Baruch, Bernard Mannes

(1870-1965)

   Born in South Carolina, after graduating from City College in New York, Bernard Baruch became a financier and successful Wall Street broker and investor. He supported Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and was appointed to the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense in 1916. In 1918, he became chairman of the War Industries Board, where he directed the industrial war effort. He helped formulate the economic provisions of the Versailles Treaty. Baruch was less in the public eye during the 1920s and 1930s. His plans for wartime industrial mobilization were presented to the Senate Military Affairs Committee in 1937. As special “park bench” adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration during World War II, he chaired the Rubber Survey Committee that drafted an influential report on rubber rationing, and he also authored a report on postwar conversion. In 1946, President Harry S. Truman named the 70-five-year-old Baruch to present the U.S. plan for the international control of atomic energy drafted by Dean Acheson and David E. Lilienthal, but known as the Baruch Plan, to the United Nations. Despite a dramatic opening speech by Baruch, the negotiations came to naught due to a veto by the Soviet Union. Baruch’s influence subsequently declined.