John J. McCloy
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John Jay McCloy (March 31, 1895, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – March 11, 1989, Stamford, Connecticut) was a lawyer and banker who later became a prominent United States presidential advisor. He was known for his opposition to the World War II atomic bombing of Japan, and his refusal to endorse compensation to the 110,000 Japanese-Americans who were held in internment camps within the USA.
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[edit] Career
McCloy was educated at Peddie School, New Jersey, and Amherst College. He enrolled in Harvard Law School in 1916, but would have his education interrupted by World War I. He was commissioned into the U.S. army as a Second Lieutenant in 1917, being promoted to Captain in 1918. He served with the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1918 and 1919. He received his LL.B. from Harvard in 1921.[1]
He was a legal counselor to the major German chemical combine I. G. Farben, and was the Assistant Secretary of War from 1941 to 1945, during which he was noted for opposing the nuclear bombing of Japan. [2] McCloy was notably supportive of the Third Reich at least until 1939 and was photographed sitting with Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.[citation needed]
During World War II, as Assistant Secretary of War, McCloy was a crucial voice in setting U.S. military priorities. The War Department was petitioned throughout late 1944 to help save Nazi prisoners by ordering the bombing of the railroad lines leading to Auschwitz and the gas chambers in the camp. McCloy responded that only heavy bombers would be able to reach the sites from England, and that those bombers would be too vulnerable and were needed elsewhere. However, only a few months earlier, Allied forces had bombed industrial centers just a few kilometers away from the extermination camp-and would continue to do so, apparently even causing some damage to buildings in Auschwitz, while sustaining very low losses. On another occasion, when replying to another appeal to bomb the gas chambers, McCloy claimed that the final decision on the selection of bombing targets, including those attacked by American planes, lay with the British alone. This was an incorrect claim. According to Michael Beschloss in an interview three years before his death (in 1986) with Henry Morgenthau, III, McCloy claimed that the decision not to bomb Auschwitz was President Roosevelt's and that he was merely fronting for him. [3] This appears plausible given Roosevelt's generally unsympathetic response to the Holocaust but is otherwise unsupported.
From March 1947 to June 1949, McCloy was president of the World Bank. In 1949 he replaced Lucius D. Clay who was the Military Governor for the U.S. Zone in Germany as the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany and held this position until 1952, during which time he oversaw Germany's return to statehood. At his direction, a campaign of wholesale pardoning and commutation of sentences of Nazi criminals took place, including those of the prominent industrialists Friedrich Flick and Alfried Krupp. McCloy also pardoned Ernst von Weizsäcker. {In 1978 Ernst Weizsacker's son German President Richard von Weizsäcker conferred honorary German Citizenship on McCloy}. Some of the less notable figures were retried and convicted in the newly independent West Germany. His successor as High Commissioner was James B. Conant; the office was terminated in 1955.
Following this, he served as chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank from 1953 to 1960, and as chairman of the Ford Foundation from 1958 to 1965; he was also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1946 to 1949, and then again from 1953 to 1958, before he took up the position at Ford.
From 1954 to 1970, he was chairman of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in New York, to be succeeded by David Rockefeller, who had worked closely with him at the Chase Bank. McCloy had a long association with the Rockefeller family, going back to his early Harvard days when he taught the young Rockefeller brothers how to sail. He was also a member of the Draper Committee, formed in 1958 by Eisenhower.
He later served as advisor to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, and was the primary negotiator on the Presidential Disarmament Committee. In 1963, he was awarded the prestigious Sylvanus Thayer Award by the United States Military Academy at West Point for his service to the country.
He was selected by Johnson to serve on the Warren Commission in 1963. Notably, he was initially sceptical of the lone gunman theory, but a trip to Dallas with Allen Dulles, an old friend also serving on the Commission, in the spring of 1964 to visit the scene of the assassination convinced him of the case against Oswald. The only prominent lawyer among the seven commissioners, he brokered the final consensus — avoiding a minority dissenting report — and the crucial wording of the primary conclusion of the final report. He stated that any possible evidence of a conspiracy was "beyond the reach" of all of America's investigatory agencies — principally the FBI and the CIA — as well as the Commission itself.
From 1966 to 1968 he was Honorary Chairman of the Paris-based Atlantic Institute.[4]
[edit] Law Firm Background
Originally a partner of the Cravath firm in New York, after the war McCloy became a name partner in the Rockefeller-associated prominent New York law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. In this capacity he acted for the "Seven Sisters", the leading multinational oil companies, including Exxon, in their initial confrontations with the nationalisation movement in Libya—as well as negotiations with Saudi Arabia and OPEC. Because of his stature in the legal world and his long association with the Rockefellers, and as a presidential adviser, he was sometimes referred to as the "Chairman of the American Establishment".
[edit] Further reading
- The Chairman: John J. McCloy - The Making of the American Establishment, Kai Bird, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
- The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, and McCloy, Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.
- The Chase: The Chase Manhattan Bank, N.A., 1945-85, John Donald Wilson, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1986.
- Memoirs, David Rockefeller, New York: Random House, 2002.
[edit] References
- ^ John J. McCloy Papers 1897-1989: Historical note. Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.
- ^ John McCloy and the Atomic Bombing of Japan
- ^ Beschloss
- ^ (2007) Who Was Who. A&C Black.
[edit] Additional sources
Martin Gilbert - Auschwitz And The Allies.
Stuart Erdheim - "Could The Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz-Birkenau?" - Holocaust and Genocide Studies (fall 97) pp 129-170.
[edit] See also
- Chase Manhattan Bank
- Council on Foreign Relations
- David Rockefeller
- Rockefeller family
- Japanese American internment
- Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy
- Warren Commission
- World Bank
[edit] External links
- Biography of John McCloy (website)
- Spartacus Educational Biography
- Foreign Affairs article on John McCloy
- John J. McCloy, a biography on Nuclearfiles.org
- The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination by Mae Brussell
- "The Splendid Reconciliation"
- A letter to John W. Pehle
- Could The Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz-Birkenau?
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| Business positions | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Eugene Meyer |
President of the World Bank 1947 – 1949 |
Succeeded by Eugene R. Black, Sr. |
| Awards | ||
| Preceded by Douglas MacArthur |
Sylvanus Thayer Award recipient 1963 |
Succeeded by Robert A. Lovett |
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