The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  Offered his choice of State, Defense, or Treasury, Lovett firmly rejected any Cabinet post, saying, “No, sir, I can’t. My bearings are burnt out.”4 Though his friends knew him to be a hypochondriac, and he would live many more years, he did have bleeding ulcers, and the doctors had recently removed a portion of his stomach. But the truth of the matter was that Lovett simply had no desire for such public power. Like McCloy, he had turned down similar requests from Eisenhower, and there seemed no reason to make an exception for this president. When Kennedy then complained that he just didn’t know enough of the “right people,” Lovett assured him that he and his colleagues could introduce him to any number of qualified men.5 For example, Lovett said, someone from one of the New York banks should receive the Treasury post. Why not Jack McCloy from Chase, Henry Alexander from Morgan’s, Eugene Black from the World Bank, or Douglas Dillon, who was currently serving as Eisenhower’s undersecretary of state? For secretary of state, Lovett proposed Dean Rusk, currently president of the Rockefeller Foundation. And for the Defense post, he suggested McCloy or Robert McNamara, who had just become president of Ford Motor Company.

  Kennedy himself had first mentioned McCloy’s name in connection with a Cabinet post only a week after the election. Vacationing in Palm Beach on November 14, he turned to an aide and speculated on whether there were any Republicans he could appoint to head a proposed new disarmament agency. After throwing around a few names, he concluded “that when one mentions the names of (David) Rockefeller, (Douglas) Dillon and McCloy one has about exhausted the supply of ‘good Republicans’ . . .”6 When he began to focus on who should take the Treasury spot, a number of advisers suggested that the current gold-drain crisis might be reason enough to bow to “tradition” and choose a Treasury secretary from the financial community. Richard Neustadt, a Harvard professor who had been recruited to advise Kennedy on the transition period, listed McCloy, Lovett, and Dillon as men who fit this description. He warned Kennedy, however, that if he chose a Republican, he should be sure it was a Republican with whom he could work. “Among Republicans, Stimsons and Lovetts are not met with every day; and superficial resemblances can be deceiving.”7

  If there were evidently not many men left in the Stimson mold, and with Lovett pleading poor health, an increasingly frustrated Kennedy was determined to recruit McCloy. On the evening of December 7, 1960, while attending a dinner party, McCloy received a message to call the president-elect at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City. When he dialed the number, he heard a voice promptly answer, “This is Jack Kennedy.” There was a long pause as McCloy, in some confusion, hesitated. Finally, the voice said, “the President-elect.”8 McCloy hastily apologized, explaining he had not expected Kennedy to answer the phone himself. When Kennedy then asked if McCloy could come right over to his hotel suite, McCloy abruptly left the dinner, grabbing a dirty old raincoat to keep himself warm. Arriving at the Carlyle, he passed unrecognized by a throng of reporters, a fact he attributed to his scruffy appearance.9 Inside, he was greeted by an equally informal Kennedy, who paced the suite barefoot as he tried to talk his visitor into joining his administration.

  First he mentioned the secretary-of-defense slot. McCloy promptly dismissed the idea by saying, “I’ve already done that.” Then Kennedy said he understood from Lovett that he had a contractual relationship with Chase Bank that “might represent a certain conflict of interest if you were to take, say, the Secretaryship of the Treasury.” McCloy said yes, he had a pension arrangement with Chase which “was definitely a handicap if I should go to Treasury.” Still, Kennedy pressed him several times about the Treasury job, until finally McCloy said that he feared, as a Republican who had “just finished as head of a large bank,” he would be too visible a political target in a Democratic administration. “Whatever you do,” he told Kennedy, “don’t pick a Republican for your Secretary of the Treasury.”10 Instead, he urged Kennedy to consider Eugene Black, a good Southern Democrat, for the Treasury post. As for himself, the one position he coveted, secretary of state, was the one position that Kennedy had decided he wanted to fill with a Democrat. So, instead of offering McCloy the top post at State, he asked what he thought of Dean Rusk for that position. McCloy diplomatically replied that Rusk “has a fine mind and is experienced.” Actually, he thought Rusk merely “a competent man, but never a leader.”11 As the conversation petered to an end, Kennedy played his last card, a job as the president’s disarmament adviser, a position that didn’t even exist. If McCloy couldn’t become secretary of state, he really didn’t want to leave New York for anything else. But the disarmament position was something different. Its requirements were undefined, so he might do with it exactly as he pleased.

  Later, in a second conversation at the Carlyle, they discussed the details of the job. Kennedy assured him that he would report directly to the Oval Office. Twisting his arm, he told the sixty-five-year-old banker that he just couldn’t find younger men with the “guts and toughness” of McCloy’s generation.12 Actually, Kennedy’s motives were probably strictly political; as Arthur Schlesinger later put it, he desperately needed “a conservative to execute a liberal policy.”13 The creation of a disarmament agency had been a prominent issue in the presidential campaign, and if it was going to happen, Kennedy would need a Republican of McCloy’s stature to get the legislation past Congress. The president-elect explained he would have three priorities: (1) the legislative establishment of a formal disarmament agency, (2) the formulation of a broad policy on negotiating disarmament issues with the Soviets, and (3) the resumption of negotiations on a test-ban treaty. The latter had been in abeyance ever since the U-2 incident. McCloy had taken a strong interest in the test-ban talks and in various disarmament schemes ever since his exposure to these problems during the Gaither Commission’s deliberations. So, after a brief discussion, he told Kennedy he would tentatively agree to take on what he regarded as a short-term assignment. McCloy said he didn’t know, but the work might even be done on a part-time basis, which would suit him, because he was intent on returning to his old firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. Once the new disarmament agency had been set up, McCloy said, he would return to New York, and in any case he would not spend more than nine months on the job.14 With this understanding, McCloy shook hands with the young president-elect and left.

  When the appointment was announced a few days later, Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow quipped, “That’s like sending a goat to guard the cabbage patch.”15 The writer Barbara Ward complained that McCloy had a “banker’s soul” and was therefore an inappropriate choice for the position of disarmament adviser.16 When a prominent religious leader visiting the White House made a similar criticism of McCloy, Kennedy responded with a little humor: “You believe in redemption, don’t you?”17

  By the first of the year, Kennedy had made most of his major appointments. Accepting Lovett’s recommendation, he named Robert McNamara to the Defense post and Dean Rusk as secretary of state.18 Many more of Kennedy’s appointments came from McCloy’s circle of friends and colleagues. Of some eighty-two State Department appointments initially made by Kennedy, sixty-three were members of the Council on Foreign Relations.19 McGeorge Bundy was named national-security adviser. His brother, and Dean Acheson’s son-in-law, William Bundy, was made a deputy assistant secretary of defense. Because Kennedy thought Averell Harriman too old and too deaf, the seventy-year-old former governor was given the decorative title of “roving ambassador” in the State Department. George Kennan was named ambassador to Yugoslavia. Dean Acheson turned down an ambassadorship to NATO but promised to be available to the young president for private consultation. Allen Dulles was retained as CIA director. And, ignoring McCloy’s advice not to select a Republican, Kennedy named Douglas Dillon to the Treasury post. The new administration was to be a government of the Establishment.

  Turning to his own task, McCloy quickly began to assemble a staff to work with him in creating a disarmament agency. The loyal Shep Stone agreed to serve as his
special assistant. Stone soon recruited a liberal Democrat, Betty Goetz, a young woman who had just spent five years working on disarmament issues for Senator Hubert Humphrey. Another old friend from the war years, Adrian “Butch” Fisher, agreed to serve as McCloy’s deputy. McCloy and his skeleton staff began to go to work even before Kennedy was inaugurated. They worked closely with the State Department’s own disarmament staff, headed by Edmund A. Gullion, a veteran Foreign Service Officer. Over the next nine months, McCloy saw Dean Rusk at least once a week and often two or three times a week.20

  After attending the Inauguration and listening to Kennedy’s speech, which he thought eloquent, McCloy met with Rusk on the secretary’s first full working day in office. They lunched in the secretary’s private dining room, and discussed how to revive the test-ban talks. The next morning, at ten-thirty, he went to the White House, where it became clear there was no consensus in the new administration on how to handle arms-control issues. For an hour and a half, he batted around ideas with Kennedy, Rusk, McNamara, “Mac” Bundy, Paul Nitze, and the president’s science adviser, Jerome Wiesner. Afterward, he and Rusk went with Kennedy into the Oval Office for a short private meeting.21 Later, McCloy wrote his old wartime friend Bedell “Beetle” Smith, “All I can say from my discussions of the past week or so is that if confusion is the beginning of wisdom, I shall be wise before too long.”22 There were many problems. McCloy sensed that Kennedy had backtracked and now was not even committed to the piece of legislation he had introduced during the campaign to establish an independent disarmament agency. The president’s “superficial preference” was for now merely to issue an executive order placing the proposed new organization inside the White House. This would make it possible to avoid what was certain to be a partisan congressional battle if a bill was introduced to establish an independent agency. McCloy’s own staff was divided on this issue, with professional Foreign Service officers like Edmund A. Gullion arguing strongly that the director of the new disarmament agency should report directly to the secretary of state.23 Liberals within the administration, however, wanted a congressionally mandated independent agency, located outside both the State Department and the White House. After much discussion, a compromise suggested by Richard Neustadt and supported by McCloy was agreed upon. Legislation would be drafted to create an autonomous arms-control agency located within the State Department, but reporting directly to both the president and the secretary of state. This solution preserved the secretary’s role as ultimate coordinator, but it simultaneously gave disarmament affairs a new prominence.24

  That spring, McCloy continued to meet with Kennedy once or twice a month to discuss the formulation of a general disarmament policy. This too proved to be a controversial issue. Skeptics like Dean Rusk told McCloy, “Many dangerous problems were involved in disarmament; one was the tendency of democracies to disarm at the drop of a hat.”25 The whole idea aroused emotions reminiscent of the debates over the atomic bomb between the scientific community and the military establishment. As Shep Stone summarized it for McCloy, the military believed the whole concept of total disarmament should be flatly rejected as a “Soviet propaganda trick.” By contrast, the scientists, Stone said, “agree that our security will decrease each year unless there are disarmament controls.”26

  McCloy’s intuitive response was to remember Oppenheimer’s warnings and side with the scientists. But there were also some stark political reasons to play the disarmament game. The Soviets had scored impressive public-relations gains with their proposal for “general and complete disarmament” in four years. McCloy regarded the Soviet plan as utopian at best and consciously propagandistic at worst. As a standard-bearer for the Stimsonian tradition of preparedness, he was instinctively repelled by such language. But he and Stimson had also agreed, after Hiroshima, that the rules of human conflict had changed; great nation-states could no longer expect to resolve their disputes by resorting to total warfare. Early in the nuclear age, the U.S. nuclear monopoly may have kept the peace, but in the long run, the dangers of an arms race made the arguments for some kind of international control over such apocalyptic weapons more and more compelling. He also knew that the Gaither panel had predicted that a window of opportunity for placing a cap on the arms race would open up in the early 1960s. The time to act was now. Though he and others in the Kennedy administration disliked the simplistic and unverifiable character of the Soviet disarmament plan, they felt a credible U.S. disarmament plan had to be placed on the negotiating table. Disarmament was not only a public-relations game; America’s long-term security would in fact be increasingly threatened as the Soviets began to achieve nuclear parity. Ultimately, arms control and disarmament would be the only sane game in town.

  Barely a month in office, McCloy explored some of these issues in a speech he gave at Phillips Andover Academy. Since the occasion for his presence at the elite prep school was the dedication of an Andover dormitory in Stimson’s name, McCloy used Stimson’s attitude toward the Soviets in 1945 to explain his own thinking about disarmament policy. Stimson, he reminded his audience, had initially argued in a September 11, 1945, memo (which McCloy had helped draft) that “the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him. . . .” For this reason, Stimson had then wanted Truman to share the bomb with the Soviets by placing it under the control of some international authority. But by 1947, after Soviet actions in Poland and elsewhere made their intentions clear, McCloy said Stimson had changed his mind. One cannot extend trust to an adversary “who is determined to make you his dupe.” Today, he said, “If we cannot trust, we are compelled to erect inspection systems and control procedures, which, by their very extent and character, may introduce irritations and instability in any agreements we reach.” He concluded that “general and complete disarmament” could only occur when “agreed and reliable procedures are set up for the just settlement of disputes. . . .”27

  Late one night, after downing numerous toasts with Andrei Gromyko, he told the Soviet foreign minister that general disarmament would come just as peace had come to the Western frontier: the cowboys had only agreed to check their guns outside the saloon “when they had a sheriff and a court and a jail.” Trust had to be nurtured, and that meant the Soviets had to discard their “fetish” for secrecy. “With all this secrecy,” he complained, “we were compelled to arm against every weapon of which we had the remotest report. We were compelled to credit Khrushchev’s statement that the missiles were coming out like sausages, even if they were not. . . .” Gromyko retorted that the United States had “no moral right to talk about their (Soviet) secrecy when we still held our bases overseas.” McCloy insisted that disarmament could only be achieved in a step-by-step fashion, over many years. Gromyko insisted just as strongly that such “half measures would only result in imbalances. . . .”28 It was all or nothing.

  McCloy was disheartened by such encounters. And yet, though few realized it, the Kennedy administration’s “tough” Republican was inching toward an extremely liberal and internationalist position on disarmament. Not many Democrats, let alone Republicans, were ready to subject the most basic of sovereign powers, the ability to maintain a standing army, to the authority of an international body. But McCloy was willing to cede such rights to an international body that possessed the legal power and arms to enforce the peace. Ever since his Black Tom litigation, he had always believed the United States should subject itself to the decisions of the World Court or similar international institutions.29 If disarmament was necessary, then it should occur within the framework of an agreed-upon body of international law.

  Some of Kennedy’s advisers thought this approach was overly complicated and highly legalistic. Arthur Schlesinger, the president’s special assistant, complained that McCloy was trying to work toward “a somewhat vague conception of the ‘rule of law.’ ”30 U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson worried that McCloy’s emphasis on legalities would leave the impression in the United Nations that the administration was back
ing away from disarmament talks. Stevenson believed the United States “must appear second to none in its desire for disarmament.”31 For his part, McCloy did not want Washington to commit itself to general disarmament in the absence of his complicated legalities.

  Though McCloy found Stevenson an adversary in this instance, he actually had a better relationship with the liberal Democrat than did Kennedy. He had known Stevenson ever since the Illinois lawyer had worked in the Navy Department during the war. He enjoyed Stevenson’s wit and genuinely respected his political views. Stevenson himself so admired McCloy that during the 1952 presidential campaign he told George Ball that his only candidate for the job of secretary of state was McCloy.32 And when Stevenson lost the 1952 election, McCloy wrote him a long letter congratulating him on running a campaign full of intellect. Since then, the two men had continued to correspond and occasionally had dinner together in New York.33 There was genuine warmth and respect shared between them even as they took opposite sides in a policy debate. By contrast, the generational gap between Kennedy and Stevenson, and their recent political rivalry, made their relationship strained. Kennedy found Stevenson wooden and indecisive, while the U.N. ambassador thought Kennedy brash and arrogant.

  Their dispute came to a head in March 1961. On the 12th, McCloy made his case in a one-hour private meeting with Kennedy on a Middleburg, Virginia, farm.34 Then, six days later, a full-dressed debate was held in the White House, with Stevenson making his argument that world public opinion demanded a commitment from the administration to “general and complete disarmament.” Kennedy, impressed by the public-relations factors, ruled in Stevenson’s favor, though McCloy convinced him to use the phrase “total and universal disarmament” so as not to appear to endorse the Soviet plan.35