The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  Kissinger was aware of these arguments, but, like many in the Pentagon, he found it difficult to reconcile himself to the fact of nuclear parity with the Soviets. In addition, he decided that, in order to assert his control over the pace of the emerging SALT negotiations, he had to scuttle any viable MIRV ban supported by the arms-control community. In deference to the force of McCloy’s arguments, he allowed U.S. negotiators to put forward a proposal to ban MIRVs. But he weighed the proposal down with what some military experts regarded as an irrelevant and unnecessary demand for on-site inspection. Kissinger’s own NSC aides later admitted that the on-site-inspection provision was designed to make the MIRV ban “unacceptable” to the Soviets.13 Another Kissinger aide, William G. Hyland, later concluded that his boss had made a mistake. It was, he told reporter Strobe Talbot, “the key decision in the entire history of SALT . . . that changed strategic relations, and changed them to the detriment of American security.”14

  When McCloy found out about Kissinger’s linkage of a MIRV ban to on-site inspections, he requested access to all NSC documentation on the matter. But in a letter that McCloy must have found extremely insulting, Kissinger refused. Saying that he had “given careful thought” to the request, he informed McCloy that his staff would periodically determine which documents should be made available to the Advisory Committee. This procedure, he explained, “will be more workable than a blanket release of all the papers. . . .”15 Clearly, McCloy was to be kept out of the loop.

  Late in 1970, McCloy went over Kissinger’s head and had his Advisory Committee send Nixon a formal written recommendation, appealing for a major shift in the administration’s negotiating position. He stated that Kissinger’s requirement for on-site inspection was unnecessary.16 Nixon refused the advice, and, to no one’s surprise, the Soviets subsequently rejected the on-site verification procedures. But the Soviet negotiators at the SALT sessions told the American delegates that they were sorry that “more hadn’t been done on MIRV.”17 McCloy was shocked by Kissinger’s cynicism, and years later sarcastically observed, “Some people thought the MIRV was hot stuff . . . gold at the end of a rainbow. They acted as if it was always a sign of weakness if you tried to concede anything.”18 He did not understand it, and felt alienated from the increasingly poisonous atmosphere of bureaucratic back-stabbing that seemed to prevail in Washington.

  By 1970, he was a very unhappy man. At seventy-five, he felt his world crumbling. The bipartisan consensus on foreign-policy issues that he had worked so hard to build in the aftermath of World War II seemed to have collapsed. There was little decorum in public debate, and the deference with which his counsel had once been received on Capitol Hill or by the media was now lost in bitter partisanship. He recognized that Vietnam had a lot to do with the divisiveness that prevailed in much of the country. On this issue too he was unimpressed by the Nixon administration’s performance. Just before the Inauguration, he had invited Averell Harriman to speak at a Council on Foreign Relations dinner. Harriman had left him with the impression that, if Washington were to seek an end to the U.S. military commitment in Vietnam, such a solution could emerge from the Paris peace talks. Yet, after Nixon had spent more than a year in office, the American people were only beginning to learn what the president meant by his promise of “peace with honor.” The Kissinger-Nixon team had done nothing to end the war. Instead, the administration had instituted “Vietnamization,” and then, in May 1970, widened the war with the “incursion” into Cambodia. McCloy might have been shocked if he had heard what Kissinger was saying in private about the war. In December 1970, at a point when even some administration officials thought Nixon’s conduct of the war made it doubtful that he could be re-elected, Kissinger told a friend over lunch that “. . . anytime we want to get out of Vietnam, we can, and that we will get out of Vietnam before the election.”19

  McCloy wanted to see the war ended. He felt, as always, that the merits of keeping communism out of South Vietnam were far outweighed by the damage to the country’s domestic equilibrium and its critical national-security interests in Europe. But appearances were still important, and he did not wish to associate himself with anything that smacked of a “cut and run policy.”20 He also felt that the president’s ability to negotiate a way out of the war was severely hampered by the growing strength and vociferousness of the antiwar movement. Moreover, he was offended by the tenor of the debate.

  The angry debate over the Vietnam War affected McCloy’s most cherished club and the citadel of the Establishment, the Council on Foreign Relations. By 1970, the Council membership was sharply divided on the failure of the Nixon administration to end the war. Discussion groups were becoming heated, contentious affairs, and even McCloy uncharacteristically once lost his temper. It happened when some of the new, younger members invited Richard Falk to speak about his recent visit to North Vietnam. A professor of international law at Princeton, and a Council member, Falk was a well-known antiwar activist. Falk told his Pratt House audience that he had talked with almost all of Hanoi’s senior leadership, and he argued that the cease-fire terms they demanded were not unreasonable. He reported that Hanoi was not insisting on the right to maintain any of its regular troops in South Vietnam (a condition that became part of the eventual 1973 peace accords). The gist of Falk’s talk was similar to Harriman’s lecture to the Council earlier that year, but McCloy nevertheless became agitated, and during the question-and-answer period he lost his temper. “He seemed to think,” Falk recalled, “that what I was saying just made it harder to fight the war. It was the first time I had seen McCloy become visibly upset.” It did not become a shouting match only because McCloy finally stood up and walked from the room. Afterward, he told the Council staff that Falk should never have been invited to speak.21

  McCloy had now personified the Council for more than sixteen years, and he held proprietary feelings for everything that went on inside its headquarters. Under his tutelage, the Council’s budget had grown from $360,000 to over $2 million annually.22 The Ford Foundation continued to fund many of the Council’s study groups, but McCloy’s solicitations from corporations had also grown dramatically. By 1969,112 major corporations—including such Milbank, Tweed clients as ARAMCO, Chase Bank, Texaco, IT&T, and Mobil—were contributing $2,000 to $15,000 annually. That year, in a fund-raising letter to Lew Douglas, McCloy wrote that the Council was the “leading private organization” studying U.S. foreign policy, and the number of its members who were now in high government posts was proof of its influence.23

  Douglas, as usual, was more than skeptical of these claims, and though he did not say so to his brother-in-law, he believed that the Council had “unwittingly deviated from the fundamental purposes for which it was organized fifty years ago. . . .” It was in danger of losing its objectivity and becoming a “propaganda” organization.24 Douglas’s views might be dismissed as those of an inveterate grouser, but a growing number of Council members thought McCloy took himself and the Council entirely too seriously.25 About this time, John Kenneth Galbraith let his membership lapse, calling the Council “the seat of boredom. . . .”26 Things were about to change, however, even within the rarefied atmosphere of Pratt House. By 1969, growing dissension within the Council over Vietnam began to generate pressure for reform of the Council’s homogeneous membership. A committee recommended a special effort to recruit younger members and a greater number of minorities. That October, Council members in New York crowded into a second-floor chamber of Pratt House to discuss whether women should be invited to join the Council. Some said that women couldn’t keep secrets, and one member thought that “inviting ladies to join the Council would be like the Union League taking in Communists.”27 Though one man was reduced to tears, the meeting decided by a margin of one vote to admit a few qualified women—though no wives. (The membership agreed that wives would only turn Council functions into social affairs.28) McCloy endorsed these reforms, but in the spring of 1970 he told the board that after seventeen years it
was time for him to retire as chairman. He would step down that autumn. Simultaneously, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who had been associated with the Council since 1925, announced that he too wished to retire.

  There was no need for a search committee to select McCloy’s successor. For the second time in his life, David Rockefeller quickly agreed to replace his mentor. McCloy was given the title of “honorary chairman,” and he would remain an active director of the Council for years to come. The matter of choosing a new editor for Foreign Affairs, however, turned out to be the cause of considerable controversy. McCloy appointed a balanced search committee which included Bill Moyers, Armstrong, and several other Council members. But that autumn, Rockefeller pre-empted the process when he offered the job to William Bundy while the two men sat in the bleachers in Cambridge, watching the Harvard-Yale football game. “David wasn’t authorized to make even a tentative commitment like that to Bundy,” complained one board director. “[But] when the chairman of your club goes out on a limb, you don’t saw it off.”29

  That Rockefeller had acted unilaterally was bad enough. But to many Council members, Bundy’s record in government as one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War was morally and politically repugnant. It was not so to McCloy, who, like Rockefeller, counted the Bundy brothers as among his oldest friends. But to his consternation, a group of dissident Council members led by Richard Falk, Ronald Steel, and Richard J. Barnet, a cofounder with Marcus Raskin of the Institute for Policy Studies, publicly protested Bundy’s appointment. Meetings were held to discuss the issue, and one-third of the Council’s membership voted against Bundy.30 The debate became acrimonious. Some said Bundy was a “war criminal.”31 His critics, in turn, were accused of being “left McCarthyites.”32 Harvard Professor Francis Bator thought Falk was leading a “witch hunt.”33 Barnet received hate mail, including some anti-Semitic letters from Council members.34 Richard Ullman, a Princeton academic, argued that the Council would be handicapped in playing any role in the postmortem on Vietnam if a man with Bundy’s record became editor of Foreign Affairs. 35 But McCloy, Rockefeller, and the rest of the Council’s leadership stood their ground and confirmed the appointment. Rockefeller explained, “Why, I know all the Bundys, they’re a fine, upright family.”36

  Four days after McCloy and his fellow board directors confirmed Bundy’s appointment, The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, leaked by an ex-Rand Corporation analyst, Daniel Ellsberg.I Bundy’s critics charged that the Pentagon Papers demonstrated that he and Johnson had deceived Congress about their intentions in 1964. Specifically, the documents revealed that Bundy had drafted a contingency resolution authorizing the use of military force in Vietnam five months prior to the Gulf of Tonkin crisis. This made it appear that Congress had been manipulated into approving the Vietnam commitment on a contrived pretext.

  The controversy caused the press to take a critical look at the Council’s activities. Later in 1971, a former Council fellow, John Franklin Campbell, wrote a biting piece in New York magazine entitled “The Death Rattle of the Eastern Establishment”:

  If you can walk—or be carried—into Pratt House, it usually means that you are a partner in an investment bank or law firm—with occasional “troubleshooting” assignments in government. You believe in foreign aid, NATO and bipartisan foreign policy. You’ve been pretty much running things in this country for the last 25 years and you know it.

  But today your favorite club is breaking up, just on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary. The same vulgar polarizations that have popped up elsewhere—young against old, men against women, hawks against doves—have at last invaded the secluded Pratt House sanctuary and citadel of the establishment itself.”37

  The Council was not breaking up, but it was true that its credibility as an independent and nonpartisan voice on foreign-policy issues was not what it used to be. Over the next few years, the Council began the process of building a new consensus within a less exclusive Establishment. Younger men and women were invited to join its ranks, including a significant number of liberals and critics of the Cold War consensus. Richard Ullman, one of those who had opposed Bundy’s appointment, was selected in 1973 as director of studies. The Council held fewer of its proceedings behind closed doors and made an effort to seem less secretive. William Bundy turned out to be a far more liberal editor than his critics had expected, opening the pages of Foreign Affairs to controversy by occasionally publishing authors who stood outside the usual bipartisan consensus. Winston Lord, an old Kissinger aide who eventually became president of the Council, explained, “Ideologically, it’s important that we have not just the safe center but some spice from the left and right as well.” McCloy did not object to these changes, and continued to participate in the Council’s affairs. But it was not the same, and he probably quietly agreed with The Wall Street Journal when it headlined a story about the Council in the 1980s “Club That Is Ghost of Former Self.”38

  Halfway through his eighth decade, McCloy could look about him and see that the order and equanimity of his world was slipping away. Vietnam had broken the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy. The Council on Foreign Relations was no longer accorded the deference that had given it such influence in Washington for nearly fifty years. He now also had cause to worry that the security system he had worked so hard to build and sustain in Western Europe was about to unravel. NATO had recovered somewhat from the balance-of-payments crisis of 1966–67, but with the arrival of East-West détente, a new wind was blowing over Germany. The SPD’s Willy Brandt was chancellor, and in McCloy’s view, the charismatic Social Democrat was repudiating Adenauer’s policy of keeping West Germany firmly facing the West. He feared that Brandt’s campaign to open up contacts with East Germany and the Soviet Union ultimately threatened the basis of the Atlantic alliance. Brandt’s Ostpolitik (Eastern policy) climaxed in August 1970, when the German chancellor signed a nonaggression pact with the Kremlin. A few months later, he signed a treaty with Poland and began negotiations with the East Germans on trade and travel rights between the two Germanys.

  On the day Brandt signed the agreement with the Poles, which recognized the Oder-Neisse border between Poland and East Germany, McCloy went to the White House. Joined by Dean Acheson and Lucius Clay, McCloy complained that the administration was ignoring these dramatic developments in Europe. Western Europe and the Soviet Union, the three suggested, should command Nixon’s attention, not the war in Vietnam. McCloy pointed out that, until Brandt had come along, West Germany had been governed by men from the Rhineland, men like Adenauer, who had been reconciled to the division of Germany and were absolutely loyal to the Atlantic alliance. Now, he said, it was unfortunate that Bonn was being run by “people from eastern Germany, who are seeking to experiment with relations with the Soviet Union.”39 McCloy was not opposed to détente per se; he just didn’t like the idea of the Germans’ leading the way. In the same meeting, for instance, he could criticize Kissinger’s handling of the MIRV issue in the SALT negotiations and emphasize the urgency of achieving some kind of arms-control agreement with the Soviets. But he thought Ostpolitik—and Brandt’s popular slogan about Germany being “one country, but two states”—threatened the postwar security system.

  Kissinger and Nixon listened politely to this sermon, but they tended to think there were more opportunities than dangers in a European détente. Besides, it seemed to them that McCloy had become a “Cassandra” on the issue of Germany. For years, he had been running to the White House with warnings about one crisis or another that he claimed threatened the Atlantic alliance. They listened and did nothing.

  It was a different matter when, in the spring of 1971, Senator Mike Mansfield reintroduced his amendment to the selective-service bill requiring the administration to withdraw 150,000 U.S. troops from Western Europe. When it became clear that the vote on the Mansfield Amendment could be close, Kissinger decided that, for the first time during the Nixon administration, it was necessary to mobilize “the Estab
lishment figures who had been responsible for so many of America’s great postwar achievements.” He called Dean Acheson, who suggested that what was needed was “a little volley firing and not just a splattering of musketry.” Why not, he said, assemble as many of those who were “present at the creation” of the postwar system and have them meet with the president?II Afterward, they could emerge with a statement opposing the Mansfield Amendment. Nixon was greatly taken with the idea, and so, on May 13, 1971, Acheson, McCloy, George Ball, Cy Vance, Henry Cabot Lodge, Lucius Clay, former NATO Supreme Commander General Alfred M. Gruenther, Air Force General Lauris Norstad, and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Lyman Lemnitzer gathered in the Cabinet Room to discuss the issue.

  Nixon said a few appropriate words about NATO, and then opened up the floor to discussion. To Kissinger’s discomfort, a few of these old “Wise Men” suggested the merits of proposing a compromise. Acheson firmly rejected this and eventually persuaded everyone to sign a statement categorically opposing any troop cuts. After a longer-than-expected meeting, Acheson led everyone out to greet the press. With characteristic acerbity, he told the assembled reporters that any unilateral troop reductions would be “asinine.” When asked why the meeting with Nixon had taken so long, he quipped, “We are all old and we are all eloquent.”40