The following info is the first in a series of diaries that contain relationships that are probably mostly coincidence, but...on the slim chance that they aren't they might form an illustration about the attitude and the greed that keep and have kept us at war, or on a war footing:
The WWI war industries board is a good place to start. The chairman was Wall Street investment banker, Bernard Baruch. Assistant Chairman was Clarence Dillon, father of future US Treasury Sect'y and Jupiter Island, Fl, resident, C. Douglas Dillon. Clarence was described by Time, in 1957, as "one of the richest men in the United States". John Foster Dulles, "received an Army commission as Major on the War Industries Board"...and, "Samuel P. Bush became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms, and Ammunition Section, with national responsibility for government assistance to and relations with munitions companies....."
The Dulles brother's lawfirm, Sullivan & Cromwell handled the problem of Prescott Bush and Brown Bros. Harriman's Nazi business dealings:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
John Foster Dulles received an Army commission as Major on the War Industries Board....
His brother, Allen Dulles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
...He was the younger brother of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State and Chairman and Senior Partner of Sullivan & Cromwell, and the grandson of John W. Foster, another U.S. Secretary of State and brother to diplomat Eleanor Lansing Dulles. His uncle (by marriage) Robert Lansing also was a U.S. Secretary of State.[.....In 1926 he earned a law degree from George Washington University and took a job at the New York firm where his brother, John Foster Dulles, was a partner.,,,
,,,After the war in Europe, Dulles served for six months as the OSS Berlin station chief. In 1947, Congress created the Central Intelligence Agency. Dulles was closely involved with its development. His translator at this time was Henry Kissinger, who worked for Army Intelligence.
Dulles' CIA Operation Paperclip assimilated Nazi scientists into the American establishment by obscuring their histories and short circuiting efforts to bring their true stories to light. The project was led by officers in the United States Army. Although the program officially ended in September 1947, those officers and others carried out a conspiracy until the mid-fifties that bypassed both law and presidential directive to keep Paperclip going. Neither Presidents Truman nor Eisenhower were informed that their instructions were ignored.
In the 1948 Presidential election, Allen Dulles was Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey's chief advisor. The Dulles brothers and James Forrestal helped form the Office of Policy Coordination. Under President Eisenhower, Dulles became CIA director.
[edit] CIA career
In 1953, Dulles became the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence, which had been formed in 1947 as part of the National Security Act; earlier directors had been military officers. The Agency's covert operations were an important part of the Eisenhower administration's new Cold War national security policy known as the "New Look". Under Dulles's direction, the CIA created MK-Ultra, a top secret mind control research project which was managed by Sidney Gottlieb. Dulles also personally oversaw Operation Mockingbird, a program which influenced American media companies as part of the "New Look".
[edit] Background in intelligence
Dulles was appointed by William J. Donovan to become head of operations in New York for the Coordinator of Information (COI), which was set up in Room 3603 of Rockefeller Center, taking over offices staffed by Britain's MI6. The COI was the precursor to the Office of Strategic Services, renamed in 1942....
......Dulles went on to be successful with the CIA's first attempts at removing foreign leaders by covert means. Notably, the elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran was deposed in 1953 (via Operation Ajax), and President Arbenz of Guatemala was removed in 1954. The Guatemalan coup was called Operation PBSUCCESS. Dulles was on the board of the United Fruit Company. Dulles saw these kind of clandestine activities as an essential part of the struggle against communism.
During the Kennedy Administration, Dulles faced increasing criticism. The failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and several failed assassination plots utilizing CIA-recruited operatives from the Mafia and anti-Castro Cubans directly against Fidel Castro undermined the CIA's credibility, and pro-American but unpopular regimes in Iran and Guatemala that he helped put in place were widely regarded as brutal and corrupt. The reputation of the agency and its director declined after the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco; he and his staff (including Director for Plans Richard Bissell and Deputy Director Charles Cabell) were forced to resign (September 1961). President Kennedy did not trust the CIA, and he reportedly intended to dismantle it after the Bay of Pigs failure. Kennedy said he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."[3] Ironically, Dulles was later appointed to the Warren Commission, the official government investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Clarence Dillon, (September 27, 1882 - April 14, 1979)
....His son, C. Douglas Dillon (later Secretary of the Treasury, 1961-65) was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1909 while they were abroad.
Dillon met William A. Read, founder of the Wall Street bond broker William A. Read and Company, through introduction by Harvard classmate William A. Phillips in 1912 and Dillon joined Read’s Chicago office in that year. He moved to New York in 1914. Read died in 1916, and Dillon bought a majority interest in the firm. In 1920, William A. Read & Company name was changed to Dillon, Read & Co..
His righthand man at Dillon Read, James Forrestal, became Secretary of the Navy, later Secretary of Defense, and died under mysterious circumstances at a Federal hospital.
During World War I, Bernard Baruch, chairman of the War Industries Board, (known as the Czar of American industry) asked Dillon to be assistant chairman of the War Industries Board.
Dillon was director of American Foreign Securities Corporation, which he had set up in 1915 to finance the French Government’s purchases of munitions in the United States.
In 1957, Fortune Magazine listed Dillon as one of the richest men in the United States, with a fortune then estimated to be from $150 to $200 million.......
Samuel Bush worked for Frank Rockefeller, and was his successor as president of Buckeye Steel Castings in Ohio.... Frank was William's and John D's brother, and William's only daughter, (Ethel) Geraldine, married Marcellus Dodge Hartley, creator of and sole owner of Remington-Union Cartridge Co., the principle company whose operations Samuel Bush would oversee in his position at the War Industries Board:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
William Avery Rockefeller, Jr. (May 31, 1841-June 24, 1922), American financier, was a cofounder with his older brother John D. Rockefeller of the prominent United States Rockefeller family. William Avery Rockefeller, Jr. was the son of William Avery Rockefeller, Sr. and Eliza (Davison) Rockefeller.
William was born in Richford, New York and in 1853 his family moved to Strongsville, Ohio. He was to later build an ostentatious mansion called "Rockwood Hall", now demolished, which was subsequently located within the Rockefeller family estate of "Pocantico", in Westchester County New York (see Kykuit).
In 1865, he entered the oil business by starting a refinery. In 1867, his brother's partnership of Rockefeller & Andrews, absorbed this refinery, and in 1870, the company became Standard Oil.
Rockefeller joined in forming the Amalgamated Copper Company, a holding company that intended to control the copper industry. Amalgamated controlled the mines of Butte, Montana, and later became the Anaconda Copper Company.
William Rockefeller served as the company's New York representative until 1911 when Standard Oil of New Jersey was dissolved by the United States Supreme Court. He also had interests in copper, railways, and public utilities. Married to Almira Geraldine Goodsell, he built up the National City Bank of New York, now part of Citigroup. His son William Goodsell Rockefeller and Elsie Stillman, daughter of National City Bank president James Stillman, were the parents of James Stillman Rockefeller.
He died in 1922 in Tarrytown, New York and was interred in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, New York.
The New York Times in discussing a trust he set up for his born and yet-to-be born great-grandchildren states that "The original William left a gross estate of $102,000,000, which was reduced to $50,000,000 principally by $30,000,000 of debts and $18,600,000 of inheritance and estate taxes."(New York Times, Aug 5, 1937, page 1 "Estate of William Rockefeller Increasing $1,000,000 a Year")
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Marcellus Hartley Dodge, Sr. (February 28, 1881 – December 25, 1963) was the chairman of the board of Remington Arms Company and a member of the family associated with the Phelps Dodge Corporation....
....The death of Marcellus Hartley in 1902 left his grandson as heir to a large fortune of 60 million at the age of twenty-one, while he was attending Columbia University and living with his grandmother....
....Marriage
In 1907 he became engaged and married to (Ethel) Geraldine Rockefeller of 689 Fifth Avenue. She was a child of William and Almira Geraldine Goodsell Rockefeller, and was estimated to have her own fortune of over 100 million dollars. They were said to be the wealthiest newlyweds in the country when they married. Initially, when in New Jersey they lived together at Hartley Farms, a country estate purchased by Marcellus and his aunt, Helen Hartley Jenkins, in 1904......
Samuel P. Bush:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
....Just two years later, in 1901 he returned to Columbus to be General Manager of Buckeye Steel Castings Company, which manufactured railway parts. The company was run by Frank Rockefeller, the brother of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, and among its clients were the railroads controlled by E. H. Harriman. The Bush and Harriman families would be closely associated at least until the end of World War II. In 1908 Rockefeller retired and Bush became President of Buckeye, a position he would hold until 1927, becoming one of the top industrialists of his generation.......
....Political prominence
In the spring of 1918, banker Bernard Baruch was asked to reorganize the War Industries Board as the U.S. prepared to enter World War I, and placed several prominent businessmen to key posts. Bush became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms, and Ammunition Section, with national responsibility for government assistance to and relations with munitions companies.....
Unfortuantely for Marcellus Hartley, he had geared up his company for war profits too early to avoid being pushed aside by nervous bankers...the US government had not rushed to war alongside Hartley:
http://query.nytimes.com/...
BANKERS NOW RUN THE REMINGTON CO.; Kimball Succeeds Dodge as Head of $50,000,000 Munitions Concern. COMMITTEE AT THE HELM Extensive Loans by Banks Cause Readjustment of Affairs, Now Satisfactory.
December 7, 1916, Thursday
Page 6, 493 words....
...The Remington Arms-Union Metallic Cartridge Company, with its many millions of dollars worth of war orders yet to be filled, will be operated at the direction of a committee of bankers and business men for some time. The committee, it was learned yesterday, consists of James H, Perkins, Vice President of the National City Bank; G.M. P.Murphy, Vice President of the Guaranty Trust Companyl Henry S. Kimball, former President of the American Zinc, Lead, and Smelting Company; Samuel F. Pryor, Vice President of the Remington-Union Metallic Cartridge Company, and W.E.S. Griswold. Mr. Pryor has been elected chairman of the committee. Marcellus Harley Dodge, who owns all but a few shares of the company's $50,000,000, capital, has retired from the presidency and has been succeeded by Mr. Kimball....
....The company, it was said recently, strenghthened its financial position in the last few months by the sale of machinery which had been bought and stored early in the war, when Mr. Dodge and his associates believed it wise to plan ahead for the filling of more war contracts than they then had in mind....
http://query.nytimes.com/...
Our Greatest Arms Plant
Remington-Union Cartridge Factory ar Bridgeport an Alladin's Castle--Industrial Army of 50,000 Organized by One Man
,,,Marcellus Harley Dodge is the Sole Proprietor...
...In April, 1914, Mr. Dodge associated Samuel F. Pryor with himself in his business. Mr. Pryor had been Vice President of the Simmons Hardware Company of St. Louis and the Southern Car Wheel Company....
http://query.nytimes.com/...
Special to The New York Times.
GUNMAKERS TELL OF ARMY REBUFF Encouragement from Navy. War Department "Not Interested." Didn't Like the Gun Offered. Ordered Some Browning Guns. Manufacture of Rifles. Remedied British Defects. Changes Took Up Two Months. Far Ahead on Rifle Deliveries.
December 20, 1917, Thursday
Page 1, 3889 words
WASHINGTON, Dec. 19.--Voluntary offers by machine gun and rifle manufacturers to rush their factories at top speed to equip the American Army, before the United States went into the war against Germany, were rebuffed by the War Department, according to evidence given today before the Military Affairs Committee of the Senate. ....
The second US government archived document on this page:
http://hnn.us/...
...reveals that, along with E. Roland Harriman, Samuel F. Pryor of Remington was a founding incorporator of the later infamous Union Bank, in 1924.....
Read the info at the following links.....it's about money, power, and weapons and war...it transcends borders and nationalistic priorities.....
Walter S. Carpenter, first modern, non-Du Pont family head of Du Pont Corps., represented Du Pont in it's 1933 buyout of Remington....he negotiated the sale with Samuel Pryor of Remington, and he was then "invited" to have a home on Jupiter Island:
http://select.nytimes.com/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Such a very few men, living on a small island....designing and profiting from all US wars since WWI.....Carpenter presided over Du Pont during the Du Pont led, A-Bomb and H-Bomb "projects....Robert Lovett designed the CIA and was Sect'y of defense during the Korean war, from 1951.
"Wild Bill" Donovan was counsel for the Du Pont's during the 1934 Senator NYe, "Merchants of Death" investigations, and Donovan was WWII director of OSS, the precursor to the CIA.....and also on Jupiter Island, the Dillons, Harrimans, Bushes...... and the friendships, as you can see in the last link,,,,endure through the generations....
Too....close....too few players, too "neat".....two recent presidents....
It all smells....like a stench!
Ole Bert Walker, Prescott Bush's father-in-law, was a partner with Samuel F. Pryor, in this business:
http://www.time.com/...
Monday, Aug. 03, 1931
Deals & Developments
No More Bananas. Directors of the $25,000,000-in-assets Atlantic Fruit & Sugar Co. are: Samuel F. Pryor of Remington Arms Co.; lanky Vincent Astar; Frederick Baldwin Adams, chairman of Air Reduction Co. and member of the executive committee of U. S. Industrial Alcohol; Percy Avery Rockefeller; Socialite Robert Walton Goelet of Newport; Henry Osborne Havemeyer, also a director of Chase, Kennecott, and International Match; George Herbert Walker, director of American International Corp. and Barnsdall Corp.; Francis Minot Weld, also on the board of Baldwin Locomotive and Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co.; Guy Gary, a director of National City Bank.
Formed in 1924 after old Atlantic Fruit Co. had been foreclosed, the company lost money in every succeeding year. Last week it suddenly announced it had disposed of its $6,000,000-a-year fruit business (bananas in Jamaica and Cuba) to Standard Fruit & Steamship Corp., controlled by the Vaccaro interests of New Orleans. With the sugar industry in bad shape, with its current liabilities greater than current assets as last reported, Atlantic Fruit & Sugar seemed on the verge of another reorganization despite its imposing directorate.
The origins of the "Merchants of Death" and their wealthy patrons' residences on tiny Jupiter Island, Fl. pop. 624
http://www.townofjupiterisland.com/...
...The price for the property was set at $25,000. A group of lawyers from Biddle’s office bought the assets and property and sent Forrest Hyde to Jupiter Island to see what their $25,000 had bought.
What Hyde saw was a rundown resort, the Island Inn, badly in need of expensive repairs, with a delinquent tax bill of $40,000. Hyde wanted no part of the investment. Through John Simpson, The Island Inn manager, Hyde was put in touch with William S. Barstow.
Barstow , a retired utilities executive and former partner of Thomas Edison, had lived on the Island for several years. When approached by Hyde, Barstow contacted three other Island residents: Arthur S. Dwight; Joseph V. Reed; and Joseph Reed’s brother-in-law, Samuel F. Pryor. The group formed a new Hobe Sound Company and bought the property at the $25,000 price Hyde’s group had paid, and, in addition, gave the Hyde group 20% of the common stock in the new Hobe Sound Company.
The purchase made by Barstow, Reed and Pryor included the Inn, the golf course, employee houses, and unsold land north of the fork at South Beach Road and Gomez Avenue. It also included other real estate on the mainland.
In 1934, Joseph V. Reed purchased the other owners’ shares in the Hobe Sound Company and began a new period of Island development. The entire property remained under Reed family ownership until 1996.
In 1944, with 75 residents on the Island , Joseph V. Reed and Permelia P. Reed founded the Jupiter Island Resident’s Committee and the Island Club and its Board of Directors. In the next year, 1945, Joseph Reed donated the land for the police station and the firehouse. Proximity to the wooden cottages and main Clubhouse was of paramount importance. The Reeds also gave the land that is now the Hobe Sound Beach to Martin County for use as a public beach....
After 60 years, there was some recent press coverage of Prescott Bush's ties to "Hitler's Angel", as Fritz Thyssen and his bank were described in an New York Herald, July, 1942 article:
http://hnn.us/...
http://www.foxnews.com/...
Documents: Bush's Grandfather Directed Bank Tied to Man Who Funded Hitler
Friday , October 17, 2003
AP
WASHINGTON —
President Bush's grandfather was a director of a bank seized by the federal government because of its ties to a German industrialist who helped bankroll Adolf Hitler's rise to power, government documents show.
Prescott Bush (search) was one of seven directors of Union Banking Corp. (search), a New York investment bank owned by a bank controlled by the Thyssen family, according to recently declassified National Archives documents reviewed by The Associated Press.
Fritz Thyssen (search) was an early financial supporter of Hitler, whose Nazi party Thyssen believed was preferable to communism. The documents do not show any evidence Bush directly aided that effort. His position with Union Banking never was a political issue for Bush, who was elected to the Senate from Connecticut in 1952.
Reports of Bush's involvement with the seized bank have been circulating on the Internet for years and have been reported by some mainstream media. The newly declassified documents provide additional details about the Union Banking-Thyssen connection.
Trent Duffy, a spokesman for President Bush, declined to comment.
Union Banking was owned by a Dutch bank, Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaardt N.V., which was "closely affiliated" with the German conglomerate United Steel Works, according to an Oct. 5, 1942, report from the federal Office of Alien Property Custodian. The Dutch bank and the steel firm were part of the business and financial empire of Thyssen and his brother, Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, the report said.
The 4,000 Union Banking shares owned by the Dutch bank were registered in the names of the seven U.S. directors, according a document signed by Homer Jones, chief of the division of investigation and research of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, a World War II-era agency that no longer exists.
E. Roland Harriman, the bank chairman and brother of former New York Gov. W. Averell Harriman (search), held 3,991 shares. Bush had one share.
Both Harrimans and Bush were partners in the New York investment firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman and Co., which handled the financial transactions of the bank as well as other financial dealings with several other companies linked to Bank voor Handel that were confiscated by the U.S. government during World War II.
Union Banking was seized by the government in October 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act (search).
No charges were brought against Union Banking's American directors. The federal government was too busy trying to fight the war, said Donald Goldstein, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.
"We did not have the resources to do these things," Goldstein said.
Fritz Thyssen broke with the Nazis in 1938 over their persecution of Catholics and Jews, and fled to Switzerland. He later was arrested and spent 1941 to 1945 in a Nazi prison. His brother lived in Switzerland from 1932 to 1947 but continued to operate businesses in Germany.
The new documents were first reported by freelance writer John Buchanan in The New Hampshire Gazette.
******************************************
....But, at least to some extent, it did happen, even if the details are far from clear. As with all such examples of infatuation with power, or the control of power, or the interests of sheer survival, the story should be told. As John F. Kennedy once said, "let the chips fall where they may."
The most judicious and succinct appraisal of all this was offered by Christopher Simpson ten years ago in n a book called The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century:
By 1944 and 1945, leaders of major German companies such as automaker Daimler Benz, electrical manufacturers AEG and Siemans, and most of Germany’s large mining, steelmaking, chemical, and construction companies found themselves deeply compromised by their exploitation of concentration camp labor, theft, and in some cases complicity in mass murder. They committed those crimes not so much out of ideological conviction, but more often as a means of preserving their influence within Germany’s economy and society. For much of the German economic elite, their cooperation in atrocities was offered to Hitler’s government in exchange for its aid in maintaining their status.
All this, especially considering the number of American businesses that were engaged in the German market, says more about finance and capitalism than about ideology. It is a story of power, totalitarianism on one hand, and sheer greed and economic survival on the other – and with no relationship to "morality." We need to do more than merely sift through the essence of Buchanan's assertions, as troubling as they may be, to appreciate the value of his labors, and wonder at the contribution to public knowledge of Steven Fowle’s maverick newspaper.
What all this means for the reputation of Prescott Bush's descendants should be as relevant as Joseph P. Kennedy’s for his descendants, just as it was for the connection of the Dulleses with Sullivan and Cromwell. Similar associations did not keep John Foster Dulles from becoming secretary of state or his brother Allen from heading the C.I.A. Nor did it stop Averell Harriman from becoming governor of New York.
....and these articles only add to the curious description of a concentration of power and influence....centered with Samuel Pryor's Jupiter Island, the Bush family, and their very wealthy sponsors:
http://query.nytimes.com/...
COHORT OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
By RONALD STEEL; A PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND JOURNALISM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, IS THE AUTHOR OF ''WALTER LIPPMANN AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY.''
November 2, 1986
THE WISE MEN Six Friends and the World They Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy. By Walter Isaacson and
Evan Thomas. Illustrated. 853 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster.
THERE are two things America is not supposed to have: an empire and a ruling class. ''The Wise Men'' takes the former for granted as a simple fact of international life, and explains through the lives of six privileged and powerful men how the latter works. The way these lives intertwined - through private schools, corporate board rooms and social clubs - and the way the United States became the inheritor of the postwar world provide the material of a fascinating, informative and ultimately disquieting study.
The six men chosen by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, two young editors of Time and Newsweek respectively, were never elected to high national office, nor do any famous statues commemorate them. For the most part they operated just behind the scenes, advising Presidents, setting agendas and carrying out policy. But the decisions they made shaped the postwar world.
They were the architects of that exhilarating, and now receding, era known as the American Century. At a unique moment in history they had the power to shape the world, the energies to do so and the moral certitude to inspire their actions. Theirs is the story of the Marshall Plan and the H-Bomb, the Truman Doctrine and NATO, the Prague coup and the Berlin blockade,
Korea and the Bay of Pigs, and ultimately of Vietnam.
The six form a cohesive unit. Dean Acheson, Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 during the Korean War, the forging of NATO and the decision to rearm West Germany, had also been Under Secretary of State from 1945 to 1947 when the wartime alliance with Russia turned to cold war enmity. It was Acheson who worked out the stillborn plan to share the atom with the Russians, then later sold the Truman Doctrine for the global containment of Communism to a skeptical Congress.
W. Averell Harriman, the inheritor of a great railway fortune, began his career as Presidential ''special envoy'' with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Tough but pragmatic toward the Russians, with whom he had had business dealings dating back to the 1920's, he was Ambassador to Moscow during World War II, and ultimately was chief United States negotiator at the ill-fated Paris peace talks on Vietnam in 1968.
George F. Kennan, Harriman's wartime counselor in Moscow, galvanized the Washington bureaucracy in 1946 with a long and alarmist analysis of Russia's expansionist ambitions. Later he turned against the ''containment'' doctrine he helped formulate and declared it had become excessively militaristic.
Charles Bohlen, Mr. Kennan's fellow Soviet expert in the Foreign Service, was with F.D.R. at Yalta and later, like Mr. Kennan, served as Ambassador to Moscow. Less creative than his scholarly colleague, he was a better team player and exerted a subtle role in moderating apocalyptic views of Soviet intentions.
Robert A. Lovett, a deputy to Secretary of War Henry A. Stimson during World War II, was a masterly administrator who helped build American wartime air power. Later, as Under Secretary of State after Acheson, he presided over the early stages of the cold war and then became Secretary of Defense. John J. McCloy worked with Lovett and Stimson during the war and was later criticized for the part he played in the decisions to intern Japanese-Americans in detention camps and not to bomb the Nazi death camps. An adroit tactician who won the confidence of men in high places, he later became President of the World Bank nd High Commissioner for Germany.
They all went to prep schools, even the impoverished McCloy, and two to prestigious Groton (Acheson and Harriman) and one to St. Paul's (Bohlen). They also attended the best colleges: Harriman, Acheson and Lovett were at Yale University, Bohlen at Harvard University, Mr. Kennan at Princeton University, and Mr. McCloy at Amherst College. They were even linked by the best undergraduate clubs: Lovett and Harriman were Skull and Bones, Acheson was Scroll and Key, and Bohlen was Porcellian.
While one could make too much of these social connections, the tendency in our avowedly egalitarian society is to make too little of them.....
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,821684,00.html
The General's Successor
Sep. 24, 1951
The Senate took exactly four minutes to confirm Robert Abercrombie Lovett as the new Secretary of Defense;... Langer made the vote unanimous.
Over the last eleven years. Defense's Bob Lovett has held down three important top policy-making jobs, just a short taxi ride across Washington from Capitol Hill. But Lovett, a tall, slender man with the poise and features of a balding Caesar, has nimbly sidestepped the publicity that might have made his name known even to Bill Langer. In a time of crisis, he is well content to work in the shadow of greater names.
Diplomatic Save. Lovett was one of many Wall Streeters (foremost: James Forrestal) who did outstanding work for Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. Wise old Henry Stimson, F.D.R.'s Republican Secretary of War, drafted Lovett as Assistant Secretary of War for Air in 1941. The smooth-working, selfless Stimson team, which included Lovett and Chief of Staff George Marshall, became a legend of administrative efficiency and warm mutual loyalty.
In Washington, Air Secretary Lovett took one look at U.S. defense nakedness, another at the tremendous lesson of Nazi air victories in Europe, and fought a campaign to get top priorities for a big U.S. bomber fleet. Then, holding down impulsive Air Chief "Hap" Arnold with a gentle hand, he skillfully got the air corps raised to the status of a semi-independent air force.
*********************************************************
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/...
Goodbye to Berlin
Erich Mendelsohn designed some of the world's finest buildings - and helped destroy the German capital. By Jonathan Glancey
Monday May 12, 2003
Deep in a desiccated, Utah desert, surrounded by mountains and fringed with scorched sage and saltbush, stand the surreal remains of German Village. Out of bounds, out of place, out of time and 90 miles from Salt Lake City, it is surely the most bizarre feature of Dugway Proving Ground, a test site created by the Allied military during the second world war to develop weapons of mass destruction for use against civilian targets in Germany and Japan....
....Washington's war secretary Henry Stimson said he did not want "the United States to get the reputation of outdoing Hitler
in atrocities". His less diplomatic deputy, Robert Lovett, pleading the case for adopting anti-personnel bombs loaded with napalm and white phosphorous, said: "If we are going to have a total war, we might as well make it as horrible as possible."
Churchill trumped Lovett by calling on US president Franklin D Roosevelt to speed up production of a promised 500,000 top-secret "N-bombs" - filled with anthrax, developed at Dugway - to be dropped on Berlin and five other German cities....
...."Mendelsohn was the architect of some of the very best of these white, concrete dreams. Dugway, Davis argues, "led the way to the deaths of, say, two million Axis civilians", and German Village remains "a monument to the self-righteousness of punishing 'bad places' by bombing them".
There is no doubt that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had to be defeated; but did the Allies really need German Village, Japanese Village and the refined architectural efforts of Mendelsohn and Raymond? At the fiery dawn of the 20th century, beneath the civilised, enlightened facades of Britain and the US, as well as Germany and Japan, was a desire for expansion, destruction and terrible revenge. Sitting on the sun-deck of Mendelsohn's pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, this axis of modern evil seems so very far removed, as far away, in fact, as the sole surviving "rent barrack" of German Village, Utah.
· Dead Cities: A Natural History by Mike Davis, The New Press
*************************************************************
When General Marshall was named Secretary of State in 1947, he urged Lovett to come back from Wall Street to be his Under Secretary. Although Lovett was still recuperating from a serious operation, he came, commenting: "There are only three people to whom I can never say no —my wife, Henry Stimson and George Catlett Marshall." Half the time Lovett ran the department while Marshall was away in Europe. In 1948 Lovett was quick to see the implications of the Russian blockade of Berlin, strongly backed the Berlin airlift as a counterchallenge. A few months later he saved Harry Truman from a major diplomatic blunder. The President was all ready to go on the air and announce that he was sending Chief Justice Vinson to Moscow to reason with Stalin. Lovett heard about the plan, telephoned General Marshall in Paris, and confronted Truman with a joint ultimatum that both of them would resign if the plan went through.
Bob Lovett was born in Texas, the son of Robert Scott Lovett, general counsel and then president of Union Pacific. Young Bob left Yale (Phi Beta Kappa, Skull & Bones) during his third year to go overseas with the Yale Unit in the naval air force. In France he flew the lumbering British Handley Pages on some of the first night glide-bombing attacks, made a careful study of dive-bombing tactics which amazed his friends and delighted the Navy brass. The unit's historian summed up Lieut. Lovett in three words: "Observation, reflection, deduction—and there you were!" ..
.. After the war he tried a year of law at Harvard, then switched to business administration. In 1919 he married Adele Brown, the daughter of Manhattan Financier James Brown. Father-in-law Brown gave Lovett the up-from-messenger treatment in Brown Brothers (later Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.), finally made him a full partner and sent him abroad to survey the world with a banker's cool eye. In the 1930s, the eye spotted trouble in Germany, and Lovett warned the firm to get its investments out. In early 1940, from Switzerland, he wrote a penetrating report of the phony war, and accurately predicted the fall of France.
A man with a long history of stomach trouble, Republican Bob Lovett has saved himself from total frustration in Democratic Washington by exercising a deft sense of humor. (Once, after a long pounding by a congressional committee, he told a friend: "It was like getting a shave and having your appendix out at the same time.") ...
....To his new job Bob Lovett brings a thoroughgoing realism much like that of his good friend and predecessor, Jim Forrestal. "This is a severe emergency," said he a year ago. "This is perhaps the last clear chance to get ourselves in shape for the unknown future . . . We tried peace through weakness for generations, with no profit in it, and it seems to me as a matter of conviction that peace through strength might be an enlightening experience."..
Note that Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, was president of Dillon Read, and was an early protege of Clarence Dillon. Forrestal's wife enjoyed vacationing at Robert Lovett's Jupiter Island residence, and it was there that the story of Forrestal's mental breakdown that resulted in his hospitalization in 1949, and death two months later, began....
More tomorrow- The CIA Denies it's early origins were Skull and Bones...
