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John Jay McCloy (March 31, 1895, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – March 11, 1989, Stamford, Connecticut) was a lawyer and banker who later became a prominent United States presidential advisor. He was known for his opposition to the World War II atomic bombing of Japan.
McCloy graduated from Amherst College in 1919, and then received an LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1921. He was a legal counselor to I. G. Farben, and was the Assistant Secretary of War from 1941 to 1945, during which he was noted for opposing the nuclear bombing of Japan[1].
During World War II, as Assistant Secretary of War, John J. McCloy was a crucial voice in setting U.S. military priorities. The War Department was petitioned throughout late 1944 to help save Nazi prisoners by ordering the bombing of the railroad lines leading to Auschwitz and the gas chambers in the camp. McCloy responded that only heavy bombers would be able to reach the sites from England, and that those bombers would be too vulnerable and were needed elsewhere. However, only a few months earlier, Allies forces had bombed industrial centers just a few kilometers away from the extermination camp-and would continue to do so, apparently even causing some damage to buildings in Auschwitz, while sustaining very low losses. On another occasion, McCloy claimed that the final decision on the selection of bombing targets—including those attacked by American planes—lay with the British alone, which was subsequently said to be incorrect. In an interview two years before his death, with Michael Beschloss, McCloy claimed that the decision not to bomb Auschwitz was President Roosevelt's and that he was merely fronting for him.[citation needed] This appears plausible given Roosevelt's generally apathetic response to the Holocaust but is otherwise unsupported.
From March 1947 to June 1949, he was the president of the World Bank. In 1949 he replaced Lucius D. Clay who was the Military Governor for the U.S.Zone in Germany as the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany and held this position until 1952, during which time he oversaw Germany's return to statehood. At his direction, a campaign of wholesale pardoning and commutation of sentences of Nazi criminals took place; some however were retried and convicted in the newly independent West Germany. His successor as High Commissioner was James B. Conant; the office was terminated in 1955.
Following this, he served as chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank from 1953 to 1960, and as chairman of the Ford Foundation from 1958 to 1965; he also became a director of the Rockefeller Foundation. From 1954 to 1970, he was chairman of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in New York, to be succeeded by David Rockefeller, who had worked closely with him at the Chase Bank. McCloy had a long association with the Rockefeller family, going back to his early Harvard days when he taught the young Rockefeller brothers how to sail.
He later served as advisor to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, and was the primary negotiator on the Presidential Disarmament Committee.
He was selected by Johnson to serve on the Warren Commission in 1963. Notably, he was initially sceptical of the lone gunman theory, but a trip to Dallas with Allen Dulles in the spring of 1964 to visit the scene of the assassination convinced him of the case against Oswald. The only prominent lawyer among the seven commissioners, he brokered the final consensus—avoiding a minority dissenting report—and the crucial wording of the primary conclusion of the final report. He stated that any possible evidence of a conspiracy was "beyond the reach" of all of America's investigatory agencies—principally the FBI and the CIA—as well as the Commission itself.
A name partner in the Rockefeller-associated prominent New York law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, who notably acted for the "seven sisters" (the leading multinational oil companies) in their initial battles with OPEC, he was sometimes referred to as the "Chairman of the American Establishment".
Further reading
- The Chairman: John J. McCloy - The Making of the American Establishment, Kai Bird, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
- The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, and McCloy, Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.
- Memoirs, David Rockefeller, New York: Random House, 2002.
Additional sources
Martin Gilbert - Auschwitz And The Allies. Stuart Erdheim - "Could The Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz-Birkenau?" - Holocaust and Genocide Studies (fall 97) pp 129-170.
See also
External links
- Biography of John McCloy (website)
- Foreign Affairs article on John McCloy
- John J. McCloy, a biography on Nuclearfiles.org
- The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination by Mae Brussell
- "The Splendid Reconciliation"
- A letter to John W. Pehle
- Could The Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz-Birkenau?