The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  At the end of the month, McCloy visited Heidelberg, where Greenstein had arranged for him to speak to a small gathering of German Jewish leaders. Barely sixty thousand Jews were still living in Germany at this time, and many of those were planning to emigrate to America or Israel. He told them that the well-being of the German Jewish community would be “one of the real touchstones and the test of Germany’s progress. . . .”26 Early in August, on the eve of elections to form the first democratic government in Germany since the Weimar Republic, McCloy made his reparations decision public. The New York Times hailed the reparations law and reported that it was the result of an “extraordinary and virtually one-man battle on behalf of the measure by John J. McCloy. . . .”

  In late July, Ellen arrived in England with Johnny and young Ellen. While she waited for McCloy to ferry them by plane into Germany, she took the children to see the ruins of Coventry. She knew they would soon be living among the destruction inflicted by Allied bombing in Germany, and she wanted to be sure they had an indelible impression of the destruction wrought by the Germans.27 For the first time in their nearly twenty years of marriage, Ellen was about to become a visible partner in McCloy’s career. Her good taste had always been an asset to him in their circle of friends in Washington and New York. But now, by virtue of her fluent command of the German language, she could become a spokeswoman for her husband. Ellen had strong feelings about what had happened under the Third Reich. She shuddered to remember the regimented nation she had seen during their 1936 visit to the Munich Olympics. And in her public role as the high commissioner’s wife, she did not hesitate to speak her mind. Once, while talking before a German women’s group, she asked them to look around the hall: wasn’t it true that most of them had been limp washrags (Waschlappen) during the Hitler years?

  To the West German public, the McCloys quickly became a household name, the “first family” of occupied Germany. Ellen had three official residences to run, in Frankfurt, Bonn, and Berlin. McCloy’s main office was established in the old I. G. Farben building, one of the few large buildings in downtown Frankfurt that had escaped Allied bombardment. On his desk he had a direct “Red Line” phone to the Department of State, and a similar phone by his bed at home. German newspapers reported on their comings and goings, and much attention was given to the fact that Johnny, eleven, and Ellen, eight, were being tutored in German and had German playmates. Their mother, in fact, made a practice of speaking only German to them, and it wasn’t long before their English began to suffer.28 The children and their pets—a canary named Hansel, Judy the boxer, and a little beagle named Punchy—initially spent most of their time in the household set up in Bad Homburg, a pleasant spa twenty kilometers outside Frankfurt. The requisitioned mansion was surrounded by several acres of woods, enclosed by a tall wire fence.29

  They had an equally spacious home sitting on a bluff above the Rhine outside of Bonn, and yet another set of living quarters in West Berlin. McCloy favored the home outside Bonn: it had a tennis court. The family had two diesel trains available for their use, the larger of which had belonged to Hitler. Dean Acheson remembered this train as “very fast and very smooth.”30 One carriage became McCloy’s “office on wheels,” while he also had the use of a sleeping car and dining car. He and Ellen practically lived on those trains as they commuted between Berlin, Frankfurt, and Bonn. A frequent topic at the breakfast table each morning was “who was going to take the big train and who would use the little one.”31 Their travels were such that the passage of regularly scheduled commuter trains were often delayed to make way for the high commissioner’s train. McCloy would think nothing of abruptly ordering his train halted so he could step down and play a little tennis.32

  As military governor, he was assigned a number of enlisted men for use as household servants. One such servant was Corporal Gates Davison, the son of McCloy’s old friend Trubee, who had attended the McCloys’ wedding in 1930. Davison had been shipped to Germany with a psych-warfare unit, but when the army brass learned he was a “McCloy cousin,” he ended up working in the McCloy household, largely for Ellen. As soon as his ship arrived in Hamburg, Ellen phoned to ask if he was off duty that night. When he said yes, Ellen replied, “Good, I’ll send the train to pick you up.” Ellen was protective of her servants and took full advantage of her prerogatives. When Davison was thrown in the brig one night for playing tennis during reveille, she called the army officer in charge and said, “This is Madame High Commissioner, and I want you to release Corporal Davison this very minute.” She had a dinner planned that evening for a group of Hollywood movie stars, and needed all the help she could get. The officer told her he couldn’t release Davison without freeing all the men detained with him. Ellen said, “Fine, release them all and send them right over.”33

  McCloy relished the powers of his new job, and the life that went with it. He had taken a substantial pay cut to come to Germany—from a tax-free $30,000 to a taxable $25,000. But the houses, the trains, the chauffeured limousines, the bevy of servants, and all the other perquisites of the job were more than enough compensation. To his friends, he seemed able to enjoy the privileges of office without losing what Acheson called his “judgment and good nature—an expansive, happy nature with no littleness, suspicion or jealousy about it.”34 People were charmed to see that in him power had not turned to conceit. When Freddie Warburg and his wife visited the McCloys, they remembered one day when they were out for a drive in the countryside and encountered a carload of Germans struggling to change a flat tire. McCloy stopped the car and he and Freddie got out and helped them jack up their car. When the job was done, one of the Germans turned to Freddie and said, pointing to McCloy, “But that looks like Herr McCloy.” Freddie grinned and said, “It is.”35

  After barely a month in Germany, McCloy flew back to Washington to recruit additional personnel and consult with Truman and Acheson on the imminent end of military law. With elections scheduled for August 14, the Allies planned to transfer most of their governing powers to the new, civilian German government. McCloy would relinquish his title as military governor, but as a member of the Allied High Commission for Occupied Germany (HICOG), he and the two other commissioners planned to retain broad authority over certain well-defined areas such as security, de-Nazification, decartelization, reparations, and foreign affairs. In addition, the high commissioners could decide at any moment to resume complete authority should the new German government develop renewed fascist tendencies.36

  In Washington, McCloy agreed that these developments would allow him to cut American HICOG personnel from twenty-two hundred to no more than fourteen hundred. He had already hired Chester McClain as his general counsel, and he decided to retain the services of a career foreign-service officer, James Riddleberger, as his political-affairs officer. He had wanted to make his old Kuhn, Loeb friend Benjamin Buttenwieser deputy high commissioner. But questions had been raised in Washington, both about Buttenwieser’s qualities as a diplomat and about the appropriateness of placing an American of German Jewish ancestry in the number-two slot. So McCloy agreed to give General Hays the title of “deputy,” and made Buttenwieser his “assistant commissioner.” He assured Acheson in an “eyes-only” telegram that this would leave his friend in a “less exposed position.” Buttenwieser was “most keen and energetic. Believe we can handle his rough edges and my personal relations with him such that I feel can always terminate without embarrassment.”37

  When he went to see Truman to report on all these developments, he found the president a bit bored. After McCloy briefed him for nearly a half-hour, Truman interrupted and said, “OK, McCloy, I sent you over there to run that country. . . . If I think you’re doing wrong, you’ll hear from me. Now let’s talk about the Civil War.”38 McCloy rather welcomed the president’s hands-off attitude, and certainly preferred it to Roosevelt’s backdoor meddling. But it also worried him that Truman seemed to have no strong views on how Washington should handle the German problem. With the election
of a German government, McCloy realized momentous decisions would have to be made on the future of Europe. Privately, he was telling his own staff that the American occupation in Germany might end in as little as eighteen months.39 Much remained to be done, and in the meantime, as James Reston pointed out in the Times, the election was about to change McCloy’s role from one of “supreme boss” to that of “supervisor—a much more subtle and difficult relationship.”40

  He arrived back in Germany in time to witness the elections. To his relief, and the surprise of most observers, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), led by the seventy-three-year-old Konrad Adenauer, won a slim plurality of the popular vote. The left-of-center Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had been expected to win, was a narrow second. It seemed more than likely that, with the support of the centrist Free Democrats and some fringe right-wing parties, an essentially “bourgeois bloc” in the new Bundestag would elect Adenauer chancellor.41 The New York Times reported that McCloy and other U.S. officials made “no secret of their satisfaction over the victory of the conservative parties. . . .”42

  Given McCloy’s larger agenda—the creation of a stable parliamentary democracy in the Western sectors of occupied Germany—he could have found no better collaborator than Konrad Adenauer. Despite his age, and though he was virtually unknown to most Germans, Adenauer had a fortunate mix of credentials. As mayor of Cologne during the 1920s, he had maintained intimate personal friendships with the Ruhr Valley’s leading industrialists and their bankers.43 Because he opposed the “socialism” in the National Socialist Party’s policies, and because he was repelled by the Nazis’ lawlessness, Hitler dismissed him from office in 1933. Allowed to retire at age fifty-seven, he spent all the years of the Third Reich secluded in a Catholic monastery on the Rhine or at home, tending his private garden. In 1944, Hitler imprisoned him and his wife, Gussi Zinsser, whose hatred of the regime was even greater than his own.44 Politically, he was fiercely anticommunist and firmly wedded to free-market economics.

  More important for the task McCloy had in mind, Adenauer was a peculiar sort of German nationalist. He was a Catholic Rhinelander, and every cultural and religious fiber in his body was repelled by anything Prussian. He disdained the Prussian military tradition and regarded the largely Protestant East Germans as almost another nationality. He thought it a historical tragedy that Bismarck had been able to link the Rhineland’s fate to that of Prussia and its godless capital, Berlin.45 The Prussians, he thought, were inevitably drawn by the facts of geography to deal with the great Russian power to the east, whereas the interests of his own Rhinelanders lay to the West. In 1920, he had even toyed with separatist politics, though in the end he had felt compelled to oppose a group of radical separatists who attempted, with French support, to declare an independent republic in the Rhineland. He favored a federalist system for Germany in which a strong, autonomous Rhinish state could counterbalance the power of Prussia.46 If the Allies wanted to keep greater Germany divided, Adenauer was well suited as the future chancellor of a separate West German state.

  Little of this was generally recognized at the time of his election. But a month later, in mid-September 1949, when the Bundestag elected him chancellor by one vote, the London Times observed, “According to his lights, he is a good European—but it is a Europe which ends at the borders of the Old Roman Empire and excludes a great part of his own country. He will be satisfied to pay lip service to the ideal of German unity without pressing for it too strongly.”47

  McCloy was generally aware of Adenauer’s views, and from their earliest conversations he had been struck by how often the chancellor referred to the Holy Roman Empire, as if it were a recent chapter in German history. They had met formally in mid-July at a meeting of the Consultative Council. But after the election, McCloy took Buttenwieser along with him one evening to pay a private visit. Buttenwieser remembered that it was “darker than Erebus and we only had a vague idea of the exact location of Adenauer’s home.” When they found it, perched atop a steep hill, Buttenwieser climbed a concrete staircase with fifty-three steps while McCloy, who had sprained his ankle playing tennis that morning, waited below. The door was opened by Adenauer’s son, Paul, a Catholic priest, who confirmed that, indeed, they had found the right house. At this point, McCloy limped up and introduced himself. The chancellor shook hands and said in German, “Ich glaube wir sind verwandt.” Not comprehending, McCloy turned to Benny and asked, “What did he say?” Buttenwieser replied, “He said, ‘I believe we are related.’ ”48

  McCloy was unaware that Adenauer’s second wife, Gussi, was a Zinsser, distantly related to Ellen McCloy’s grandfather. Gussi Zinsser had died in 1948, probably from leukemia, though her health had deteriorated greatly during her imprisonment in the last year of the war. Even this personal connection did little to break the ice. “Der Alte”—“the Old One”—as Adenauer was known, relied on his natural reserve and formality to keep other men at a distance. Theodore White, who was then a foreign correspondent in Europe for the left-wing American Overseas News Agency, once described him as a “stiff old man, who walked as if his legs were hinged by rusting joints.” His aloof demeanor was accentuated by the haunting, almost forbidding appearance of his face. Tight, pale skin pulled across prominent cheekbones and a flat nose-bridge made him look slightly like an elderly Oriental gentleman. His eyes were cold and unsmiling.49 Acheson once remarked that Adenauer seemed determined to waste no energy on unnecessary “movement, gesture, voice or facial expression. He moves slowly, gestures sparingly, speaks quietly, smiles briefly. . . .”50 Wilhelm Grewe, a young German lawyer who later became ambassador to Washington, observed that Adenauer “was a man full of distrust.”51 He was everything, in fact, that McCloy was not: tightly controlled, austere, authoritarian, a man seemingly embittered by two widowhoods and an as yet unhappy political career. It would take all of McCloy’s natural geniality and high-spirited prodding to draw this man out.

  Initially, McCloy was not particularly impressed by Adenauer. His age alone suggested he was probably going to be simply a transition leader. McCloy also thought Adenauer was “not above striking a pose for political effect.”52 His prickly personality, his pride, and his extreme formality only made McCloy’s task more difficult. Admittedly, his mission was to turn over sovereignty to a West German parliamentary government. But this was to be done gradually, and each step was to be accompanied by demonstrations on the part of the Germans that they had mended their ways. Adenauer’s avowed intention was to accelerate this process as much as possible. His attitude had shocked the world earlier that spring, when he asserted that the German military leaders who had surrendered to the Allies in 1945 had “no mandate from the German people to submit to the terms of unconditional surrender.”53 And during the recent political campaign, he had bluntly warned, “The foreigners must understand that the period of collapse and unrestricted domination by the Allies is finished.”54 Such unilateral pronouncements suggested the new high commissioner and the new chancellor could be on a collision course.

  McCloy did what he could to allay the German’s suspicions. In their private conversations, he made it clear that he looked with sympathy on German desires to exercise greater sovereignty. Nor was it any secret within the HICOG bureaucracy that McCloy had brought a new perspective with him on dealing with the Germans. He told a meeting of the military governors in early September, “I had once a chief, a very great chief [Stimson] during the war who kept telling me all the time the way to trust a man is to trust him, and when you don’t trust him, hit him. If we take too nervous a position at this stage, in the week before the Bonn Government is set up . . . we may be defeating our own purpose.”55 In fact, McCloy’s willingness to deal civilly with the Germans was making some veteran HICOG staffers unhappy. In another meeting, later that month, McCloy nodded his head in agreement when an aide told him, “There are some people that still think that the way to treat a German is to kick him in the pants every ten day
s . . . and they are dismayed by the friendly approach.”56

  McCloy agreed that Adenauer was “naturally inclined to be somewhat authoritarian,” particularly in his dealings with the press. But he did not think the chancellor had a “dictator complex.” One day he told his staff, “You know, you see businessmen that have a way of delegating work. . . . Well, he is not such a great delegator.”57

  Attending to Adenauer’s prickly expectations in matters of protocol was not easy. Under the terms of the new “Occupation Statute,” McCloy and the British and French high commissioners had chosen as their official headquarters the shiny, snow-white Petersberg Hotel, a palace of a luxury hotel built before World War I in the Siebengebirge mountains just south of Bonn. McCloy was enamored by the Old World charm of the hotel, with its scenic view of Bonn and the Rhine River far below. But Adenauer suspected the high commissioners had meant to convey some symbolic message by their choice of the Petersberg, and he disliked traveling up the mountain’s steep and winding road. A few days after his election in the Bundestag as chancellor—by a margin of one vote, and that cast by a former Nazi—McCloy arranged for a ceremony in which the high commissioners would formally greet the new chancellor and hand him a copy of the Occupation Statute.