The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment

New York: Simon & Schuster, c1992. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 25 cm, 800 pages, illustrations, notes, sources, bibliography, index. DJ is price clipped. Kai Bird (born September 2, 1951) is an American author and columnist, best known for his works on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, United States-Middle East political relations, and his biographies of political figures. He won a Pulitzer Prize for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Bird's biographical works include The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (Touchstone, 1998); The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment and Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (1998), which he co-edited with Lawrence Lifschultz. In April 2010 his book Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 was released by Scribner. It is a meld of memoir and history, fusing his early life in the Arab world with an account of the American experience in the Middle East. The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (Crown, 2014) is a biography of CIA officer Robert Ames, whose career focus was the Middle East. According to the book, Ames played a key role in starting the peace process that led to the Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO. Ames perished in the April 18, 1983, truck bombing of the American embassy in Beirut. In 2021, he published a biography of Jimmy Carter entitled The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter. John Jay McCloy (March 31, 1895 - March 11, 1989) was an American lawyer, diplomat, banker, and presidential advisor. He served as Assistant Secretary of War during World War II under Henry Stimson, helping deal with issues such as German sabotage, political tensions in the North Africa Campaign, and opposing 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 United States adviser to all presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. McCloy is best remembered as a member of the foreign policy establishment group of elders called "The Wise Men", a group of statesmen marked by nonpartisanship, pragmatic internationalism, and aversion to ideological fervor. Derived from a Kirkus review: In a 1962 spoof for Esquire, Richard Rovere quoted John Kenneth Galbraith as deeming John J. McCloy ``chairman of the US Establishment''—but McCloy has never been the subject of a full- dress biography. Here, Bird fills this void with an evenhanded and wonderfully readable account of the public man that also sheds light on the meritocracy whose dedication to principles beyond partisanship still gives it incalculable influence over a presumptively democratic polity. An ambitious, industrious overachiever who made his way from the wrong side of the tracks in Philadelphia through Amherst and Harvard Law School to international eminence, McCloy was notable more for analytic acuity than great brilliance. The upwardly mobile attorney nonetheless left his mark wherever he went. During WW II, for example, the globe-trotting McCloy was Henry Stimson's top aide at the War Department. He later headed the World Bank during its formative years and was High Commissioner of occupied Germany, moving on to the chairmanship of Chase Manhattan. Though a staunch Republican, he served as an advisor to JFK, LBJ, and their successors, while remaining a leading light of the Council on Foreign Relations—an establishment citadel if ever there was one. When he died early in 1989, a few weeks short of 94, McCloy was fittingly eulogized for his substantive contributions to the public good. An impressive narrative history that records a consequential individual's shortcomings without tarnishing his accomplishments. The absorbing text (ten years in preparation) will likely be the definitive life story for decades to come.