by Kai Bird
In fact, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., owned almost 6 percent of Standard Oil of California stock, making him the single largest shareholder. In private, his own lawyers acknowledged that these shares were “enough to make his voice have some influence.” Worse, Rockefeller had intervened with the board of directors to block the selection of Davies as president of the company.13 Ickes charged that Rockefeller had regularly intervened to select the executive heads of other oil companies operating under the 1911 antitrust injunction. If it could be proved that this had resulted in a restraint of commerce, the terms of the 1911 decree could be reopened. If that happened, the Rockefellers might be forced to divest themselves of any interest in the oil companies.
McCloy was the perfect Rockefeller representative, because he was known to the other antagonists in the case as an objective intermediary. He had the basic trust of all the prickly personalities involved, including Ickes, Ralph Davies, and Abe Fortas, and the job they were fighting over was one McCloy had turned down. He could, and did, call up all of these men, and was perfectly frank with them. The SEC investigation dragged out into the autumn of 1946, but after numerous depositions the case was dropped. By then, it had generated some unfavorable publicity, but, partly because of McCloy’s handling of the matter, the SEC’s investigators were deflected.
Within a week of settling into his new offices at 15 Broad Street, McCloy assumed a variety of extracurricular responsibilities. Frankfurter wrote from Washington to warn him of the “difficulties you will encounter in playing your part as a citizen—that is in deciding what good causes to take on and what are beyond your hours and energy.”14 McCloy was well aware that too many outside interests might interfere with his “effort to again get the feel of the law.”15 But he could not resist.
One commitment he made was to become an active member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was particularly interested in a major study the Council was conducting of Soviet-U.S. relations. So too was the thirty-one-year-old David Rockefeller, who had recently begun to take an active interest in Council affairs. Rockefeller had his college roommate, George S. Franklin, a lawyer bored with his law practice, write up the Council’s conclusions in a report intended for publication. It quickly became apparent, however, that no consensus existed on how Washington should treat Moscow. Franklin’s draft report tried to make the case for a policy combining a measure of firmness with a historical understanding of legitimate Soviet fears. He suggested that Washington had to recognize Moscow’s “vital interests in having governments not unfriendly to her along her western frontier.” Whenever possible, the Soviets should be treated as equals, Franklin wrote, and this might include a sharing of nuclear secrets.16
McCloy more or less shared these views. Early in December 1945, the Council hosted a black-tie dinner in his honor at their new and elegant quarters in the Harold Pratt House on East 68th Street in Manhattan. He told his dinner companions, “Thus far we have gotten along with Russia fairly well.” There would be difficulties, but “Russia’s concepts and example will wilt before ours if we have the vigor and farsightedness to see our place in the world.”17 To him, dealing with the Soviets was a simple matter of firm diplomacy and vigorous economic competition.
The Council study group, however, was split down the middle, and in the end such influential Council members as Frank Altschul and Isaiah Bowman killed the Franklin report as too mild an assessment of Soviet intentions. Altschul went so far as to say, “The problem that we face with Russia today is essentially the same one faced by Hitler.”18
Such divisions within the Council reflected a growing polarization in America. Early in 1946, the well-known publicist Herbert Bayard Swope coined the term “Cold War” to describe the contentious nature of Soviet-U.S. relations.19 Curiously enough, those, like McCloy, who had personally dealt with the Soviets were not immediately swept up by such early Cold War sentiments. And because McCloy really didn’t fear the Soviets, J. Edgar Hoover would soon accuse him of “pro-Soviet leanings,” particularly for his views on the issue of sharing the secrets of the atomic bomb.20 Atomic policy was now on the front burner of the Truman administration’s agenda. Though the Soviet press was complaining that the United States and Britain were engaging in “atomic diplomacy,” the Kremlin nevertheless surprised Washington in January 1946 by supporting the formation of a U.N. Atomic Energy Commission.21 As a result, the United States had to come up with a plan for dealing with the issue. So, barely a week after arriving at Milbank, Tweed, McCloy got a call from Secretary of State Byrnes. If he would not go to Moscow as ambassador, Byrnes asked, would he at least agree to serve on a State Department committee, chaired by Undersecretary Dean Acheson, to study atomicenergy policy? Still fascinated by the atomic bomb, McCloy couldn’t resist accepting.
Joining him on the Acheson Committee were James Conant, the president of Harvard and a former member of the Interim Committee, Major General Leslie R. Groves, former head of the Manhattan Project, and Dr. Vannevar Bush, director of the president’s Office of Scientific Research and Development. Acheson knew these men well, but he felt sure that all these “big shots,” with the exception of Bush, lacked any technical knowledge of nuclear physics. How could they advise the president—who Acheson thought had no understanding himself about atomic matters—how to control this exotic technology if they hadn’t “the faintest idea what it was”?22 So he very quickly appointed a panel of scientific consultants, led by David Lilienthal, the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, to advise his committee. Over the next ten weeks, the Acheson Committee met on weekends to work out a detailed proposal for the international control of atomic energy and the bomb.
McCloy tried to acquire an elementary knowledge of nuclear physics. It was rough going. First he turned to J. Robert Oppenheimer, a member of the Lilienthal panel of consultants. Of all the scientists McCloy had met during the war, no one had made a deeper impression on him than “Oppie.” Niels Bohr, the Danish Nobel Prize physicist, had introduced them early in the war years, when Oppenheimer was a candidate to head the Manhattan Project. McCloy thought of him as a man of wide culture, possessed of an “almost musically delicate mind,” an intellectual who was simultaneously a man of “great charm.” Oppenheimer agreed to try to explain nuclear physics to McCloy one night after dinner at Acheson’s home in Georgetown. Pulling out a blackboard, he began drawing little stick figures representing electrons, neutrons, and protons chasing one another about in unpredictable ways. After McCloy and Acheson asked one bewildered question after another, “Oppie” finally walked away from the blackboard, saying, “It’s hopeless. I really think you two believe neutrons and electrons are little men.”23
McCloy nevertheless felt he could easily spend all his time for two months studying “the atomic bomb business” and still be “fascinated.”24 Gradually, he picked up a little understanding of atomic physics from one of Oppenheimer’s colleagues, Professor Isidor I. Rabi. The political implications of what he was learning tended to confirm his own predilection toward comprehensive, international control over atomic energy.
Oppenheimer’s views quickly began to dominate the Acheson-Lilienthal Committee deliberations. The physicist started with the proposition that the peaceful exploitation of atomic energy was inextricably linked to the technical capability of producing a bomb. One could not do the first without acquiring the capability to produce an atomic weapon. He concluded that, given this reality, an international agency should monopolize atomic energy, and apportion its benefits as an incentive to individual countries not to build atomic weapons. He argued that “without world government there could be no permanent peace, that without peace there would be atomic warfare.” In the absence of a world government, Oppenheimer suggested that any answer to controlling this weapon of total war must include the creation of an international Atomic Development Authority. In short, in the field of atomic energy there must be a “partial renunciation of sovereignty” by all countries.25
McCloy, Acheso
n, and most everyone else on the State Department committee accepted Oppenheimer’s views, and the physicist became the primary author of the report they turned over to the president in mid-March. But there were some disagreements. McCloy, for instance, accepted Oppenheimer’s assertion that the bomb itself had revealed the “secret” of atomic physics, and that, short of international controls, one could expect the Soviets to develop their own bomb within a very few years. General Groves disagreed, arguing, among other things, that there was no uranium in the Soviet Union. (This proved to be false.) Groves sought to prolong the U.S. atomic monopoly by achieving global control over all uranium supplies. He did not really believe the Soviets would agree to surrender any sovereignty over atomic matters, but he knew some kind of offer had to be made, and this one was as good as any. In his mind, Oppenheimer’s proposed Atomic Development Authority would serve as an atomic league empowered to punish any country attempting to build a bomb. Acheson, McCloy, Bush, and Conant did not sign on to this view. They were genuinely alarmed by the long-term dangers of another total war, this time waged with nuclear weapons, and endorsed Oppenheimer’s plan in a sincere effort to abolish such weapons altogether.26
McCloy approached this whole problem as a lawyer. Given the right kind of international institutions, nations, he thought, could be required, like individual citizens, to act within the framework of the law. His own experience during the Black Tom case had vindicated for him the principle of international arbitration. There was no better time than now, at the dawn of the nuclear age, to take a major step toward the formation of a world government. He and the others on the Acheson Committee were well aware how controversial their proposals would seem to the American public. And so there were some second thoughts when they met for four days with the Lilienthal panel at the beautiful Dumbarton Oaks mansion in Georgetown. There they sat in the mansion’s great conference hall, a room of somber elegance, discussing how to avoid an apocalypse. From the walls, which towered nearly three stories high, hung magnificent tapestries; a shaft of sunlight bathed El Greco’s painting The Visitation in one corner; a Byzantine cat sculpted in ebony sat encased in glass.
When they had finished reading Lilienthal’s draft aloud, Acheson looked up, removed his reading glasses, and said, “This is a brilliant and profound document.” In succeeding days, however, some significant changes were made. Dr. Bush suggested that the final report should make it clear to the American people that the proposed Atomic Development Authority would assume control over nuclear facilities only in “stages.” The theoretical secrets of the bomb, for instance, might be turned over to the Russians immediately. But control over uranium mines and other facilities would only gradually be relinguished, perhaps in return for some kind of quid pro quo from Stalin. Bush suggested, for instance, that Stalin might be persuaded to “open up” Soviet society to Western journalists and academics as a sign of good faith. McCloy, Groves, and Conant were, to different degrees, persuaded by Bush’s arguments. Lilienthal and Acheson, however, thought it simplistic to think that the U.S. atomic monopoly could be traded for internal Soviet reforms. As a compromise, Lilienthal agreed to insert some language about a “staged” implementation of the plan, but refused to specify any timetables. McCloy and all four other members of the Acheson Committee then signed on to the final report.27
Truman and Byrnes officially accepted the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, and Byrnes made a pretense of saying that he was “favorably impressed.”28 He was, in fact, shocked by the sweeping scope of its recommendations, and attempted to limit the report’s influence by having the president appoint a conservative to negotiate atomic matters at the United Nations. There was considerable sentiment within the Acheson-Lilienthal group to have McCloy selected for this job. But within a day of the submission of their report, the president selected, at Byrnes’s suggestion, Bernard Baruch, the financier and dabbler in public affairs. Acheson was appalled, and so too was McCloy. Lilienthal wrote in his diary, “When I read the news last night, I was quite sick. . . . We need a man who is young, vigorous, not vain, and who the Russians would feel isn’t out simply to put them in a hole, not really caring about international cooperation. Baruch has none of these qualities.”29
For his part, Baruch made it clear that he did not consider the Acheson-Lilienthal Report official policy. Nor did he need any advice from the scientists: “I knew all I wanted to know,” he told Bush. “It [the bomb] went boom and it killed millions of people. . . .”30 He would rely on his own advisers—two conservative bankers, Ferdinand Eberstadt and John Hancock, and Fred Searls, Jr., a mining engineer and close personal friend. All three men happened to be investors in the same uranium mining corporation, and were alarmed by the very idea that such privately owned mines might be turned over to an international Atomic Development Authority.31 This smacked of socialism. None of these men seriously contemplated turning over control of U.S. nuclear weaponry to an international body. Baruch thought of the American bomb as the “winning weapon,” and was soon telling Oppenheimer that he saw his job as a matter of “preparing the American people for a refusal by Russia.”32
Soon after his appointment, Baruch met with Searls and Eberstadt in his limousine while waiting to catch a train at Penn Station in Manhattan. When the elderly financier expressed “great reservations” about the Acheson-Lilienthal Report’s recommendations, Searls said that he had heard that the report was the “result of a concerted effort by a wide group who would like to have had McCloy appointed to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission.”33
Searls’s source for this information was undoubtedly Donald Russell, who shared his distrust of internationalists like McCloy and Acheson. Russell, a South Carolinian who had been Byrnes’s law partner, had been struggling for several months with McCloy over the organization of postwar intelligence. At the end of the war, McCloy had supported a plan by his former Cravath partner Al McCormack to merge remnants of Bill Donovan’s OSS apparatus into a centralized intelligence group within the State Department. They had the support of Acheson, and initially, Byrnes. But then Don Russell, from his position as assistant secretary of state for administration, proposed an alternative plan whereby each geographic bureau within the department would conduct its own intelligence collection. Byrnes was trying to decide between the “Russell Plan” and the “McCormack Plan” at the very moment when the controversy over the Acheson-Lilienthal Report broke.
Russell thought the report’s recommendations lent credence to an astonishing set of charges against McCloy that had been circulating in Washington ever since the previous autumn. Russell’s assistant, Deputy Assistant Secretary Joseph Anthony Panuch, was convinced that McCloy was a subversive. In mid-November 1945, just as their struggle over intelligence organization was heating up, Panuch had written his boss a detailed, five-page memo of charges against McCloy: “I could see that you found it hard to believe that Mr. McCloy could possibly have any connection with Communism . . . [but] it can readily be demonstrated that Mr. McCloy and his partners have been, to say the least, unusually friendly to the Soviet Union and sympathetic to the Communist cause.”34
Specifically, Panuch charged that McCloy and McCormack had “permitted officers with known Communist leanings (as reported by the F.B.I.) to sit in positions where they could influence the trend of intelligence.”35 Soon such charges were appearing in Congress, where on March 14,1946, one congressman suggested that individuals with “strong Soviet leanings” who had once worked in the War Department could now be found working in the State Department. McCormack angrily denied the charge in a public letter, but Panuch was not about to give up the offensive. He now wrote a memo arguing that the integration of these left-wing OSS officers into the State Department, as envisioned by the McCormack Plan, was part of an attempt to shift the center of gravity in foreign policy-making “from a national to an international orientation via the supranational United Nations Organization.” The result, he warned, would be “a socialized America in a world
commonwealth of Communist and Socialist states. . . .”36
Shortly afterward, Secretary Byrnes accepted the Russell Plan for a decentralized intelligence apparatus, and McCormack submitted his resignation in late April 1946. McCloy was disgusted with the whole affair, but his belief in the need for a centralized intelligence bureaucracy remained unshaken. If it could not be built within the State Department, he thought, perhaps it could find a home elsewhere. Such a possibility, of course, was something J. Edgar Hoover naturally regarded with apprehension. He had, in fact, circulated derogatory information about McCormack just before Congress voted not to fund the new intelligence office.37
In this context, Hoover now questioned the loyalty of McCloy, Acheson, and a half-dozen other government officials associated with atomicenergy policy. The charges were contained in a long letter he sent on May 29, 1946, to one of Truman’s closest aides, George E. Allen. Saying that he thought Allen and the president would be interested in information furnished by a “source believed to be reliable,” Hoover reported “there is an enormous Soviet espionage ring in Washington operating with the view of obtaining all information possible with reference to atomic energy. . . .” He then listed McCloy, Acheson, Herbert S. Marks (a young lawyer and Acheson assistant who had served on the Lilienthal board), Howard C. Petersen (the new assistant secretary of war), Henry Wallace, Alger Hiss (who was then still working in the State Department under Acheson), and a number of others. All these individuals, he said, “are noted for their pro-Soviet leanings,” mentioning in particular Hiss and McCloy. Hoover linked some of these individuals to Nathan G. Silvermaster, an alleged Soviet agent.38
