John J. McCloy

John Jay McCloy (March 31, 1895 – March 11, 1989) was an American lawyer, diplomat, and banker. He served as Assistant Secretary of War during World War II under Henry Stimson. In this capacity he dealt with German sabotage and political tensions in the North Africa Campaign. He was the prime mover of Japanese internment, as well as a high-ranking federal bureaucrat who opposed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the war, he served as the president of the World Bank, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Warren Commission, and a prominent adviser to all presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. McCloy was one of a group of important foreign policy advisers whose activities are detailed in the 1986 book The Wise Men, by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, who describe McCloy as "the most influential private citizen in the United States".

John McCloy was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of John J. McCloy (1862–1901) and Anna (née Snader) McCloy (1866–1959). His father was an insurance man who died when McCloy was five. His mother was a hairdresser in Philadelphia, with many high-society clients. McCloy's family was poor; he would later often say he grew up on the "wrong side of the tracks," and describe himself as being outside the establishment circles in which he would later move. His original name was "John Snader McCloy". It was later changed to "John Jay McCloy", probably to sound more aristocratic.

McCloy was educated at the Peddie School in New Jersey, and Amherst College from which he graduated in 1916. He was an above-average student who excelled at tennis and moved smoothly among the sons of the nation's elite. McCloy was a brother of Beta Theta Pi fraternity at Amherst. In 1930, McCloy married Ellen Zinsser, a native of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York and a 1918 graduate of Smith College. She was active in volunteer and civic organizations, such as volunteer nursing programs and served on the board of the New York chapter of the Girls Clubs of America, the Bellevue Hospital nursing school, and the New York chapter of the American Red Cross. They had two children: John J. McCloy II and Ellen Z. McCloy.

McCloy enrolled in Harvard Law School in 1916, and he was an average student. He was profoundly influenced by his experience at the Plattsburg Preparedness camps. When the US entered the war in April 1917, he joined the United States Army in May and was trained at Plattsburgh, New York and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Artillery on August 15, 1917. He was promoted to first lieutenant on December 29. In May 1918 he was assigned as an aide to Brigadier General Guy H. Preston, commander of the 160th Field Artillery Brigade of the 85th Division. He sailed for France for service with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on July 29, 1918. He saw combat service in the last weeks of the war, as commander of an artillery battery during the Meuse–Argonne offensive.

After the armistice of November 11, 1918, he was transferred to General Headquarters of the AEF in Chaumont, Haute-Marne, France, on March 1, 1919. He was then sent to the Advance General Headquarters in Trier, Germany and was promoted to captain on June 29. McCloy returned to the US on July 20 and resigned from the army on August 15, 1919. He then returned to Harvard where he received his LL.B. degree in 1921.

McCloy went to New York to become an associate in the firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, which was then one of the nation's most prestigious law firms. He moved to Cravath, Henderson, & de Gersdorff in 1924, where he worked with many wealthy clients, such as the St. Paul Railroad. In 1934, McCloy found new evidence allowing him to re-open an action for damages against Germany for the destruction caused by the 1916 Black Tom explosion.

He undertook much work for corporations in Nazi Germany and advised the major German chemical combine I.G. Farben, later the manufacturer of the Zyklon B gas. By the time he left for government service in 1940, McCloy earned about $45,000 a year ($835,000 in 2020 dollars) and had savings of $106,000 ($2,000,000 in 2020 dollars). His involvement in litigation over a World War I sabotage case gave him a strong interest in intelligence issues and in German affairs.

US Secretary of War Henry Stimson hired McCloy as a consultant in September 1940, even though McCloy was a Republican Party supporter and opposed Franklin Roosevelt for the upcoming November 1940 presidential election.

Stimson was particularly interested in McCloy due to McCloy's extensive experience with German sabotage in the Black Tom case. Stimson knew that the Germans would once again try to sabotage American infrastructure if a war against the United States were to break out. Working for Stimson, McCloy became immersed in war planning. On April 22, 1941, he was made Assistant Secretary of War but held only civilian responsibilities, especially the purchase of war materials for the Army, Lend Lease, the draft, and issues of intelligence and sabotage. Once the USA entered the war, McCloy was a crucial voice in setting US military priorities and played a key role in several notable decisions.

An indefatigable committee member, McCloy during the war served on the government task forces that built the Pentagon, created the Office of Strategic Services, which eventually became the Central Intelligence Agency, and he proposed both the United Nations and the war crimes tribunals. He chaired the predecessor to the National Security Council.

In February 1942, his involvement in combating sabotage made McCloy heavily involved in the decision to forcibly remove Japanese-Americans from their homes on the West Coast to inland internment camps. Kai Bird wrote in his biography of McCloy:

More than any individual, McCloy was responsible for the decision, since the (U.S.) President had delegated the matter to him through (U.S. Secretary of War) Stimson.

From March 1947 to June 1949, McCloy served as the second president of the World Bank. At the time of his appointment, the World Bank was a new entity, having only been manned by one previous president, Eugene Meyer, who resigned six months into his tenure over disputes with the bank's executive directors. McCloy was brought in to resolve the situation and was determined to make the bank an entity that would fund economically efficient projects, not just consumption. Over this tenure, he would develop relationships with Wall Street to overcome their skepticism of these bonds from countries, selling over hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds. Eventually, McCloy would leave the World Bank, as the Marshall Plan would start giving vast sums of economic support in 1948 for Allied countries that would swamp the investment the World Bank could provide.

On September 2, 1949, McCloy replaced the previous five successive military governors for the US Zone in Germany as the first US High Commissioner for Germany and held the position until August 1, 1952. He oversaw the further creation of the Federal Republic of Germany after May 23, 1949.

At the strong urging of the West German government and under massive pressure from the West German public, McCloy approved recommendations (including from the Peck Panel) for commuting of sentences of Nazi criminals including those of the prominent industrialist Alfried Krupp, General Hellmuth Felmy, and Einsatzgruppe commanders Gustav Adolf Nosske and Martin Sandberger. McCloy granted the restitution of Krupp's entire property. He also commuted the sentence of Ernst von Weizsäcker at the urging of Winston Churchill. Another commutation handed down was for Edmund Veesenmayer, who played a role in mass deportations. Nuremberg judge William J. Wilkins wrote,

Imagine my surprise one day in February 1951 to read in the newspaper that John J. McCloy, the high commissioner to Germany, had restored all the Krupp properties that had been ordered confiscated.

McCloy rejected requests for an amnesty. He also refused to commute the death sentences of five men whom he called "the worst of the worst": Oswald Pohl, Otto Ohlendorf, Paul Blobel, Werner Braune, and Erich Naumann. Two other death sentences from the Dachau trials were upheld by General Thomas T. Handy, that of Georg Schallermair and Hans-Theodor Schmidt. There were mass protests by hundreds of thousands amongst the West German public and government. Many were outraged that full amnesty had not been granted to the condemned, and it reached the point that McCloy's family started receiving death threats. Nevertheless, all seven men were executed at Landsberg Prison on June 7, 1951.

McCloy died of pulmonary edema at his home in Cos Cob, a neighborhood of Greenwich, Connecticut, on March 11, 1989. His wife had died at 87 a few years earlier of Parkinson's disease.

Without regard to partisanship, he served under presidents of both parties. Although a Republican, he was the second-highest-ranking official in the War Department during World War II. Like his fellow "Wise Men," McCloy often heeded the call to service. Despite having lucrative jobs on Wall Street, he left his positions to serve in government, whether to serve in the War Department or as the High Commissioner in Germany.

He was and remains a highly controversial figure. Despite his Two Medal of Honor awards, consistent presence in the highest echelons of government and powerful influence, it has been argued McCloy has achieved the status of a person of infamy within the United States' history. Both shortly following and contemporaneously his decisions have been questioned for their necessity, legality and how they appeared to be strongly racially motivated. Being the driving force behind Japanese Internment in World War Two, suppressing evidence that indicated it was not necessary, resisting repeated calls to destroy the death camp apparatus at Auschwitz with artillery or aerial bombardment and opposing the desegregation of the military until a last minute about turn, possibly motivated by the self awareness of and desire to not have his legacy entirely be based around racial bias, have been what scholarship around him have largely focused on. The lack of legal precedent and extreme nature of his decisions are widely controversial. At the time McCloy was quoted as saying "The Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me" and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes wrote in his diary that "many people thought McCloy was 'more or less inclined to be a Fascist.'" In 1981 McCloy would admit before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians that the Internment had not been about military necessity...but was the result of "retribution for the attack made on pearl harbor." Paul Finkelman writing for the Columbia Journal of Race and Law in 2024 would argue that "In other words, McCloy admitted that in implementing and defending the internment he misled the Court and the nation in order to incarcerate in concentration camps... completely innocent Americans because of their race and shared ethnicity with the people from another country who had attacked the United States. This also included McCloy admitting to having "orchestrated the withholding of critical information from the government."

McCloy is also remembered for his role in forming the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was tasked by Henry Stimson in the early 1940s to sort out the political tensions in the pre-war intelligence community, which was marked by political infighting and jurisdictional disputes among the chiefs of the Army and Navy and the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. To sort out the issue, he and William Donovan created a new intelligence program, Office of Strategic Services, that attempted to fuse and streamline those forms of intelligence and is modeled after the British intelligence agencies. The centralization of the war intelligence office became a blueprint for the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency under the National Security Act of 1947.

In recognition of his efforts to the United States, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction by President Lyndon B. Johnson on December 6, 1963. In the same year, he was awarded the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Society's William J. Donovan Award. Also in 1963, McCloy received the Sylvanus Thayer Award by the United States Military Academy for his service to the country. Furthermore, McCloy was a recipient of the Association Medal of the New York City Bar Association in recognition of exceptional contributions to the honor and standing of the Bar in the community.

On his 90th birthday on the White House lawn with President Ronald Reagan overlooking, John McCloy was named an honorary citizen of Berlin by German President Richard von Weizsacker and the mayor of Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen. At the event, Ronald Reagan recalled how "John McCloy's selfless heart made a difference, an enduring difference, in the lives of millions" and thanked him on behalf of "for all [McCloy's] countrymen and the millions of people around the world whose lives [McCloy] helped make safer because of your devotion to duty and to the cause of humanity." The citation for his honorary citizenship reads "John McCloy is closely connected with the reconstruction and development of this city. His dedication contributed to a great extent to understanding of Berlin in the United States of America and to preservation of peace and freedom."