John J. McCloy

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.

Career

McCloy graduated from Amherst College in 1919, and then received an LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1921. 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[1]. 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, John J. 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 the 3rd, McCloy claimed that the decision not to bomb Auschwitz was President Roosevelt's and that he was merely fronting for him [2]. This appears plausible given Roosevelt's generally unsympathetic response to the Holocaust but is otherwise unsupported.

From March 1947 to June 1949, McCloy was the 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. 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.

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".

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.

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?

Preceded by Eugene Meyer	President of the World Bank 1947–1949	Succeeded by Eugene R. Black
Preceded by Douglas MacArthur	Sylvanus Thayer Award recipient 1963	Succeeded by Robert A. Lovett

John J. McCloy

Career

Law Firm Background

Further reading

Additional sources

See also

External links