McCloy, John Jay

(1895-1989)

   Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, John McCloy graduated from Amherst College in 1919 and Harvard Law School in 1921. He became a successful corporation lawyer and was counsel for Schechter Poultry Corp. in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States in 1935. He also traveled widely in Europe and acted as legal counsel for the German company I. G. Farben in the 1930s. He shared a box with Adolf Hitler and Herman Goering at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. From 1941 to 1945, McCloy was assistant secretary of war, where he worked with Robert Lovett. He was involved in a number of controversial decisions, supporting the internment of Japanese Americans and ruling out the bombing of railway lines and gas chambers in and around concentration camps. After the war, he became president of the World Bank from 1947 to 1949 and from 1949 to 1952 was the U.S. commissioner for Germany. He was implicated in protecting wanted Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and then criticized for reducing the sentences of jailed Nazis, including the arms manufacturer Alfred Krupp. McCloy was chair of Chase Manhattan Bank from 1953 to 1960, the Ford Foundation from 1958 to 1965, and the Council for Foreign Relations from 1954 to 1970. He acted as an adviser to presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan.