by Kai Bird
In the spring of 1986, Robert McNamara called him up and invited him to join such veterans of previous arms-control negotiations as Paul Warnke, Gerard Smith, and George Kennan in urging President Reagan to take a less adversarial approach in his dealings with the Soviets. But McCloy was uncomfortable with the idea; he did not want to seem partisan, and he did not want to force himself on the president, particularly in the company of a group of prominent Democrats. Instead, he sat down and wrote the president a letter that repeated to Reagan what he had told numerous friends in and out of government: that in all his encounters with the Soviets, he had always found someone on the other side of the table who could be reasonable. Surely, he told Reagan, your administration should be able to negotiate some sort of agreement with the Soviets which could serve to ease tensions.8
Partly because the Soviets had a new, dynamic leader in Mikhail Gorbachev, and partly in response to Reagan’s growing domestic problems, the Reagan administration in 1987 finally began to show a genuine interest in arms-control negotiations. McCloy was pleased when, at the end of that year, the administration signed the INF treaty, which eliminated intermediate-range nuclear missiles from the European continent. He hoped further such agreements could be made in the future.
In March 1985, on McCloy’s ninetieth birthday, President Reagan invited him to the White House for a celebration in the Rose Garden. It was a crisp spring day when McCloy arrived at the front gate in his pale-blue Mercedes limousine. (He still served as a board director of Mercedes-Benz of North America, Inc.) With him were his son, John, an investment banker, and his daughter-in-law, Laura, and his two grandsons, Jay and Rush. His wife of fifty-five years, Ellen, had been ill for some time and could not attend. Inside, more than a hundred friends and colleagues—including the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker; Vice-President George Bush; and Secretary of State George Shultz—watched as the president of Germany, Richard von Weizsàcker, conferred honorary German citizenship on McCloy. Weizsàcker, the son of the same man whose war crimes sentence McCloy had commuted in 1950, praised McCloy’s “human decency in helping the beaten enemy to recover” and his efforts to build “one of the free and prosperous countries in the world. . . .”9
President Reagan congratulated the old man, saying, “John McCloy’s selfless heart has made a difference, an enduring difference, in the lives of millions.” Afterward, McCloy stood up against a chill wind, hatless and without an overcoat, and joked with the president: “Compared to me, what a spring chicken you are.” He admitted that he was a little sensitive about his age. “A friend of mine—I’m sure he was a friend—once said to me, ‘Jack, did you ever stop to think . . . in a few years your life will represent one-half the life of the entire country. . . .” America, he said, was still “a young country. . . . Its great destinies are ahead of it.” He then reminisced briefly about his long life, and particularly his experience in two world wars. He recalled his service in World War I under Brigadier General Guy H. Preston, “a man who had fought Indians on the Plains.”10
The following evening, he was the guest of honor at a black-tie dinner hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. Former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was there, as were Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and dozens of other old friends. Rockefeller anointed him “the first Citizen of the Council on Foreign Relations,” and unveiled a plaque beneath a portrait of McCloy hung in the Council’s ornate meeting hall which read, “Statesman, Patriot, Friend.” Then Kissinger rose to speak. Quoting Bismarck, he intoned, “John McCloy, I believe, heard the footsteps of God as he went through history. And those of us who were not humble enough or whose ears were not sharp enough had the privilege of knowing that if we followed in his footsteps we were in the path of doing God’s work.”
McCloy responded to this outlandish flattery with better-measured words: “I know that many of the things said tonight were exaggerated, but they made me feel warm. My record has its pluses and minuses. I only hope that it has been credible, that people can say of me: he did his damnedest, the angels can do no more.”11
To his distress, however, his last years were stalked by the kind of controversy and personal animus that he had managed to avoid most of his life. Outside of the Council on Foreign Relations and similar Establishment turfs, strident voices were sometimes heard, disputing the soundness of his judgment and protesting the awards and honors heaped upon him. When Harvard University accepted Volkswagen money funneled through the McCloy Fund, a coalition of students and some faculty organized a vigorous protest. Articles appeared in campus publications recounting McCloy’s role in the internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II and his decision not to bomb Auschwitz. The Washington Post, The New Republic, Commentary, and numerous other national magazines re-examined the controversy, while old friends came to his defense, including Nahum Goldmann’s son, Guido, who happened now to be on the Harvard faculty.
But the debate persisted, partly because McCloy refused to stay above the fray. In 1981, when a congressional commission investigating the Japanese American internment invited him to testify, he eagerly agreed, thinking he would be able to explain why such tough decisions had been made in the midst of the war. He mistakenly thought he would be accorded the usual deference and courtesy of an elder statesman. Things did not work out that way. When he tried to describe conditions in the internment camps as “very pleasant,” the audience, many of whom had lived in those camps, burst into sarcastic laughter. Later, one of the commission members, a Japanese American who was then serving as a judge in Pennsylvania, literally screamed at him, “What other Americans, Mr. McCloy, fought for this country while their parents, brothers and sisters were incarcerated?”
McCloy angrily responded, “I don’t like the word ‘incarcerated.’ ”12 He then astonished everyone by warning the commission that Congress should do nothing to tie the hands of a president in a future crisis. One could not predict what might have to be done in the name of national security. The next war, he suggested, could be waged against Cuba, and it might be necessary to detain large numbers of Cuban Americans in southern Florida. Not surprisingly, such testimony was punctuated by hissing and booing. McCloy thought the whole proceedings were a “disgrace,” and told a friend, “Money, money, money. Why don’t they dun the Japanese government? We didn’t attack Pearl Harbor, they did.”13 Few were convinced by his arguments, and eventually Congress issued a formal apology to the Japanese American community and promised to pay $20,000 in compensation to each surviving internee. McCloy was crestfallen when President Reagan signed the bill into law.
The controversy even invaded the private confines of Milbank, Tweed, where one of the firm’s associates, a Japanese American whose parents had been interned, confronted McCloy in the hallway outside his office. It quickly turned into a shouting match, and though the associate was not dismissed, he soon left Milbank, Tweed for another firm.
McCloy felt misunderstood. He told reporters who came around to his One Chase Plaza office that he was never such an important figure. He didn’t understand why anyone would think he had ever had the power to decide these issues. “I was just a leg man,” he protested. He was further annoyed when Harper’s magazine profiled him in a long cover story as “the most influential private citizen in America.” He tried to stop the publication of the article and, failing that, vigorously protested its treatment of his role in the internment, Auschwitz, and Krupp decisions.
Unhappy as he was with these public recriminations, McCloy’s private life had taken a tragic turn. In the mid-1970s, Ellen had begun noticing that her hands sometimes trembled. Eventually, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative nerve disorder. By 1976, she could no longer take care of herself, and McCloy hired a live-in nurse. Over the years, the disease steadily advanced, clouding Ellen’s mind so that at times she couldn’t even recognize her husband of fifty years.14 Once, McCloy returned home from his Milbank, Tweed offices late at night and found
Ellen hallucinating. To his shock, he realized that she thought he was some Nazi general who had come to take her away. On another occasion, a doctor asked her to name the current president of the United States, and she replied, referring to Jimmy Carter, “Oh, you know, that Peanut.” These spells came and went, but her condition never improved.
Watching his once strong-willed wife deteriorate pained McCloy greatly. Ellen had always been the one who had pushed him in his career. He had relied on her judgment and scheduled his social life around her desires. In the presence of others, McCloy tried to hold his emotions in. He never sobbed, or broke down, but sometimes he would softly cry, and mumble quietly that it hurt him that he couldn’t do anything to help her. Finally, though the idea was awful to him, he realized he would have to put Ellen in a nursing home where she could receive round-the-clock care. A place was found thirty minutes from Cos Cob, and Ellen, now generally unaware of her surroundings, was moved into a large pleasant room. (McCloy told his old friend Benny Buttenwieser that the nursing home was costing him $75,000 a year.)
Every day after work, he came and sat by her; they would hold hands for hours, while he read aloud from a biography or history book from his large library. At times he thought of retiring and spending his whole day looking after Ellen. But though by most standards he was a relatively rich man, he felt he had to keep on working in order to meet Ellen’s medical expenses and to maintain the household. He told his friends that he realized that retirement wouldn’t do him or Ellen any good.15
Ellen finally died in the spring of 1986, at the age of eighty-seven. By then McCloy’s own health, at the age of ninety-one, was beginning to deteriorate. He had suffered a mild heart attack in 1982, but after a brief hospitalization, he returned to work. Even though he found little corporate legal work to do, Milbank, Tweed allowed him to retain his office and the use of a secretary. Nearly every day, he was driven to One Chase Plaza, where he answered his correspondence and talked with old friends. With the assistance of Shep Stone and the Harvard diplomatic historian, Ernest May, he attempted for a time to write a short memoir. It didn’t work out, but it gave him the excuse to reminisce on tape with such old friends as Robert Lovett, Averell Harriman, and Benny Buttenwieser. After Ellen died, he spent more time at his Cos Cob home, where his daughter took care of him. Off and on for five years, he suffered from congestive heart failure. Then one day, just a couple of weeks before his ninety-fourth birthday, he awoke and found it difficult to breathe. His doctor was called from nearby Greenwich and quickly determined that the patient was suffering an attack of pulmonary edema.16 In lay terms, his heart was simply giving out, and his lungs were filling with fluid. For three hours, he struggled to find the strength to breathe, and then, at 12:15 P.M. on March 11, 1989, he was gone. The Chairman was dead.
At the very beginning of the Cold War, in 1946, John J. McCloy unabashedly wrote his earliest mentor, Philadelphia lawyer George Wharton Pepper, “In the light of what has happened, I would take a chance on this country using its strength tyrannously. . . . We need, if you will, a Pax Americana, and in the course of it the world will become more receptive to the Bill of Rights viewpoint than if we do no more than devoutly wish for peace and freedom.” This imperial vision of a beneficent America attempting to impose its values on a hostile world became the rationale for a prolonged Cold War, fought not only in Europe, but throughout the developing world.
It also required an enormous investment of American resources in building a military establishment the likes of which the world has never seen. As Henry Stimson’s lieutenant during World War II, McCloy was instrumental in mobilizing the American economy to wage total war. This may have been his greatest service to the country. But when the war ended, he and his peers in the American foreign policy establishment provided the rationale for continuing this mobilization, this time to build a peacetime national security state. America would turn outward and assume global responsibilities. The costs of building this military and intelligence apparatus have been staggering; the end of the Cold War has left America with an uncompetitive economy burdened with debt, high unemployment, low growth, and income levels more unevenly divided than at any time since the beginning of the Cold War.
The Establishment always assured the American people that the burdens of the national security state were affordable while the risks of isolationism were not. Like many in his generation, McCloy had overlearned the lessons of Munich. He equated neutrality with isolationism, and isolationism with appeasement. He shared with most members of the Establishment a worldview that ultimately set the stage for America’s disastrous intervention in the Vietnamese civil war.
McCloy himself candidly stated that his career had “its pluses and minuses.” Foremost among his many attractive qualities was his flexible legal mind. Studying the law required patience, persistence, and humility. One had to be able to see another man’s point of view and understand how two people could arrive at opposing opinions. The man who staged “reading debates” for himself on the issues of the day also had the ability to convince two adversaries that he could represent the interests of both. Through sheer hard work he became remarkably adept at “yellow-padding” complicated legal agreements between contentious parties. No one disliked this man except from a distance.
McCloy had a reservoir of patience and enough persistence to prevail in almost any endeavor. But he was not a stubborn man. He could change his mind. He even possessed the ability to admit he was wrong, a rare quality in men of his stature and power.
Through persistence, not brilliance, he crossed over Philadelphia’s “Chinese Wall” and elbowed his way into elite society. The son of a hairdresser earned a position for himself as lawyer-servant for some of the most powerful private interests in America. Men like John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Felix Warburg, and Sid Richardson sought his counsel, in part because he was just a very good lawyer, but also because they knew he was the kind of man who could tell rich men what he really thought. He could be disarmingly frank, even critical, and yet they also sensed that his loyalties were to their class. He was exactly the kind of man a Rockefeller could trust to run his bank or teach his sons how to sail.
On occasion, McCloy’s pragmatism led to his most troubling decisions. He could justify almost anything in the name of national security, including the wholesale internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Similarly, his determination not to divert military resources away from the war effort blinded him to the opportunity of rescuing thousands of doomed European Jews from the gas chambers of Auschwitz. And even some of his admirers find it difficult to understand his clemency decisions on behalf of Alfried Krupp and dozens of other convicted Nazi war criminals.
Often, however, his instincts were sound. As assistant secretary of war he helped the U.S. Army take the first halting steps toward racial integration. As high commissioner in Occupied Germany he nurtured democratic institutions and encouraged a robust free press. He had gambled that if Germany could be kept divided for at least one generation, eventually the powerful German nation could be reunited within a democratic European union. To an extraordinary degree, he won this gamble. As an adviser to the president during the Cuban missile crisis, he patiently negotiated the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba and urged the Kennedy administration to place arms control high on the national agenda. From the dawn of the nuclear era, he understood that after Hiroshima, mankind would someday have to take the path to a disarmament system or not survive.
As men possessing a measure of gravitas, McCloy and other Establishment figures always claimed they could rise above the private interests they represented and discern the larger public good. Ultimately, this claim is not sustainable. But it is nevertheless remarkable how the postwar Establishment managed for so long to fulfill that promise. Before he died, McCloy himself observed of the new generation, “These big salaries lawyers are getting make it much harder for them to consider government as part of their careers. When I was young, the id
ea of serving in Washington was the most exciting prospect I could imagine.”
McCloy’s career compares so favorably to the opportunism of his successors that many observers have taken to voicing a certain nostalgia for the pre-Vietnam Establishment. But even McCloy, at critical moments in his stewardship, blurred the boundaries between private and public interests.
The Establishment symbolized by John J. McCloy’s life remains a useful metaphor for understanding how power works in America at the end of the twentieth century. Lawyers trained in the Wall Street tradition still constitute American democracy’s only natural aristocracy.
Admittedly, this Establishment is no longer the narrow, male-only, Wall Street private club of McCloy’s time. The old Philadelphia Establishment is dying out. Elite institutions are no longer exclusively dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from the Eastern seaboard. Reflecting the splintering of interests within society at large, the club itself displays more divisiveness and less bipartisanship than at any time in this century.