talk for no more than forty-five minutes, leaving enough time for a few questions from the floor. In the mid-1950s, McCloy moderated such meetings as Allen Dulles talking on “U.S. Intelligence Organization,” James B. Conant speaking on Germany, and Lester Pearson addressing the “New Challenges in East-West Relations.” Foreign heads of state and numerous foreign ministers gradually came to regard the opportunity to give a CFR talk as one of the requirements for an American tour. In a typical year, three prime ministers, six foreign ministers, and one president addressed the Council.51 Though all CFR meetings were and are off the record, all too frequently these speakers gave such lackluster performances that George Franklin had to reprimand members for departing before the end of a meeting.52
One exception occurred during Fidel Castro’s visit to New York in April 1959. The CFR’s membership turned out in large numbers to hear the Cuban revolutionary speak. Afterward, Castro was repeatedly questioned about civil liberties and the expropr
iation of foreign property. Finally, one Council member stood and asked, “How much does Cuba want?” Insulted, Castro replied angrily, “We don’t want your money. We want your respect.” Faced with further hostile questions, Castro eventually drew himself up and announced, “I can see that I am not among friends,” and walked out.53
But it was a rare occasion when a speaker actually chose to use the Council’s platform to say something candid or unorthodox. A recitation of facts, laced with the usual platitudes, was the norm. As John Kenneth Galbraith wryly put it, such exercises could result in a “frank appreciation of the support to self-esteem that comes from being in the presence of the great.” (Galbraith later resigned, he said, for “reasons of boredom.”) In short, under McCloy’s direction the Council was rarely a center for debate or the airing of controversies. Instead, it became a venue for a meeting of minds, the construction of a consensus, or, at worst, a mechanical ratification of conventional wisdom.
Lew Douglas, a Council director since 1940, thought the Council under McCloy “was becoming a protagonist of the views of the government, no matter which party was in power.” Men who bothered to raise “legitimate questions” about basic assumptions of a given policy were “given little credence, if indeed they were not occasionally referred to with a not too well concealed contempt.” As an example of the Council’s being run as a mouthpiece of Washington, Douglas cited a Council meeting in which Soviet productivity figures were discussed. Douglas noted that “the statement was made that, although the C.I.A. source of the figures could not be disclosed, it was hoped that the figures themselves would be widely used.”54 Douglas believed the Council should not have been so eager to disseminate what he suspected were inflated estimates of Soviet productivity.