A pragmatic architect of the postwar U.S. international order
Khrushchev warned that the U.S. military buildup threatened war.
John J. McCloy was an American lawyer, security official, diplomat, and banker who connected wartime administration with the construction of the postwar international order. His record included responsibility for Japanese-American internment and consequential decisions on German war criminals, exposing both the reach and contradictions of U.S. power. In 1961, as John F. Kennedy’s arms-control adviser, he pursued test-ban and disarmament talks with the Soviet Union and confronted the military tensions surrounding Berlin in his July meeting with Khrushchev.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1917–1919U.S. Army artillery officer, service in France
- 1921–1940New York lawyer and Wall Street attorney
- 1941–1945Assistant Secretary of War, wartime mobilization, intelligence, and security policy
- 1947–1949Second President of the World Bank
- 1949–1952U.S. High Commissioner for Germany
- 1953–1960Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank
- 1953–1970Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations
- 1961President Kennedy’s arms-control adviser
Related historical events
- 1914–1918First World WarU.S. Army officer serving on the French frontHe served as a U.S. Army artillery officer on the French front from 1917 to 1919.
- 1961The Building of the Berlin WallKennedy's disarmament adviserIn July 1961 in the USSR, Khrushchev told him that the US military buildup threatened war.
The decision to remove Japanese Americans
As assistant secretary of war from April 1941, McCloy was the operating official in the February 1942 decision to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Delegated the matter by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, he mediated between the Army and the Justice Department, and on February 11 he and Stimson obtained President Franklin D. Roosevelt's approval to proceed with mass removal. Kai Bird judged that "more than any individual" McCloy was responsible for the decision. He supervised the evacuations and detention, and helped craft the wording of Executive Order 9066.
Naval intelligence's Kenneth Ringle report argued against mass internment, and the Munson report likewise found little threat; McCloy dismissed the latter as the work of "amateurs." In July 1942 he wrote to Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson that "These people are not 'internees'—they are under no suspicion for the most part and were moved largely because we felt we could not control our own white citizens in California."
As litigation over the constitutionality of internment proceeded, he worked to buttress the government's legal position. In 1943 he proposed a segregated Nisei unit, and that spring he had John DeWitt's final report reworded so that it no longer asserted that loyalty could not be determined, withholding its release for a year. He also fought to remove the footnote that Edward Ennis and others had inserted in the Korematsu Supreme Court brief. After the war, appearing before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in 1981, he opposed redress and reparations and acknowledged that the internment had not been a matter of military necessity but rather retribution for the attack on Pearl Harbor.