by James Grant
Baruch often spent part of the week in Washington. Before leaving New York, which he typically did Monday on the four o’clock train (taking a drawing room if he could get one), he would notify any or all of a long list of top officials, by telegraph, of his impending arrival. The list included Robert P. Patterson, Under Secretary of War; James V. Forrestal, Under Secretary of Navy; James F. Byrnes, who was sitting on the Supreme Court; General Levin H. Campbell Jr., Army Chief of Ordnance; Cordell Hull; General Brehon Somervell of the War Department Service of Supply; Leon Henderson of the Office of Price Administration; Milo Perkins of the Board of Economic Warfare; Professor Luther Gulick of the War Production Board. In Washington at the Carlton he shared a $1,000-a-month suite with Lacey, his valet, one bedroom per man. Baruch told Geoffrey Hellman of The New Yorker that he took most of his meals in his room, sometimes with Donald Nelson or other official guests, and that he would eat a beefsteak and a dozen eggs for breakfast if his doctor would let him. “My boy,” said Baruch, “I never go out in Washington, because unless I dine at seven-thirty sharp, I get cross and am poor company. I don’t drink cocktails, and I hate to sit around till eight o’clock or so watching other people drink. I lock myself in my room, like an animal. I am in bed by eleven.”[57] He told Harold Ickes that he went to bed with a copy of the Racing Form.
The job that Baruch finally took up was so perfectly tailored to all his attributes—mental, physical, theatrical—that he might have designed it himself, which, in fact, he did. In 1942 there was a critical rubber shortage. Baruch had seen it coming and for years had urged precautionary stockpiling. He knew the rubber business from the inside as an investor in the rubber-bearing shrub, guayule. The shortage and the political bickering that accompanied it disgusted him. But there was a nobility in his character that made him incapable of recriminating for long if there was work to be done, and in early June he floated an idea with his friend Steve Early. It was that the President should appoint a distinguished citizen to get the facts, make a report on what should be done, and clear the way for action.
Action was urgent, because the shortage was acute, and if synthetic rubber were not brought into mass production quickly, the domestic economy would collapse. As Early put the Baruch idea to the President, Congress was devising its own solution. In July it voted to establish a new rubber bureaucracy and to mandate the construction of plants that would derive rubber from grain, one of the two synthetic processes then under development. The competing method was oil-based. Since there were more farmers than oil men, the grain idea had strong political appeal.
Roosevelt, however, would have none of it, and as he considered his veto message he dropped a line to Baruch:
Dear Bernie:
Because you are “an ever present help in time of trouble” will you “do it again”? You would be better than all the Supreme Court put together! Sam [Rosenman] will tell you & I’ll see you later.
As ever
FDR
The reference to the Supreme Court was an acknowledgment that Baruch was the President’s second choice for the job; Chief Justice Harlan Stone had been the first. Baruch nonetheless accepted (it wouldn’t have occurred to him to refuse for mere reasons of pride), and the organization of the Baruch Rubber Committee was announced two days later, on August 6.
The chairmanship that Baruch held was an executive and honorific post. His fellow committeemen, Dr. Karl T. Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr. James B. Conant, president of Harvard University, would weigh the scientific evidence. A technical staff of twenty-five was hurriedly assembled and dispatched around the country to ask questions and make on-site studies. Samuel Lubell, the future political analyst and a wartime aide of Baruch’s, was appointed secretary.
The committee’s charge was to “get the facts,” to investigate the merits of alternative rubber-making processes, and to tackle the politically touchy issue of gasoline rationing. It was to decide whether there was sufficient butadiene to sustain the “Buna” rubber program, which was based on petroleum, and to what extent, if any, more Buna rubber would mean less high-octane aviation gasoline.
At first, the committee had no office space. It met at the Carlton, or in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, when the weather was right. “I’m like a lizard,” said Baruch in explaining these alfresco quarters. “I get in the sun whenever I can.” For a while the group worked at Dumbarton Oaks, indoors or on the lawn, and later in an office in the LaSalle Building, which the government had rented for it. By then its work was almost finished. It was leaning toward (and would soon recommend) the oil-based process for rubber making and was drawing up a program of gasoline rationing and a thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. There was plenty of gasoline; the program was designed to conserve tires.
On technical matters Baruch deferred to the judgment of his scientific colleagues, but he expressed strong views on political and administrative subjects.[58] Invoking the principle of one-man industrial control in wartime as he had for twenty-five years, he insisted that the new Rubber Administrator should report to Donald Nelson at WPB (which organizational structure, in fact, the committee suggested). For another thing, he said, industry, not government, should bring the synthetic-rubber program to fruition. Once he warned a pair of engineers in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey’s rubber division about unwanted government meddling. He said it was up to them to train the bureaucrats to serve them, and he asked them rather “challengingly” whether they had started to do so. One of the engineers in Baruch’s presence, Frank A. Howard, wrote that he was relieved to be able to say yes. He vividly recalled Baruch’s parting words: “I know you can do it, and if you can’t, I’ll take your hides off.”
The blunt truth telling of the Baruch Report, as that document inevitably came to be known (Baruch had it distributed to every member of Congress and every daily newspaper, to 1,800 college and university libraries, 6,000 public libraries, 1,500 special-subject and business libraries, and 230 law libraries), won over the country. Before the committee had its say, only 49 percent of the public favored nationwide gasoline rationing as a step to conserve tires. After its report appeared, in mid-September, the proportion in favor jumped to 73 percent. By the end of the war, as Baruch pointed out, a billion-dollar industry had been built “from scratch.”
Before the occurrence of this industrial miracle and indeed before the publication of the committee’s report, the Baruch appointment was hailed as a national windfall. Fulton Lewis Jr., the anti-Roosevelt radio commentator, praised it, and the Washington Post published a warm editorial on the day after Baruch’s seventy-second birthday. Said the Post, in part: “It is curious what a feeling of confidence can be generated among millions of Americans by the picture of a septuagenarian seated on a park bench. But we dare to say that precisely such a feeling was created when President Roosevelt asked Bernard M. Baruch to head a committee of three to report on rubber.” (Baruch jokingly told Eugene Meyer Jr., the Post’s publisher, that the editorial was of the genre ordinarily reserved for dead men. Meyer might have recognized that line; a variation on it had once been used on Baruch by a congressman following an extravagant Baruch testimonial to Meyer.) A friend of Swope’s reported that after the report was released, a movie audience, apparently in New York, had applauded Baruch in a newsreel.
Because he liked the role of freelance critic and troubleshooter—keeping his own hours, accepting praise but not day-to-day responsibility—and because he was getting on in years, Baruch was understandably picky about the full-time jobs that the Administration offered him in the wake of his rubber triumph. In the case of anti-inflationary posts, he had a specific condition of employment. It was that he receive a voice in the government’s fiscal councils. This was denied him, however, not merely because the Administration’s tax chief, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. was unwilling to cede authority, but also because he had no use for Baruch. Baruch had tried to win him over, but M
orgenthau remained unwon. When, on the morning of December 15, 1942, Baruch happened to call him on a war-bond subscription matter, each man was in characteristic form with respect to the other:
Morgenthau: Hello.
Baruch: Good morning, Mr. Secretary. B. M. Baruch speaking.
Morgenthau: Yes.
Baruch: I didn’t want to—I know how burdened you are—I just . . .
Morgenthau: No.
Baruch: . . . but I didn’t want to leave you with the impression that I hadn’t done what I said I was going to do about that subscription.
Morgenthau: Oh.
Baruch: And I’ve done it, but I didn’t think it was wise to write a letter that they could publicize because after all the rich man who subscribes money is not doing anything very important, and that’s the reason that I did it quietly through the ordinary channels . . .
Morgenthau: Yes.
Baruch: . . . and didn’t . . .
Morgenthau: Well, it’s very kind of you to call me. It wasn’t necessary. I know your reputation, and if you say you’ll do something, you do it with or without publicity.
Baruch: Well, I don’t like—I think it’s—I think it’s bad for a man who’s supposed to be a little—a rich man to . . .
Morgenthau: Yes.
Baruch: . . . talk about subscribing a million dollars, you know, and they wanted the pub—the publicity people . . .
Morgenthau: Oh.
Baruch: . . . because I thought it was—being so big and be bad for many reasons, if you can understand.
Morgenthau: Well, I—I’m sure whatever you decided was right.
Baruch: And thank you very much, and I’m going to do with the bonds what I said I was going to do . . .
Morgenthau: Fine.
Baruch: . . . in the way of gifts, and that will be done so quietly nobody will know it, at least I hope they won’t. I’m sorry to have troubled you so, but I just wanted . . .
Morgenthau: No trouble.
Baruch: Goodbye, sir.
Morgenthau: Call me any time.
Baruch: Thank you.
The first full-time job that Baruch was offered was the top post at the new Office of Economic Stabilization. Samuel Rosenman, the presidential aide who tendered the invitation, in September 1942, called it the “super-duper” job. The head of OES would administer the wage-price laws, rally the public to unpopular rules and regulations, and coordinate the Administration’s anti-inflation policy. Receiving no assurances about his say in fiscal policy, however, Baruch declined; at his suggestion the job went to James F. Byrnes.
Baruch’s second brush with regular work was closer, more dramatic, and more irregular than the first. It occurred in February 1943, a time of rising dissatisfaction with the War Production Board and with its chief, Donald Nelson. The Army complained that Nelson was indecisive and incompetent, while Nelson’s friends countered that, if perhaps he did tend to err on the side of deliberateness, he at the very least fended off military control of the home front. On the WPB there were pro- and anti-Army factions—the leading anti, of course, being Nelson; the most conspicuous pro being Ferdinand Eberstadt, who had founded Chemical Fund during a brilliant Wall Street career and now supervised (no less brilliantly, his friends thought) the WPB’s priorities operation. Baruch was caught in the middle. He admired Eberstadt and was sympathetic to the Army, but he also advised Nelson and wasn’t averse to criticizing the Army when he thought it had overreached itself. Early in February Byrnes proposed a solution to the production dilemma. Baruch would replace Nelson.
“You would be taking no chances,” wrote Byrnes to Roosevelt concerning Baruch. “He knows that organization better than anybody in it. For the past year he has spent four or five days each week in Washington, and the heads of the various divisions have taken their problems to him. Without any power he has accomplished miracles in straightening out controversies and in securing the cooperation of manufacturers.” Byrnes pointed out that Baruch’s appointment would be welcomed on Capitol Hill and in the press.[59] He would disarm critics, and he was unquestionably loyal. “You would be appointing not only the best man for the place, but appointing one of your best friends.” Byrnes masterfully added: “Harry Hopkins told me to say to you that he concurs heartily in my suggestion.”
Roosevelt gave Byrnes the go-ahead to write a letter for his signature asking Baruch to take the job. Byrnes drafted it, Roosevelt signed it, and Byrnes personally delivered it to the Carlton. Baruch opened the letter and read this:
February 5, 1943
Dear Bernie:
For a long time I have been calling upon you for assistance in questions affecting our war production. You have given unsparingly of your time and energy and your advice has been exceedingly valuable. I know that you have preferred to serve in an advisory capacity and have benn [sic] disinclined to accept an appointment that would require you to devote all of your time to an administrative position. However, I deem it wise to make a change in the direction of war production and I am coming back to the elder statesman for assistance. I want to appoint you as Chairman of War Production Board with power to direct the activities of the organization.
With your knowledge of the subject and your knowledge of the organization, I am sure you can arrange so that it will not require you to work day and night. I would not want you to do that, but I am confident you will accept because of your willingness to make any sacrifice you believe will aid in the prosecution of the war.
Sincerely yours,
Franklin D. Roosevelt
What Baruch said in reply wasn’t what Byrnes expected to hear. He did not say yes. He said he needed time to think and to consult with his doctors. He wanted to make sure that John Hancock of Lehman Brothers, his old friend and confederate, would be available to serve with him again. Byrnes was appalled. The man on whom he had just spent a king’s ransom in political capital wasn’t sure that he wanted what he (Byrnes) had contrived to give him. Byrnes argued but Baruch was obdurate: he announced he was going to New York. (Byrnes had assured Roosevelt: “Baruch would like the appointment. He has never told me this, but I know him well enough to know that his heart is in the production fight. He would rather do that job than anything else on earth. . . .”)
Although Byrnes had moved with stealth, his plans to replace Nelson with Baruch were found out. Someone in the White House had passed them on to Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court justice who liked to keep a hand in practical politics. Frankfurter was opposed to Baruch and was therefore in favor of Nelson. (Said Frankfurter of Baruch: “The war production process cannot be run by intermittent flashes . . . which is the function that Baruch has been exercising and could only exercise if he were formally made head of WPB.”) The justice alerted a friend at WPB. The friend called Nelson, who for once took action. The next morning, February 16, 1943, he fired Eberstadt—whom he thought to be an Army fifth columnist and also Baruch’s man—and announced the dismissal to the press. That evening he had drinks with the President.
Meantime, en route to New York, Baruch came down with a fever and went straight to bed in his mansion. There was nothing unusual in that. Sometimes he really was sick, and sometimes his hypochondriacal imagination deceived him. In any case, his health was never far from his mind. From time to time, out walking, he would stop for no particular reason and take his pulse. Once he declined an invitation to attend an outdoor function by giving the explanation, “I don’t like to sit in a big crowd. Everybody comes up to you and they cough in your face.” When, in 1945, he flew to Europe on a mission to see Churchill, he took along his own nurse and doctor. Looking back on the illness that came over him after the invitation from Byrnes, he wrote: “There was a frightening moment when they thought I might have a very serious liver disorder, perhaps even a cancer.”
Byrnes recalled that it was days before he heard from him.
Baruch did, of course, return to Washington and with Hancock in tow, but by then the President had changed his mind.
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“Mr. President, I’m here to report for duty,” said Baruch as he presented himself to Roosevelt to accept his new duties. The President pretended not to hear.
Baruch had a contempt for psychiatry, amateur or professional, and he would no doubt scorn the following hypothesis, which is offered anyway. Feeling his age but refusing to plead senility, unwilling to exchange his advisory portfolio for a burdensome job, wanting to serve but knowing that Roosevelt would make the decisions—being vexed in this way, he imagined a disease. Whether or not that is true, he walked out of Roosevelt’s office a free man and by outward signs a contented one.
In the first spring of the war, a woman from Nashville, Tennessee, fiftyish, five feet four inches tall, 150 pounds, and, she said, “good looking,” asked her congressman, Albert Gore, for a favor. She said she would like to marry and that the man she wanted was Bernard Baruch. (Furnishing some additional background material, she said that she had taught piano, edited a cookbook, written ads for department stores in Oklahoma, and earned a bachelor of laws degree; she was a regular Democrat and a member of the Order of the Eastern Star.) “I admire him extravagantly,” she went on. “He is such a gentleman, refined, educated, and a man of means. I am in comfortable circumstances myself. Would you in an indirect manner find out Mr. Baruch[’s] views on the subject?”
