Real Lace

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  It would be the last great party in the lavish house Nicholas Brady had built for his wife twenty years earlier. The Duchess had already completed arrangements to sell its furnishings, and to turn “Inisfada” over to the Jesuits for use as a Catholic retreat. (Her neighbor, Michael Grace, was less gracious when his family sold the Grace estate on the Irish Channel to a local country club; something of an eccentric, he regarded the house as still his and refused to move out, and, when the country club moved in, he enjoyed annoying the golfers by walking around the golf course in bathing trunks, swinging at members with a golf club.)

  It had been deemed improper to have the Cardinal meet with the President during the election campaign, but when, in November, Roosevelt was re-elected by an overwhelming majority, the Hyde Park luncheon was quickly set up. The Cardinal was received by both the President and Mrs. Roosevelt, and those Roosevelt servants who were Catholics received His Eminence’s blessing. Mrs. Roosevelt, though not a Catholic, knelt with her servants during it. In the conversation that followed, the subject of a United States minister to the Vatican came up, and the President virtually promised that the Vatican would receive such recognition. In the negotiations toward this end that followed, Bishop Spellman—the future Cardinal Spellman—would act as the chief liaison between the White House and the Vatican. But the true heroine behind the establishment of such a mission was, of course, the Duchess Brady.

  When Anthony N. Brady died, he had left an estate of over $100 million—the largest of its day. Grandpa Murray had been the estate’s executor. When Brady’s son Nicholas died in 1930, his widow inherited some $60 million. Not long after her great party at “Inisfada” the Duchess met in Rome a man named William Babbington Macauley. Macauley was the son of an Irish trawler captain, and was serving as Minister to the Vatican from the Irish Free State. In 1937 the Duchess married Mr. Macauley in a small private ceremony at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in Manhattan. One of the few witnesses was Bishop Spellman. Bishop Spellman was also at the pier to see the couple off on their wedding trip on the Conte di Savoia. Relations between the Duchess and the Bishop had become somewhat strained, however, because Mr. Macauley was not as enamored of the Jesuits as his bride was, and had privately vowed to terminate the Duchess’s long romance with them. For several months, the Bishop and the Duchess—who still liked to be known as “the Duchess Brady,” though she was sometimes referred to as “the widow Brady”—were out of touch.

  In 1938, Bishop Spellman received a cablegram from Rome which said simply: “GENEVIEVE DIED AT NOON.” After scarcely more than a year of marriage, the Duchess had succumbed to complications following a routine visit to the dentist. Mr. Macauley’s feelings in the matter aside, the Duchess was buried beside Mr. Brady in the Jesuit novitiate which they had built in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. As Bishop Spellman wrote to one of his nieces in college at the time:

  I am glad, Mary, that there is to be a Mass celebrated at Manhattanville for Mrs. Brady. She was a marvelous woman and in several respects one of the most wonderful persons I have ever met.… Of course she may have made some mistakes but they were fewer than most of us make. Fundamentally she had a wonderful heart and a good brain, and she believed, I am thoroughly convinced, that everything she did was right. Certainly everything that she did was done with the right motive. She tried to be guided by supernatural considerations, and I know that even in her social activities she had religious motives. She was a daily communicant, and whenever possible she passed an hour each day in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament.

  She did not live to see her friend Cardinal Pacelli become Pope Pius XII in 1939.

  After the Duchess’s death, William Babbington Macauley found himself in very comfortable circumstances indeed. The bulk of her great fortune was left outright to him. Macauley traveled between New York and Rome and Florida, accompanied by his personal chef-butler, a man named Woods. Eventually, Macauley elevated Woods to the post of private secretary. When Macauley died, eyebrows went up on both continents when it was revealed that he had left all his money to Mr. Woods. Thus a great portion of Anthony N. Brady’s fortune passed out of the Brady family, a development that did not exactly please the other Bradys, who fell to wrangling over what was left.

  When Grandpa Murray used to remind his children and grandchildren that “Money can divide a family,” he might have been anticipating the fate of the Bradys.

  Chapter 18

  “ATOMIC TOM”

  Proper and pious Uncle Thomas E. Murray, Jr., who was often criticized within the family for the way, after Grandpa Murray’s death, he more or less appointed himself the conscience of the Murrays, McDonnells, and Cuddihys—the family’s moral and religious watchdog—could also be a man of urbanity and gentle humor. For example, when his nephew, Jack Cuddihy, was a student at Portsmouth Priory in 1937, he wrote to Uncle Tom to ask whether the latter would be interested in buying an ad in the school yearbook, The Raven. Young Cuddihy gently reminded his uncle that he himself was a stockholder in certain of the Murray companies and therefore, speaking as a stockholder, he recommended his uncle’s using The Raven as an advertising medium. Writing on the letterhead of his Metropolitan Device Corporation, which manufactured industrial electric switches, Uncle Tom replied with tongue firmly in cheek:

  Your recent communication calling attention to the advertising possibilities of the Portsmouth “Raven” has been duly received and referred to our Advertising Manager for a complete report.… It may take several days to get all of the necessary data to enable us to reach a final decision.… In the meantime, we are enclosing herewith an order for a full page “ad” from the Metropolitan and we are very anxious to know when this publication will reach the public, as we wish to be prepared, with extra help, to adequately meet the switch demand that is bound to result from this publicity. Will you therefore be good enough to give us some idea as to when we will have to prepare for the rush of orders?

  His nephew had asked him if Metropolitan was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and in the same vein Uncle Tom replied:

  In answer to your question, permit me to say that it is not, as the facilities of that Exchange are not nearly adequate enough to absorb the additional load that would be placed upon it if our stock was listed. It is quite evident to us that the whole mechanism of the Exchange would jam, resulting in confusion and possibly discharge of employees, and it would seem to us, from the philanthropic standpoint, we should put aside all selfish motive and refrain from permitting our stock to be used as a gambling medium. I feel sure, when you consider this matter you will agree with our conclusions.

  He was also a public-spirited man, and was to become easily the most distinguished Murray of the second generation. He himself held two hundred patents for electrical and welding devices, and, after a brief bout with politics—as an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York—Uncle Tom spent a number of years devoted to the family businesses. During World War I, under a commission from the government, he helped to apply his father’s welding process to munitions-making, and he designed and manufactured welding equipment for the Army’s trench warfare division. After the war, he devised a new and improved type of rear-axle housing for automobiles.

  During the Second World War, Uncle Tom converted his plants to the production of mortar shells for the government, and for his wartime inventions in this field he received a citation for distinguished service and a personal letter of thanks from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1947, Tom Murray was named presiding trustee of a three-man board to administer the $15 million health and welfare fund of the United Mine Workers of America.

  But he found his thoughts turning again to government service of some sort, and when President Harry S. Truman asked him in 1950 if he would be interested in serving as a member of Truman’s five-man Atomic Energy Commission, Uncle Tom eagerly said yes. He was appointed to fill the unexpired term of David A. Lilienthal, who had resigned.

  Uncle Tom Murray—or “
Atomic Tom” as he was soon being called—was a man of strong principles. And, on the AEC. it was not long before he found himself locking horns with the Commission’s Chairman, Lewis L. Strauss. Part of their differences was political—Strauss being a Republican, Murray a Democrat. But it went much deeper than that. A lot had to do with the difference in the two men’s personalities. Tall, slender, and handsome Tom Murray was quietly conservative in manner, a gentle persuader when attempting to convey his beliefs and express his opinions. Strauss was tough, assertive, pugnacious, and autocratic, a man who liked getting his own way and who reacted stormily when he didn’t. “Humility” was one quality Strauss had little of, and his tenure as Chairman of the AEC was marked by a series of stormy confrontations, among them his ousting of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer from the handling of classified research. Strauss liked to take full personal credit for the development of the hydrogen bomb, while his detractors insisted that he really had very little to do with it. With his toplofty manner, Strauss did not make many friends in Washington, and those who disliked him mocked his excessively precise speech—he insisted that his name be pronounced “Straws”—and the impeccably manicured tailoring of his clothes.

  Tom Murray objected to what he called Strauss’s “one-man rule” of the Atomic Energy Commission. But the basic difference between the two men was over matters of atomic policy. Murray wanted “rational limits” on nuclear warfare. Lewis Strauss wanted more and more big bombs. Strauss was for nuclear testing, Murray was opposed. Strauss wanted private industry to produce atomic energy, while Murray favored a government program. Strauss was a hawk, Murray a dove. Tom Murray argued that hydrogen bomb tests should be stopped because the atomic bombs were already powerful enough to destroy civilization, and there seemed to be no sane reason for building bigger ones. He said that, instead, the United States should equip its armed forces with tens of thousands of smaller atomic weapons as protection against the danger of limited wars. He also argued that the federal government could produce peacetime atomic power better and more quickly than if the task were left to private companies, as Strauss advocated. The government should produce atomic power, Murray believed, for use in areas where ordinary fuel was scarce and power was costly.

  Murray’s chief objection to Strauss’s management of the AEC was the tight lid of secrecy which Strauss imposed on the activities of the Commission, even bypassing and ignoring Congressional inquiries into what the AEC was up to. The public needed more information about, for example, the hazards of nuclear testing. “The world actually learned about radioactive fallout from twenty-seven Japanese fishermen, and I think that was the wrong way to have learned it,” as Tom Murray put it.

  On the AEC Murray later wrote that he was dismayed to discover that “It is not easy to say precisely who makes atomic energy policy in the United States or how it is made,” and that if one were “to try to trace the making of a basic nuclear policy decision, he would have to go through a tortuous maze of governmental agencies that initiate or suggest policies, draft position papers on proposed policies, advise, dilute, compromise, and modify policy proposals. He would probably get lost or give up before he had completed his quest through the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Joint Committee, the National Security Council, the Operations Coordinating Board, the President’s special staff assistants on scientific affairs, disarmament and other matters, and the Atomic Energy Commission itself.” It was a maze of lethargy and confusion, created, he implied, by the Commission’s cantankerous Chairman.

  Murray was startled to discover, from General Douglas MacArthur’s testimony to Congress upon his return from the Far East in 1951, that those charged with executing American nuclear policy were also kept in the dark and not given access to the full facts, and that the General himself “had not been fully briefed on our atomic strength.” At the time, Murray was determined to convey information about America’s nuclear stockpile to members of the National Security Council, including the Secretary of State. It was ruled, however, by Chairman Strauss, that neither the Secretary of State nor the Security Council had any “need to know” these facts. This struck Murray as absurd, since the National Security Council was the highest policy-making body in the country, and had been principally created by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles—the celebrated advocate of America’s “massive retaliation” policy. How could one retaliate massively without some glimmer of an idea of what wherewithal there was for retaliation at all?

  Murray believed in “dismantling the Era of Terror,” an accomplishment, he felt, that would be as desirable to the Kremlin as it would be to the rest of the world. And, a moralist, he urged the Commission to consider what he called “the forgotten equation”—the connection between morality and national strategy, and he argued that the policy dominating American thought since the end of World War II, of retaliation with giant thermonuclear weapons, was, in the final analysis, insane. Finally, he stressed that “the future welfare of humanity at large must not become exclusively dependent upon the decisions of a very small group of people. We were not brought up to believe that democracy was a form of government under which the people decide all issues that are trivial, or even moderately important, but not those of the highest importance.”

  With ideas like these, he battled with Lewis Strauss for fully seven years. At one point, in 1953, Murray noted that Admiral Hyman Rickover had been turned down on a plan for a 60,000-kilowatt reactor for an atom-powered aircraft carrier. Murray went to Rickover and suggested that an industrial reactor be built by Westinghouse, through government subsidy. The immediate problem was the tight Eisenhower budget, and so Murray went to the chief Eisenhower economist, Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, and presented his case. Though Humphrey favored the idea, Defense Secretary Charles Wilson was opposed to spending the money. “Money down the drain” was Wilson’s comment. But, in the end—because the President usually tended to take George Humphrey’s advice more readily than anyone else’s when it came to money matters—Eisenhower approved Murray’s plan, and an atomic reactor was built in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. Despite Eisenhower’s famous and well-publicized “Atoms for Peace” speech, this was the only peacetime reactor built in the United States during his administration. England, at the time, already had five.

  Atomic Tom Murray was also the first to warn of the danger of Strontium 90, which was finally—many years later—recognized by Eisenhower in his ordering suspension of atomic tests. When, within the AEC, Murray strongly urged that the perils of Strontium 90 be recognized and publicized, he was bitterly opposed by Strauss. When Murray insisted on going to New York to deliver a speech on the subject in 1954, Strauss went so far as to have another of his commissioners, Willard Libby, issue a statement just prior to his speech refuting him on the issue and calling his fellow commissioner, in effect, a liar and an alarmist. In the end, of course, Murray—not Strauss or Libby—was proven right.

  In 1957, when Murray’s term on the Commission was scheduled to expire, rumors circulated in Washington that he would not be reappointed, and that Eisenhower planned to appoint a Republican commissioner in his stead. As a result, a majority of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy—the majority consisting of nine Democrats and one Republican—publicly urged the President to reappoint him. The ten Congressmen wrote a letter to Eisenhower, citing Murray’s many accomplishments on the Commission—pointing out how he had led the way to opening up American uranium resources, calling attention to Murray’s stand on hydrogen bomb tests and his having been singlehandedly responsible for the building of the first big industrial atomic power plant. Newspaper editorials all across the country, led by the New York Times, backed the Congressmen and urged the President to keep Murray. As it became increasingly clear that Eisenhower intended to listen to none of these pleas, Tom Murray’s niece, Mary Jane Cuddihy, wrote to her cousin-in-law in Detroit, Henry Ford II—an influential Republican—asking Ford to intercede for her uncle. F
ord replied, in a somewhat chilly tone, that he would not do this, since he was certain that the President intended to appoint a man from his own party. And, in the end, that is what happened, and Atomic Tom was not reappointed.

  After leaving the AEC, Tom Murray was made a part-time consultant to the Congressional committee that had tried to intercede for him. Still, though he did his best not to show it, he was privately bitter about Eisenhower’s refusal to acknowledge his work by keeping him on the job. He even wrote a book, entitled Nuclear Policy for War and Peace, in which he gracefully and lucidly told of his AEC experiences, outlined his beliefs, and attempted to play down his differences with Lewis Strauss. Of this book, the Times Book Review commented, “It sheds important light for the first time on an area that has been shrouded in darkness and confusion and should serve as an important guide to public understanding of one of the most crucial issues of our generation, and thus greatly aid in the formulation of a sane nuclear policy upon which may depend the future of all of us.” Editorially, the Daily News commented, “Read a book, Ike!” But the Eisenhower snub may have helped shorten Tom Murray’s life. He died three years later, in May, 1961, at the age of sixty-nine.