by Kai Bird
Throughout that spring, McCloy commuted between Manhattan and Washington. Earlier that year, he had moved from the top of One Chase Plaza down to Milbank, Tweed’s thirty-sixth-floor offices, where he was given a corner suite. He could look out across the southern tip of Manhattan and see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island; far off to the right, near the Jersey shore, he had a view of what remained of the old Black Tom railroad terminus. His arrangement with Milbank, Tweed was very informal. He served the firm not as a partner, but as “of counsel,” a term usually used in the legal community to describe a senior lawyer and former partner who has reached retirement age. In McCloy’s case, it was recognized that he had no intention of retiring. In fact, he had told his former partners that he intended to become quite active in the firm. But because of his nine-month commitment to the president, he would take a little longer to work his way back into the business. In addition, he had not relinquished his chairmanships of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Ford Foundation. He also remained on the board of directors of a dozen corporations. In May, he was elected vice-president of the New York City Bar Association, a largely ceremonial post but one that occasionally required his presence at functions.36 Still, despite these outside activities and his commuting to Washington, he gradually eased himself back into the law, acquiring a number of corporate retainers on behalf of Milbank, Tweed.
When not in Washington, he spent as much time as possible with Ellen in their apartment on 79th Street, which occupied one floor of a large town house. On the weekends, they moved up to their country home in Cos Cob, Connecticut, which they had built in 1958 on a five-acre lot.37 There was a pool in the backyard which they shared with their neighbors. On one side lived McCloy’s old fishing partner Henry Brunie, his wife, and their daughters, who considered McCloy an adopted uncle. On the other side lived Freddie Warburg and his wife. There was a housekeeper, and a butler who drove McCloy into Manhattan each morning. McCloy’s son, Johnny, had graduated from Princeton, where he had written his senior thesis on the German resistance to Hitler, and was now serving a two-year stint with the U.S. Army back in Germany. His daughter, Ellen, to whom McCloy was very close, was now a twenty-year-old student at her mother’s alma mater, Smith College. His thirty-one-year marriage to Ellen was as solid and comfortable as ever. She was active in a large number of charitable ventures, most prominently as a member of the board of Bellevue Hospital. He displayed the same vigor as always on the tennis court, and on two or three occasions a year he found the time to pack himself off to Vermont, Arizona, Texas, or some other stretch of wilderness for a few days of fishing or hunting. Occasionally, he and Freddie Warburg went horseback-riding together on Warburg’s horse farm near Middleburg, Virginia. He had ample income, considerable material assets, and the admiration and respect of his peers. As McCloy celebrated his sixty-sixth birthday that March, his personal life seemed to lack nothing.
That spring, the Kennedy administration faced the first of a string of foreign-policy crises: the fiasco known as the Bay of Pigs. It is not clear if McCloy was aware that the Eisenhower administration had been planning a covert operation involving the invasion of Cuba by a band of CIA-trained and -equipped Cuban exiles. Robert Lovett, however, had been briefed on the project in late 1960 and had expressed strong disapproval of the scheme. But the new president was unaware of Lovett’s skepticism and did not consult anyone outside his immediate intelligence and military advisers. (Arthur Schlesinger justified the invasion in a White Paper written shortly before the fiasco.38) In the event, the Cuban exiles landed on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs and were quickly defeated. Publicly humiliated, the young president told Clark Clifford, “I’ve made a terrible mistake. . . . I would hope that I could live it down, but it is going to be difficult.” Called down from New York to assess what went wrong, Lovett told Kennedy what he had told the Eisenhower administration in January 1961, that the CIA’s covert-action programs were not always “worth the risk or the great expenditure of manpower, money, and other resources involved.”39 The fiasco sealed Allen Dulles’s fate. In a few months, he was replaced by McCloy’s West Coast business acquaintance John McCone.
McCloy regarded the Bay of Pigs as a singular example of bad presidential decision-making. He was inclined to be less critical of the CIA’s covert operations than was Lovett. But for him the Cuban affair raised troubling legal questions. How could we protest Khrushchev’s arming of Laotian or Vietnamese rebels if we ourselves armed anti-Castro rebels? It was also a matter of misplaced priorities. Why risk so much presidential prestige over a Caribbean island of so little strategic importance? The Bay of Pigs venture, McCloy thought, had diverted the White House from the far more weighty issues of NATO defense, Berlin, and arms-control negotiations with the Soviets. As he told the president’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, he hoped that, “no matter what the provocations or jingoistic pressures, any further action against Castro will be prayerfully considered.”40
It was understood that McCloy would concentrate on the broader problem of developing a disarmament policy and setting up a new agency; meanwhile, negotiations over a test-ban treaty were revived in Geneva. McCloy selected his old friend Arthur Dean, a Sullivan & Cromwell partner, to go to Geneva that spring.41 The talks quickly became stalemated, however, partly because of Soviet insistence that there be a “troika” of three administrators with inspection powers, each one of whom could veto an inspection of a suspicious explosion. Washington wanted one administrator, believing that a troika of inspectors would only paralyze the inspection system.42
For its part, the United States was making the negotiations difficult by insisting on the right to explode certain outdated nuclear-weapon designs in order to refine its seismic capabilities. Such tests, the Soviets responded, would only provide a cover for the testing of new weapon designs. Among themselves, the Americans could admit that there “was some validity” to the charge that “these shots would teach us how to evade the test ban agreement.” But this was something they were unwilling to concede to the Soviets.43
In addition, the two parties were at loggerheads over the number of on-site inspections each side would be entitled to in the course of a year. On-site inspections were thought to be necessary to distinguish low-level nuclear explosions from minor earthquakes. The United States demanded twenty such on-site inspections, while the Soviets insisted that three inspections a year would be entirely sufficient. In fact, the two positions were not so far apart. McCloy told Rusk in March that the scientists now believed their seismic instruments were sensitive enough that ten on-site inspections “would be an acceptable deterrent.”44 Ultimately, Washington would have accepted as few as seven or eight inspections. And it is known today from Soviet sources that they were prepared to go to at least four or five inspections.45 In retrospect, it seems clear that a test-ban treaty was much more attainable in 1961 than either party thought.
Faced with what they perceived as a stalemate on the test-ban talks, Stevenson and other liberals in the administration persuaded Kennedy that spring to shift the focus of negotiations from a test ban to an agreement on general disarmament principles. McCloy was initially reluctant on this score, since he thought he needed more time to develop a legal framework for a general disarmament agreement. But early in June, Kennedy met with Khrushchev in Vienna for a mini-summit. The Soviet leader took a hard line on Berlin and other matters, but on the issue of disarmament he suggested there was room for radical progress. “In view of the fact,” Khrushchev told the president, “that apparently no agreement can be reached on the question of nuclear tests this question should be linked to disarmament. If agreement could be reached on disarmament, then the USSR could agree to any controls and it would then drop the troika arrangement and the requirement for unanimity.” With a disarmament agreement, he promised, controls “must be most extensive so that no country could arm itself clandestinely.”46 In other words, if the two superpowers could trust each other enough to go for a sweeping d
isarmament package, the Soviets would agree to all the verification provisions Washington wanted. Without disarmament, however, there could be no progress on such limited arms-control measures as a test-ban treaty.
Needless to say, the Kennedy administration was not politically prepared to end the Cold War so precipitously. Nor could McCloy make the leap in trust that would have been required for a breakthrough. Later that week, he told a commencement audience at Williams College, “Every time Russia pulls a new weapon advance out of its sleeve, the United States tries to do the same. And the whole grim sequence leads to a sense of instability and insecurity.”47
He could describe the cycle of distrust between the two superpowers, but he could not himself break it. On the contrary, he now decided it was time to take a tough position. Several days later, he went in to see Kennedy, armed with a memo recommending that the United States unilaterally break the moratorium on nuclear testing. He said Khrushchev had made it clear in Vienna that the Soviets were not about to change their position on either the test ban or general disarmament. He warned Kennedy that the Soviets might soon or already be engaging in “clandestine testing,” and concluded that so long as the U.S. respected the moratorium “the USSR is under no pressure to come to an agreement involving any inspection.” He even suggested that the United States give no prior announcement of the resumed tests.48 For the time being, Kennedy rejected this advice, though he made sure that preparations continued for the tunnels necessary for a series of underground tests. And he did accept McCloy’s recommendation to send a signal to the Soviets by recalling Arthur Dean from the Geneva test-ban talks.
McCloy’s tough line on a resumption of testing did not mean he wished to break off the general disarmament talks. In fact, he wished to proceed with these negotiations and reiterated his concept of a “rule of law”: “We should press for . . . an acceptance of the concept of the rule of law in international disputes which involves a true acceptance of the principle of international arbitration, the extension of the jurisdiction of the International Court, the application of international sanctions by impartial tribunals not subject to veto.”49
Soon after seeing Kennedy, he had his first session with the Soviet disarmament negotiator, Valerian A. Zorin. After they had met for 110 minutes in the State Department, McCloy told the press the opening session went “OK.” But in a series of meetings between June 19 and 30, the two men made no progress at all. When McCloy tried to confine the discussion to the mechanics of setting up a multinational disarmament conference, Zorin expressed “surprise” that the United States did not wish to discuss matters of substance.50 The Russian kept pressing McCloy for unilateral steps toward actual disarmament. One day that month, McCloy scrawled a note to Eisenhower, “I feel like a maiden in need of prayer. . . .”51
The disarmament talks seemed unrealistic enough as it was, but to make matters worse, McCloy’s meetings with Zorin occurred at a time of heightened tensions over Berlin. The New York Times that week reported that administration officials expected a difficult summer, “replete with talk of war.”52 Berlin was heavy on everyone’s minds. Refugees were streaming across from East Germany through the city’s unguarded lines into West Berlin, and Khrushchev was repeatedly warning that the abnormal status of West Berlin had to be altered. At an NSC meeting called to discuss the crisis on June 28, a hawkish Dean Acheson recommended that Kennedy send a division of army troops down the Autobahn to West Berlin and declare a national emergency. Afterward, a shocked Averell Harriman complained to Arthur Schlesinger that Acheson, a “frustrated and rigid man,” was “leading us down the road to war.”53 In such an atmosphere, McCloy was not likely to achieve much on the disarmament front. At the end of the month, he took Zorin to the White House to introduce him to the president, but this presidential meeting led to no breakthrough. Clearly, if McCloy was to meet with any success, he would have to find it in the Moscow round of talks, scheduled for mid-July.
Before taking off for Moscow, he “bummed a ride” with the Army chief of staff, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, for two days of good “dry-fly” fishing on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence. “The salmon are smaller than on the south shore,” he wrote Eisenhower, “but they were active and in many ways more exciting. . . . It was a real relaxation.” He said that he really did not “relish” the prospect of another session with the Russians, and reported to the retired president that he had just received a “rather surly and unpleasant” note from the Russians on the test-ban issue. “I suppose one must expect as much.”54
After six months on the job, the only concrete accomplishment McCloy could claim was that he and his staff had finally drafted the legislation necessary for establishing an autonomous Arms Control and Disarmament Agency within the State Department. Before leaving for Moscow, McCloy presented it to Kennedy, who then sent it on to Congress for what would later prove to be a contentious debate.55
After two further meetings with Kennedy, McCloy finally boarded a plane for Frankfurt, where he planned to spend a day or two before going on to Moscow.56 He traveled with what Dean Acheson told Justice Frankfurter was “quite a harem”: Ellen McCloy; their daughter, Ellen; and his niece, the pretty thirty-two-year-old Sharman Douglas. When he arrived in Moscow, the talks with Zorin resumed in what The New York Times reported was an atmosphere of “gloom.”57 Zorin informed McCloy that the Soviets were not prepared to participate in a multinational disarmament conference until some broad bilateral agreement on general principles was reached with the United States. For a week, the two men argued over language, mechanically reading prepared speeches to each other. Zorin continued to insist on the phrase “general and complete disarmament,” while McCloy held to his own formulation of “total and universal disarmament.” The Russian translations of the two phrases were actually identical, so the argument seemed rather nonsensical. The only light moment in their discussions occurred when the Soviet interpreter once mistakenly translated Zorin as saying that the Soviet Union was unalterably wedded to “total and universal disarmament.” At this Zorin interrupted and, speaking in English for the first time, said, “You know, Mr. McCloy, it looks as if he is going over to your side.”58
This charade continued until finally, on July 25, McCloy left unexpectedly for the resort town of Sochi, on the Black Sea. Khrushchev had invited him and his family to join him at his vacation dacha. The boisterous Soviet leader warmly greeted the McCloy party, and laughingly apologized for having called McCloy a “goat sent to guard the cabbage patch” when he was appointed Kennedy’s disarmament adviser. McCloy replied, “No, no, that’s all right,” and, pointing to the rows of old war medals emblazoned across Khrushchev’s chest, “I see you’re something of an old goat yourself.”59 The two men laughed, and then Khrushchev talked in reassuring terms about the diplomatic sparring McCloy had just put himself through. It was, he joked, like kicking a football back and forth. Perhaps the ball would be kicked around like this until the Soviets sent in a new ball, and then a treaty would be signed. But the next day, having read a translation of a speech President Kennedy had given on the Berlin crisis, Khrushchev exploded. He told McCloy that the speech constituted “a preliminary declaration of war.”60
Kennedy had not taken Acheson’s advice to send in troops, and he had not declared a national emergency. But he had announced in bellicose language that he was calling out 150,000 reservists and was asking Congress for a dramatic increase in the defense budget. Whereas Eisenhower had steadfastly refused to frighten the American people with talk of bomb shelters, Kennedy now endorsed a program to build fallout shelters nationwide. Nuclear warfare, he seemed to be saying, could be right around the corner. “We cannot and will not,” he said, “permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force.”61
Kennedy’s speech escalated the war of words over Berlin’s status. In part, he was motivated by the widespread perception that his reputation had been damaged by the Bay of Pigs episode and press reports that Khrus
hchev had browbeaten him at their meeting in Vienna. He now had to look tough. But he could also threaten to fight for Berlin because he knew now that the alleged “missile gap” did not exist. Earlier that year, the Defense Department had shown him satellite photos demonstrating that the Soviets had only a “handful” of ICBMs.62 McCloy, of course, had not heard Kennedy’s speech, but he was quite alarmed by Khrushchev’s reaction and worried that the two powers might actually be drifting into war.
That evening, however, Khrushchev acted the gracious host and held a dinner in McCloy’s honor. Vast quantities of food were served, accompanied by plenty of wine and vodka. The more they talked, the less rhetorical became their exchanges. On the following morning, Khrushchev took a motorboat ten minutes across the Black Sea to the villa where the McCloy party was lodged. Arriving a half-hour earlier than expected, he caught Mrs. McCloy and her niece, Sharman Douglas, sunning themselves in bathing suits on the dock. Embarrassed, the two women scrambled inside as Khrushchev politely turned his back. A few moments later, McCloy and his now fully clothed ladies joined Khrushchev for the boat ride back to the general secretary’s own dacha. Quite proud of his indoor pool with its retractable glass doors, Khrushchev insisted they go for a swim. He loaned McCloy a pair of his large black boxer-style swimming trunks, and shortly later the two men were photographed bobbing around together in the pool. Grinning broadly, with Khrushchev’s arm wrapped around McCloy’s shoulder, the Russian and the American looked the closest of friends. Afterward, they played some tennis together and then went for a walk in Khrushchev’s garden. The next day, McCloy hinted to reporters that the arms talks might be making some progress: “Maybe we are further along.”63