"We Know the Russians"

Though it stands in Berlin's U.S. sector, the big red brick building that houses Berlin's railway administration is occupied by Russians. One night last week small groups of striking transport workers sidled up to the building. At the entrance they disarmed two guards, rushed inside. While some strikers brandished guns at a door (see cut) behind which Russians were barricaded, 200 other strikers stampeded through the building, tore pictures of Lenin and Stalin from the walls. Only when four Russian officers, enraged by this desecration, screamed " 'Raus, 'raus!" (Out, out) and beat down on strikers with their fists, did the mob retreat.

Neither under the Czars nor under the Commissars have the Russians had much experience at settling strikes. Last week the commandants of the three Western powers pitched in to help the Russians get an agreement. The strikers are demanding all of their pay in West marks because most of them live and work in the Western sectors. The Russians, who control the entire city rail transit system, have offered 60% of the workers' pay in West marks. Last week Ernst Reuter, Socialist Mayor of (West) Berlin, appeared at a strike meeting and offered to add 15% from city funds to the Russian offer. He told the strikers that the U.S., British and French commandants wanted them to accept the settlement. "I would not recommend that you accept this agreement, unless I had to," said Reuter. The strikers voiced their unwillingness to take any part of their pay in East marks. Cried one: "What shall we do with the other 25%--buy schnapps or ride on merry-go-rounds?"

Mayor Reuter said the Western commandants would back a Russian promise that there would be no reprisals against returning strikers. Said Reuter: "The Western powers are not small children who don't keep their promises." An angry striker yelled back: "It's too late. We know the Russians. The Western powers will take care of us--after we've disappeared."

In spite of these fears and the continued Russian refusal to recognize the non-Communist union, the strike meeting agreed to submit the proposed settlement to a ballot.

The majority of Berliners still supported the strike, but some were beginning to express impatience at crowded buses and long walks from home to work. More were beginning to fear that unless the strike ended, Berlin would not build up a stockpile of fuel for the winter.

Trouble for a Troubleshooter

Bombs soared into the air and burst a thousand feet above the harbor into terrible yellow blossom. Shrapnel peppered the brick walls of the warehouses, plowed the planks off the pier, and rained down upon the hissing waters. Shells shot hither & thither, exploding under the touch of the terrific heat and shooting their missiles at random. Some of the shrapnel shells fell even in Manhattan. On the pier arose a white glare as of a million mercury-vapor lights.

That was how the New York Sun described the Black Tom explosion of July 30, 1916. The Literary Digest scoffed at reports that German saboteurs had blown up the Black Tom pier to prevent munitions shipments to the Allies; it said that such rumors "died of sheer inanition almost as soon as born."

A shock-haired youth named John J. (for Jay) McCloy, then just out of Amherst, later was to spend ten years of his life proving that the rumors were true, and hanging the Black Tom guilt on the German government. He learned the worst of the Germans as he threaded his way through a maze of false leads up & down Europe; he learned of German deceit and arrogance and violence that had led to one world calamity and was to lead to another.

Between Hate & Love. Between wars, too, Jack McCloy learned something of the Germans at their best. On an eastbound train in 1929 he ran into his Amherst classmate, Lew Douglas (now Ambassador to Great Britain), and Mrs. Douglas. Arriving in New York, they introduced McCloy to Mrs. Douglas' sister, Ellen Zinsser. McCloy liked Ellen, and liked the Zinsser home at Hastings-on-Hudson. Her father, Frederick, a chemist, was a brother of Harvard's famed Bacteriologist Hans (Rats, Lice and History) Zinsser. Although the elder Zinssers were U.S.-born, the Zinsser family had a German-American flavor of stability, culture and family affection.

Fifteen years after he had married Ellen, Jack McCloy, a U.S. Assistant Secretary of War, heard Lieut. General Courtney Hodges explain that he was about to shell Rothenburg. McCloy had visited Rothenburg and he remembered it --the narrow cobbled streets within the wall, the Gothic spires, the Renaissance houses. "Do you have to destroy Rothenburg?" he pleaded. "Maybe not," said Hodges. "Maybe the town can be induced to surrender." Negotiations were begun. Next day Rothenburg surrendered, and in 1948, out of gratitude, it made Jack McCloy an honorary citizen.

This week, McCloy, who has good reasons for hating the worst and loving the best of Germany, is getting ready to go back there as U.S. High Commissioner, the civilian successor to General Lucius D. Clay. McCloy will have to negotiate (which is what he does best) with the French, the British and the Russians, but his main job will be to bear a heavy share of the responsibility for suppressing the worst in the Germans, drawing out the best. For this people have the greatest capacity for good & evil in Europe, and the future of the world may turn upon whether they can be made a democratic, peace-loving people.

"There is some destiny about all this business," says Jack McCloy. "Germany seems to dog my footsteps."

Between Camp & Campus. Jack McCloy's first steps were taken in Philadelphia where he was born in 1895 ("north of Market Street, on the wrong side of the railroad tracks," McCloy explains). His father, who came of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian stock, worked for an insurance company. When Jack was six his father died, leaving no insurance. Mother Anna May Snader McCloy, of Pennsylvania Dutch (i.e., German) background, learned nursing, told Jack his father had hoped he would be a lawyer, skimped & saved to send him to Maplewood, a Quaker boarding school, then to Peddie, Amherst College and finally Harvard Law School.

At Amherst, Anna McCloy's boy studied hard (a cum laude graduate), earned part of his way by waiting on tables for meals, tutoring during vacation, won a letter in tennis. The war in Europe invaded the Amherst campus in 1916. Jack McCloy plumped for "preparedness" as against "pacifism." He spent the summer after graduation training at Plattsburg. The U.S. was in the war as he finished his first year at Harvard Law. He hurried to Plattsburg again.

Lieut. McCloy caught the eye of his commanding officer, General Guy Preston, a salty cavalryman who had fought at the Battle of Wounded Knee near the Cheyenne River, where in 1890 the Sioux made their last stand. McCloy went to France as Preston's operations officer in the 160th Field Artillery Brigade. Years later, Preston told another officer why he had chosen McCloy as staff aide. "One day at Fort Ethan Allen, I walked behind him after he had been riding. I could see blood all over his pants. I said to myself, any man who could keep riding with that much pain must be a damn good officer."

When they got back to mustering-out camp in Virginia, Preston asked his young aide to take a permanent Army commission. But McCloy was already haunting the law libraries. Last week the general, now 85 and retired in Palo Alto (Calif.), described the scene: "One evening McCloy came to eat with me. I saw he was preoccupied. Finally he exclaimed: 'General, that abstract law is beautiful stuff.'

"I saw his face was radiant as an angel's. I said at once: 'I'll never again ask you to stay in this man's army. Your destiny is too manifest.' "

Lawyer's Lawyer. McCloy graduated from Harvard Law in 1921 with good grades, though he missed Law Review by a shadow. Nowadays a good friend as well as former student of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, McCloy jokes over the fact that the Justice did not remember him at Harvard: "He kept all the smart boys in the front row." McCloy headed for the big law firms of Wall Street. First with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, later with Cravath, De Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood, he and other fledgling "clerks" read and studied morning & night, drafting contracts, charters and all the other documents of corporate and financial law.

The juniors were made to stand on their feet. The pace was swift, the competition was stern. Says a friend who has known McCloy ever since those days: "Jack learned not to depend on others. It is surprising how many men in Washington have never learned how to handle anything themselves, and depend on other people to shape up the work. The one thing McCloy has never had to do is to depend on somebody else to do his draft ing; he can do it better himself and he knows it."

One of Cravath's clients, Bethlehem Steel, had a stake in the Black Tom case, then being argued before the International Court at The Hague. McCloy, who on his wedding day in 1930 had sailed to take over Cravath's Paris office, went to observe the Hague proceedings and came away fascinated. He devoted the better part of his next ten years to the case, one of the most celebrated in modern international law.

McCloy, as coordinator of 20-odd lawyers, representing many clients, took part in the melodramatic hunt for evidence, which the German secret service tried desperately to cover up. One bizarre episode concerned a Czarist Russian adventurer, Count Alexander Nelidoff, who said he had documents linking the German government with the Black Tom saboteurs. McCloy plucked a pencil from Nelidoff's vest pocket to take some notes. The Russian gasped in horror, snatched the pencil back, explained that it was a tiny pistol loaded with gas pellets which could quickly asphyxiate everybody in the room. Later, checking with British Intelligence, McCloy found out that Nelidoff's documents were unreliable, that the Russian himself was a notorious international forger sometimes employed by the Germans to plant phony evidence. He never did find out whether the pencil was a fake as well.

The trail led to fantastic secret messages penned in lemon juice (invisible until pressed with a hot iron) on the pages of a copy of Blue Book Magazine, to old check stubs found in a discarded suitcase in a Baltimore attic, to memoranda from the German secret service uncovered in the archives of the Austrian government. McCloy traveled from Dublin to Warsaw, interviewing Irish Republicans and such German characters as the late Franz von Rintelen, who masterminded German espionage in the U.S., and Rudolph Nadolny, who was then a German secret service man in the Wilhelmstrasse and is now active in behalf of Soviet Germany. In 1936, the Germans started to give up. Five years later, the American claimants recovered $26 million in damages; McCloy's client, Bethlehem Steel, got a $2,000,000 share.

Bureaucrat's Lawyer. The Black Tom case brought McCloy to the attention of a shrewd judge of men, Elder Statesman Henry Stimson. In 1940, when Stimsori went to Washington as Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of War, he made McCloy his special consultant on German espionage.

Up to that point, McCloy's career was clearly consistent and easy to follow. What happened next is harder--and more important--to understand. Within a few months of McCloy's arrival in Washington, Stimson got Roosevelt to appoint McCloy Assistant Secretary of War. If this was a "policy job," it had been given to a man who had little experience with either policy or politics. If it was an "administrative job," it had gone to a man with no experience of administration.

McCloy's assignment, in which he made a brilliant contribution to the war, arose out of the complexity of modern government, beset as it is by problems outside clear-cut administrative lines and party politics. McCloy became a troubleshooter, and expert in the solution of conflicts between people and between ideas. The business of the law is to find a way through difficult human problems toward workable and just answers. What McCloy did from 1941 to 1945 in Washington and on half a dozen battlefields was a lawyer's job--not the courtroom lawyer, but the lawyer who keeps his client out of the courtroom.

His specific chores tell the story. He helped shepherd the Lend-Lease bill through Congress; while debate was at its hottest, he set up a cot in the Senate wing of the Capitol, kept vigil for all who needed advice. From France's Jean Monnet he picked up the phrase "arsenal of democracy," sent it on, via Felix Frankfurter, to Franklin Roosevelt as the keynote for a famous fireside chat.

McCloy fostered the intelligence unit which helped break the Japanese codes. As an old artilleryman he spoke up for spotter planes. When the Air Forces' "Hap" Arnold said he could not spare pilots, McCloy took lessons himself to prove. that even middle-aged men could handle light planes. Then he offered to give Arnold a ride. The story goes that the general drew back in mock alarm--"Not that!" he cried. "You can have the planes."

One unpleasant chore was to supervise the evacuation of Japanese from the West Coast. McCloy felt uneasy over this action, which he considered necessary but unjust to thousands of loyal citizens of Japanese origin. By way of recompense, he pushed the formation of the famed 442nd Combat Team, in which the Nisei in Italy gave distinguished proof of their loyalty to the U.S. "One thing I want on my tombstone," says McCloy, "is that I helped form the 442nd Combat Team."

The Deft Retort. He traveled the battlefields; once in North Africa's Kasserine Pass, he showed stumped G.I.s how to operate a new weapon called the bazooka.

In Britain just before D-day he had to tell dazzling Georgie Patton to stop shooting off his mouth. The general dramatically complained: "On the eve of battle, you undermine my confidence in myself." McCloy countered: "General, if I thought I could undermine your confidence in yourself by anything I might say, I would ask General Eisenhower to remove you." Patton perked up and shut up--for a while.

In Japan McCloy had to tell Douglas MacArthur about a War Department plan. The great man greeted him with the usual flood of spellbindery. McCloy broke it up by rapping the table. "Now, General," he said, "I want to hear what you have to say, but you talk for an hour and then I'll talk for an hour." They got along fine.

McCloy had previously tried out the same technique with his boss, Stimson, who from his experience and intellectual eminence looked a long way down on some of his assistants. Stimson used to bark into his "squawk box" for McCloy and Robert Lovett and expect them to come in running. They did, but they did not always say yes when they got there.

One day McCloy went to the White House with James Forrestal, then Under Secretary of the Navy. At the War Department, "Colonel" Stimson (as the Secretary was known) found himself in distress. He burst out: "Why can't people leave my papers alone? . . . Get me McCloy at the White House."

They got McCloy, and Stimson bellowed into the phone: "God damn you, McCloy, what have you done with my papers?"

From the other end of the phone the whole office could hear McCloy's response: "I don't know, Colonel. I haven't got your goddam papers." Stimson paused, then laughed and hung up the phone.

At the other end, Forrestal, himself in no little awe of Stimson, was properly impressed, looked at McCloy, and said: "I never knew you were on such intimate terms with the Secretary."

Control, Not Vengeance. McCloy attended the Casablanca, Cairo and Potsdam conferences. Although deeply immersed in the war, he did not forget the war's purpose. In 1944 the U.S. had worked out no clear policy of what it wanted to do with defeated Germany. Strictly speaking, such a policy should have been the responsibility of the State Department; but in those years Washington expected little from the State Department, and was rarely surprised. A German policy was cooked up at the Treasury, of all places, and presented to Roosevelt on the eve of the Quebec conference.

Published reports that McCloy had a hand in concocting this Morgenthau "goat pasture" plan for Germany are the precise opposite of the truth. McCloy gave Stimson his first tip on the Morgenthau plan's existence, and it was Stimson with MCloy's help who finally defeated the plan-- but only after irreparable harm had been done. The press disclosed that Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had initialed the Morgenthau plan at Quebec, and the Nazis were able to turn this fact into a powerful propaganda weapon for bolstering German resistance in the last year of the war. Stimson and McCloy took the position that the Atlantic Charter pledged the U.S. and Britain to help "victor and vanquished" toward equal economic opportunity. McCloy helped Stimson to draft a memorandum which pleaded for a principle of control, rather than vengeance, and for German reconstruction for the sake of a stable Europe. When he dropped the Morgenthau plan, Roosevelt confessed (to Stimson) that he had "no idea" how he could ever have initialed such a proposal.

Confidence, Not Crusading. In late 1946 McCloy was out of the War Department (with a Distinguished Service Medal) and back in private law (Milbank, Tweed, Hope, Hadley and McCloy) when his old colleagues in Washington pressured him to come back as President of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

The Bank, created at Bretton Woods, with capital subscribed by 48 nations (largest contributor, 31%, is the U.S.), was in an organizational mess. The job was a challenge to an old troubleshooter. McCloy picked it up, after carefully scouting the terrain and laying down conditions. It was his first real administrative job, and the result, while impressive, has not been universally praised.

McCloy had had no previous banking experience except "writing contracts for bankers." This practice in protecting a notably cautious fraternity from its possible recklessness was not exactly conducive to an openhanded policy of administration at the World Bank during McCloy's tenure. Many of his foreign colleagues complain that he missed a great opportunity to push a development program along the lines later suggested by President Truman's "bold, new program" for backward countries. McCloy did not see it that way. He thought the first task was to give the U.S. investing public some confidence in the Bank. He succeeded, to the extent of selling $250 million of Bank bonds to U.S. investors.

Under McCloy, however, the Bank was run by McCloy and his American aides, not by the international directors. Like many lawyers in administrative jobs, McCloy's was a one-man act. He resented the directors, once told them that they could be replaced by better men if they met once every three months instead of once a week. Directors complained that he withheld information on pending loans until a few days before meetings. McCloy admits that he was sometimes short with the directors. "I'd go to a meeting and tell them that the Bank's mission had departed for Guatemala. Then I'd go to the next meeting and tell them the mission had arrived in Guatemala."

Recently, when McCloy lined up for a farewell picture with the directors, an official cracked: "Why don't the members pose with their rubber stamps in their hands?"

Somewhat to his surprise, McCloy liked the job. It was a postgraduate lesson in the flow of mankind's economic bloodstream. "A real listening post in the world," says McCloy. "Everybody who is anybody financially comes to see you. I've discovered the 48 nationalities work pretty well together and can be loyal to an international institution provided you get them away from the front of a microphone."

The Bank now shows an operational profit, has made loans of $650 million to eight countries. When ECA dries up by 1953, it may well be that the Bank will stand ready to give international credit new impetus.

Free Enterpriser. Despite his long service within a Democratic administration, McCloy is a Republican. During the 1944 presidential campaign, he was conferring with Franklin Roosevelt when the phone rang. The President talked into the mouthpiece unguardedly about campaign strategy. Embarrassed, McCloy interrupted: "Mr. President, don't forget I'm a Republican." "Damn it," grinned Roosevelt, "I always do forget it." Then he went on talking unguardedly.

Another time, provoked by professional Democrats at a Washington cocktail party, McCloy lashed back with a telling defense of his politics. He repeated the gist of the argument last week: "I think, as time goes on, that in the Republican Party will lie the antithesis to the trend toward large government controls. I don't mean that government should not operate in certain important social fields. But it's important to keep a force opposed to the monolithic state. If you destroy the incentive and initiative of free enterprise, you bring everything down to a low, undistinguished level of life. I think the Republican position is strong because it does not try to solve every problem in terms of government control."

He calls some New Deal liberals "totalitarians," believes they stand contrary to every meaning of true economic liberalism. On the other hand, he thinks some Old Guard Republicans are less "enlightened" than many Democrats on foreign policy.

In a Tight Spot. McCloy has learned to gauge how far people can be pushed, to hold out in good humor but dogged firmness through protracted debate. He has a flair for the right word in a tight spot. On Kwajalein after V-J day, an audience of G.I.'s greeted him with the chant, "When do we go home?" McCloy feigned deafness, cupped an ear, cried, "What's that? I can't hear you." It drew a laugh and eased the tension. In Nicaragua, while International Bank president, he was taken to a ballgame by Dictator Anastasio Somoza. The third baseman was wild. Later, at a banquet, the local after-dinner speakers kept asking for money from the guest of honor's Bank. When McCloy rose to speak, the atmosphere seemed sticky. He promptly aired it by saying: "What Nicaragua needs most is a good third baseman."

On family vacations at Ausable Lakes in the Adirondacks, he is indefatigable. He rises to fish at 4 a.m., drags his family on walks up Iron Mountain. "After a hike with him," says chestnut-haired Ellen McCloy, "we all come home on our hands and knees." The McCloy family circle, in the yellow brick Georgetown house, includes Grandmother Anna McCloy, now 83, young John, 11, Ellen, 7, a droopy-eared beagle named Judy and an affectionate boxer named Punch.

McCloy never drinks coffee or tea, takes only an occasional social Scotch & soda. He likes cigars, which his wife bans at home, and chocolate drops, which he also nibbles in his office. He reads incessantly, even props a book before him as he shaves, always carries an Oxford Book of Verse on his travels, collects volumes on fishing* and military science, stages reading debates with himself--i.e., follows simultaneously three or four books on the same subject but with different slants.

Toward Frankfurt. Comments on McCloy's appointment as U.S. High Commissioner in Germany last week came from varied sources but were monotonous in content. George Marshall, Robert Lovett, Historian Douglas Southall Freeman, British Socialist Hugh Dalton, all said, in effect: "They couldn't have picked a better man." Some of McCIoy's friends, however, were sorry he took the job. McCloy knows it's tough. "No doubt about it," he said last week, "it's going to be a windy corner."

McCloy will not have to "run" part of Germany, as General Clay did. The Germans will do that under the new West German constitution. McCloy's job is to see that the Germans do not transgress their constitution or the broad policies of the occupying powers. If they do, he and the British and French High Commissioners will have to step in and set the Germans on the right path.

The Russians and their German comrades are expected to make all possible trouble. McCloy is supposed to encourage German industry, but he knows that the countries which now have Germany's old markets may not like that. He is supposed to encourage German democracy, but he knows that poverty may lead again to extreme German nationalism.

In short, Europe needs Germany and is afraid of Germany. Russia fears a Germany allied with the West; the West fears a German alliance with Russia. Neither side will consistently and wholeheartedly commit itself to either a strong or a weak Germany. In the midst of this conflict, the Germans toss about, driven by their poverty, their fears of another war, and their national ambitions. A U.S. expert on Germany said the other day: "Whenever you think you have the answer to a German problem, you have to box the compass to see how it checks with all the major forces. You usually wind up finding that you've boxed yourself--and have to start over."

No one can say whether McCloy will find a way out of the German box. The mission suits his lawyer's talents better than the World Bank job did, but it is far more complex and important than anything he has tackled.

In Washington last week, McCloy was anxiously briefing himself on Germany. "He always worries over a new job," explained Ellen McCloy.

But he was not exactly despondent about it. Ellen stood in the midst of rolled-up rugs and crated books, telling the moving men how to get to the Zinsser home in Hastings. "Are you sure we can get down that narrow road?" asked the driver. Said Ellen McCloy: "You've been moving the Douglases and the McCloys in & out of that house for a dozen years. If you can't make it, this will be the first time."

Her husband, in a seersucker suit, bounced down the steps. "It looks like I'll have a pretty free afternoon," he said. "Don't touch that fishing stuff until I get back."

* Brother-in-law Lew Douglas, in Paris last week, and still under treatment for an eye injured by a fishhook, says: "Jack McCloy is a fine fisherman. He ought to be; I taught him myself."

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