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Book Review of The Chairman, by Kai Bird; New York: Simon and Schuster; 1992; 800 pages, hardbound, $30
At the outbreak of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, John J. McCloy, ostensibly a private citizen but still serving as chairman of the President's Arms Control and Disarmament Board, was abruptly recalled from a business trip in Europe and flown back to Washington.
When first briefed on the existence of nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba, McCloy's response was to call for immediate air strikes to take out the weapons. McCloy, presenting his tough guy, brinksmanship, ``Stimsonian'' approach, was playing ``Liar's Poker'' with the existence of the human race. Yet, it was mostly bluff. Once Attorney General Robert Kennedy intervened, with a proposal for a naval blockade of Cuba, and the Russians blinked, McCloy then proceeded to run the peace negotiations. He acted swiftly to implement the outline of a utopian, one-worldist policy of détente with his counterparts in the Soviet Union, and in the process, he sacrificed the sovereignty of both the United States and Russia, to the greater good of the British-run United Nations apparatus.
Kai Bird's The Chairman performs a useful service in documenting that treachery.
McCloy's role in the Cuban Missile Crisis was merely one high point in a career that spanned several decades. McCloy, the son of a poor, industrious, but ambitious Philadelphia hairdresser, had been lifted from ``the wrong side of the tracks'' and put into the upper echelons of power. By 1962, he was the acknowledged ``Chairman of the Establishment,'' [fn1] the ``chief fixer'' for the British-American-Canadian establishment that has dominated policymaking in the United States for the better part of this century. This lackey for the most powerful London and Wall Street banking families, had been doing their bidding for more than four decades, and was now at the pinnacle of his power. [fn2]
The 1962 deal with the Soviets was a follow-up to the infamous McCloy-Zorin agreement of a year earlier, in which a ``world federalist'' agenda had been solidified between the two superpowers. The deals were part of a larger shift away from the primacy of modern nation-states, back into the arms of feudalist world government.
The architect of McCloy's foul deeds, the Don Juan to McCloy's Leporello, was Grenville Clark, a shadowy but powerful Wall Street lawyer. Clark hailed from a blue-blood Massachusetts banking family with oligarchical roots going back 250 years. At the insistence of former President Teddy Roosevelt, Clark had launched the Plattsburgh, New York training camps that brought the United States into World War|I on the side of the British, and he retained significant policy influence in the United States for the next 45 years. [fn3] Together, these two schemers from the infamous Teddy Roosevelt-Elihu Root-Henry Stimson Anglophile tradition, radically altered U.S. foreign policy. [fn4]
McCloy and company moved with lightning speed to turn the Truman administration into a war-ground against the principle of the sovereign nation-state. The Roosevelt postwar vision of a world without power blocs, but which hoped to ensure the progress of all nations, was shattered.
In the 1950s, McCloy, as chairman of the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), set into motion a number of study groups to undermine U.S. foreign policy. The most important study group, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, was chaired by McCloy agent Henry Kissinger. Kissinger here first broached the British cabinet-warfare doctrines of limited war, client wars, and even the insane concept of ``limited nuclear wars,'' all within the confines of geopolitical dogma.
McCloy was aiming to effect the total abrogation of national sovereignty. In 1957, the Gaither Commission, of which McCloy was a member, realized that the window of opportunity to impose a one-world govenment would present itself in the early 1960s, when the United States would control a preponderance of weaponry including nuclear arms, and could dictate the terms of the new order. Attempts to manipulate the labile Eisenhower Presidency around this scheme failed, but McCloy and company made their move with the advent of the Kennedy administration.
During 1961, McCloy sought to force through an agenda of arms control/détente initiatives. Based on the assessment of the Gaither Commission, the United States had a strategic superiority over the Soviets in weaponry of all types, and McCloy seized upon the opportunity to implement his radical new policy.
In the spring of 1961, McCloy began serious arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union, starting with the Test Ban Treaty talks in Geneva. McCloy brought in Arthur Dean, part of his original CFR study group on U.S.-Soviet affairs, to help manage the talks. McCloy was pushing for total disarmament, and was confident that the Soviets would be trustworthy negotiating partners for his utopian plan.
McCloy proposed ceding the right to maintain a national army to an international body, one, such as the World Court, that would be created that could enforce the peace. He wanted to use the ``rule of law'' to create a new international order. This brought him into direct conflict with Arthur Schlesinger, who complained that McCloy was trying to work toward some vague ``concept of the rule of law'' which intended to sacrifice national sovereignty. But, McCloy continued to work with his close friend and confidant Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, to get the outline of this policy adopted by the Kennedy administration.
In June 1961, Kennedy and Khrushchov met for their infamous mini-summit in Vienna, Austria. While Khrushchov tried to bully the President on Berlin and other issues, he put forward a cooperative policy on disarmament, including bans on testing nuclear devices. The door to détente was opened.
McCloy then began talks with Soviet disarmament negotiator Valerin Zorin, at the U.S. State Department in June 1961, but the intervention of the Berlin Wall crisis stopped the momentum toward disarmament.
The crisis around Berlin had been building since the end of World War II. While the apparent issue was the continuous stream of émigrés leaving East Berlin for the West, the larger issues included the reunification of Germany, the division of Europe, and the configuration of the world. The crisis grew worse over the summer of 1961, and came to a head in August. The Soviet government began erecting the Berlin Wall while the President was on vacation. Although Acheson and others mouthed some opposition, in reality there was no opposition to the erection of the Wall in the West. McCloy, Harriman, and their cohorts in effect supported the Wall, which would serve as a divider of Germany and East versus West. This lack of opposition effectively gave approval to the historic British geopolitical dogma--the division of the world between Western Europe and Asia, with the division running through Germany, precisely as specified in Halford Mackinder's doctrines.
According to historians Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas: ``For McCloy and his generation, who had twice fought a world war against Germany, this was not the worst outcome [i.e., two Germanys]. George Kennan and Chip Bohlen certainly felt this way and advised the President not to overreact to the building of the wall. As for McCloy, he could not publicly say such things without touching a raw nerve among his West German friends. But that Germany was best left divided, even if half of it had to live under communism, was the unspoken truth. And certainly there was no point in going to war over the wall, which, after all, had become a necessity if Germany was to remain divided. Averell Harriman said it bluntly to Kennedy in a secret letter written to the President a few weeks after the wall went up. `Since Potsdam, I have been satisfied that Germany would be divided for a long time....' Implicit in both views [McCloy's view of German separation and that of Harriman] was the commitment to the postwar structure of peace that required the division of Germany between East and West.'' [fn6]
With the construction of the Wall, the world was now partitioned between East and West, and the supranational governing bodies associated with the United Nations were increasingly running the planet. The power of the nation-state would be further eroded with the fast-approaching crises leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In September 1961, McCloy lobbied for a comprehensive disarmament policy, including for passage of legislation to create an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. McCloy personally armtwisted numbers of Congressmen to ensure passage of the ACDA legislation. Two among the most prominent were longtime friends: William Fulbright and Senate Banking Committee chairman Willis Robertson, an ardent opponent of the bill. Robertson, father of kook-televangelist Pat Robertson, was a fishing buddy of McCloy's going back several decades. McCloy's lobbying merely proved that, when push came to shove, the so-called ``left'' and the so-called ``right'' were both in the hip pocket of the Anglo-American establishment.
McCloy interspersed his lobbying with private negotiations with Valerin Zorin in Moscow and in New York. His intent was to produce an agreement on general disarmament principles, but there was still intense opposition to this madness from nationalist elements in both countries. Both governments and their respective armies were continually violating various test-ban agreements, indicating their enmity toward McCloy's scheme of general disarmament. McCloy was trying to pull off a utopian coup.
Clark rammed through a final document that went beyond the strictures of the United Nations. ``The conference proposes: That a World Federal Government be created with closely defined and limited powers adequate to prevent war and strengthen the freedoms that are the inalienable Rights of Man.'' [fn8]
Clark kept agitating for the World Federalist view throughout the 1950s from his position in the World Federalist grouping and among his Boston Brahmin cohorts. Clark sat on the board of the Harvard Corp., but hobnobbed among the inner circle of establishment policymakers including Felix Frankfurter, Averell Harriman, and James Conant.
In 1958, Clark collaborated with Harvard Law Professor Louis Sohn in the publication of World Peace Through World Law, a book promoted heavily by the Ford Foundation and the New York Council on Foreign Relations through the direct intervention of McCloy, who saw to it that the book was printed and widely distributed. Clark's book was a blueprint for the total reform of the United Nations along the lines of a World Federalist perspective.
The book launched a frontal assault on the very existence of nation-states. It proposed to subordinate all critical powers to a world governing body that would appropriate all military policing powers unto itself. It would eliminate the existence of most weaponry, i.e., total and complete disarmament, and have full legal jurisdiction to impose itself on violating nations, its own large-scale police force and legal system, and a revamped governing body. There would be an executive grouping, but there would be no veto power among the leading nations, thereby abrogating all semblance of national government.
The thrust of the book is proposals for global disarmament, global policing, and global courts. In the updated introduction issued in 1960, Clark acknowledged the role of the British and Soviet governments in promoting this scheme. He stated,
``Thus in the first discussions of the Russian and British proposals, it became apparent that, apart from an effective inspection system to supervise the disarmament process from the outset, it will be indispensable simultaneously to establish an adequate world police force in order that, after complete disarmament has been accomplished, the means will exist to deter or apprehend violators of the world law forbidding any national armaments and prohibiting violence or the threat of it between nations. It will then become equally clear that along with the prohibition of violence or the threat of it as the means of dealing with international disputes, it will be essential to establish alternative peaceful means to deal with all disputes between nations in the shape of a world judicial and conciliation system....``The necessity will also be seen for a world legislature with carefully limited yet adequate powers to vote the annual budgets of the world peace authority, to enact appropriate penalties for violation of the world law and other essential regulations concerning disarmament and the maintenance of peace, and to keep a watchful eye on the other organs and agencies of the peace authority. In addition it will be necessary to constitute an effective world executive, free from any crippling veto, in order to direct and control the world inspection service and the world police force and to exercise other essential executive functions.
``Finally, it will follow as surely as day follows night that an effective world revenue system must be adopted, since there would otherwise be no reliable means to provide the large sums required for the maintenance of the inspection service, the world police force, the judicial system and other necessary world institutions.'' [fn9]
In 1961, McCloy, an intimate friend of Clark, borrowed liberally from this book in drafting the U.S. position on disarmament. McCloy insisted that disarmament take place totally and in stages, and be supervised by a global police force. The Soviets concurred, and in September the two sides drafted a ``Joint Statement of Agreed Principles for Disarmament Negotiations.'' The statement was adopted by the UN General Assembly, and became known as the McCloy-Zorin Agreed Principles.
``Its language was both utopian and specific: `The programme for general and complete disarmament shall ensure that States will have at their disposal only those nonnuclear armaments, forces, facilities and establishments as are agreed to be necessary to maintain internal order and protect the personal security of citizens; and that States shall support and provide agreed manpower for a United Nations peace force.' To implement the various stages of disarmament, inspectors from an International Disarmament Organization would `be assured unrestricted access without veto to all places as necessary for the purpose of effective verification.'|'' [fn10]There were other sections of Clark's proposal that McCloy had included in his original draft, including specifics on weapons to be eliminated, and on these points he clashed openly with the White House and the U.S. military. Kennedy, and even McGeorge Bundy, thought the proposal was too radical.
But, the language stuck, and this McCloy-Zorin agreement became the basis for all subsequent UN policy. All of the one-worldist interventions, from NATO's Malvinas ``out of area'' deployment, to the Persian Gulf War, have been shaped by this outlook.
With the new agreement in his pocket, McCloy formally left the government in October 1961. But, the damage had been done. He continued to serve as chairman of the newly created President's Advisory Committee on Disarmament, as a way to steer the entire détente/disarmament campaign.
All of the groundwork for a one-world, utopian scheme had thus been laid, and only awaited the intervention of a major crisis to escalate its implementation.
The day-to-day unfolding of the Cuban Missile Crisis is not our concern here. Rather, as a by-product of the world being brought to the brink of thermonuclear war, the crisis had several key components:
1. The crisis provided the ``shock effects'' for psychological warfare against the United States and other nations, terrorizing their people and leaving them susceptible to cultural brainwashing, such as that of the ``rock-drugs-sex'' counterculture.Once the immediate crisis had abated, McCloy was deployed to the UN to head the U.S. negotiating team to ``resolve'' the key issues. Over the next several months, as McCloy and his Soviet counterpart, Vasily Kuznetsov, smoothed out the details, McCloy ushered in the new world-government configuration, much to the chagrin of President Kennedy. The sovereignty of the United States was continuously eroded, though Kennedy fought his negotiator every step of the way.2. The ``crisis management'' initiated between the Soviet Union and the United States by people like Bertrand Russell, who actively intervened in the crisis, was used to cement the détente relationship between the two superpowers, mediated ultimately by the ``world government'' establishment.
3. The military and nationalist establishments of both countries were demoted in their relative power, and rendered subservient to the world government apparatus.
4. The preconditions had thus been laid for the assassination of President Kennedy as a nationalistic impediment to the predilections of McCloy, Harriman, and company.
5. The 500-year stand-off between nation-state elements and world government-financier elements could now be ended, in favor of the latter, and the financier (i.e., the British-American-Canadian establishment) elements now embarked on a policy of de-industrialization and eradication of nation-state impulses.
McCloy's conduct of the negotiations earned him the President's wrath. McCloy was willing to compromise on most terms of the negotiations. For example, on the issue of verifiability, Kennedy opposed McCloy's ``gentlemen's agreements'' on launch pads, and Kennedy instructed his negotiators to ``insist on both on-site inspection and the removal of the IL-28s [bombers stationed in Cuba]. Furthermore, said Kennedy, McCloy was to tell Kuznetsov that no Soviet military base of any kind could remain in Cuba.'' [fn11]
McCloy wanted to wrap up the Cuban crisis and move on to ``broader arms-control measures,'' and ``such specific topics as the current Chinese-Indian war, which he thought was the kind of regional conflict that might get out of hand. Kennedy was disinclined to open the discussions up to such far-flung issues, and felt he repeatedly had to instruct McCloy and [UN Ambassador Adlai] Stevenson not to talk to the Russians about these larger issues. The President was heard one day complaining that he was spending more time worrying about McCloy and Stevenson than he did about the Russians.'' [fn12]
Détente was now a ``done deal,'' and McCloy set about eliminating other vestiges of nation-state resistance to the new global order. He travelled to Europe regularly, and continually singled out French President Charles de Gaulle, no friend of the British, for attack. He also expressed displeasure at the sympathetic behavior of German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer toward de Gaulle.
While there is no evidence linking McCloy to the assassination, he was a critical operative on the Warren Commission, which orchestrated the cover-up. McCloy termed termed this ``laying on the dust.'' [fn13] Once again, McCloy was deployed to do the establishment's dirty work, this time in collaboration with Allen Dulles, the former CIA director and blue-blood Wall Street operative fired by Kennedy.
McCloy was in the upper echelon of the intelligence community. A close friend of Britain's deployed spymaster in the United States, Sir William Wiseman, McCloy had coordinated one of the largest investigations of espionage and counter-intelligence in U.S. history, the Black Tom case. He had overseen the creation of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) from his position as Assistant Secretary of War, and had helped engineer the peacetime conversion of the OSS into the CIA. In the 1950s, he helped coordinate U.S. intelligence activities both in and out of government, and his Ford Foundation became a money-bags for legal and illicit intelligence ploys. He was at the very top of the ``secret government'' of the postwar period.
McCloy and his ally, Allen Dulles, himself a bitter enemy of President Kennedy, coordinated the cover-up of the Kennedy assassination from within the confines of the Warren Commission. McCloy acted ruthlessly throughout to halt any investigation of a conspiracy. It was McCloy who brought in F. Lee Rankin to run the commission, and it was McCloy who orchestrated the suppression of all critical evidence.
When Rankin reported to the Warren Commission that the Texas Attorney General had reported that Lee Harvey Oswald was a likely FBI agent, complete with agent number and payroll reports, McCloy quashed this revelation through a series of duplicitous maneuvers. He ultimately conspired with J. Edgar Hoover to deny any truth to the allegation.
As for the completely contradictory medical and coroner reports that demonstrated the impossibility of any simple explanation for the number of shots and shooters, McCloy opted for the report of the Bethesda Naval Hospital doctors, which gave the best justification for the single-shooter hoax.
McCloy was unabashed in his level of deceit. A longtime hunter and gun expert, he knew that the bolt-action Italian rifle allegedly used by Oswald could not have been the murder weapon. He also knew that the reports of other shots fired from the grassy knoll were completely credible. On these and other counts, he simply lied.
The ``lone assassin'' theory, propagated by Dulles from the first day of the Commission meetings, would be the centerpiece of all the lies. McCloy and Dulles ran roughshod over the Commission to ensure that this story stuck, and they also argued for the necessary corollary: the so-called magic bullet idea. McCloy had to know that this fairy tale was fractured, but he rammed it down the throat of the nation.
Three Senators on the Commission (John Sherman Cooper, Richard Russell, and Hale Boggs) doubted the veracity of the Commission's findings, and it was McCloy, with his lawyerly doubletalk and likely veiled threats, who ultimately brought the recalcitrants around. McCloy drafted the language of the final report on all of the thorny issues, and he told the holdout Senators that there would be no minority report. To overcome the objections to the ``single bullet'' theory, he wrote out a proposed compromise, ``that there was `very persuasive evidence from the experts to indicate that the same bullet which pierced the President's throat also caused Governor Connally's wounds.' However, Connally's testimony and `certain other factors have given rise to some difference of opinion as to this probability but there is no question in the mind of any member of the Commission that all the shots which caused the President's and Governor Connally's wounds were fired from the sixth floor window of the Texas Book Depository.'|'' [fn14]
Thus, McCloy took two separate and equally unproved ``facts''--the single bullet theory and the lone assassin theory--and joined them together, with no proof!
The pièce de résistance was the drafting of the final conclusion, that Oswald had acted alone.
``The staff's initial draft stated that there had been `no conspiracy.' [Gerald] Ford suggested it say that the Commission had found `no evidence' of a conspiracy. McCloy's language was finally agreed upon: `Because of the difficulty of proving a negative to a certainty the possibility of others being involved with either Oswald or Ruby cannot be rejected categorically, but if there is any such evidence it has been beyond the reach of all investigative agencies and resources of the United States and has not come to the attention of this Commission.' This was lawyers' language, and it laid `the dust' on all the `ugly rumors' of conspiracy without forcing the Commission to make a categorical denial, to `prove a negative.'|'' [fn15]Thus, the thuggery of Wall Street legal lingo was used to ensure that the killers of President Kennedy got away, deepening the pessimism of a shocked nation, and saying to all other nationalist leaders around the world: You could be next!
McCloy reacted vitriolically. Having recently resigned as chairman of the Ford Foundation, McCloy quickly accepted an appointment as chairman of the board of the Paris-based Atlantic Institute, which promoted the unity of the Atlantic Alliance. Within weeks, he and Dean Acheson were named ``special consultants'' on the NATO crisis.
McCloy flew to Europe to try and isolate de Gaulle within the European Community, especally from Germany. For the moment, McCloy succeeded only in bringing down the Ludwig Erhard government. In the spring, McCloy testified before a Senate subcommittee and ``complained of the `reinfection of Europe with nationalism' and `discriminatory' attitudes toward Germany.'' [fn16]
Meanwhile, a hue and cry arose in the United States to remove troops from Europe, and this was endorsed by de Gaulle. But, McCloy refused to bend. He ultimately resorted to a variety of stop-gap measures to hold together the alliance. For McCloy, NATO was the core of the postwar world and could not be abandoned. This commitment even led him to question U.S. policy in Vietnam, which was at that time a subject of raging debate.
In a speech in 1968 at a meeting of the ``Table Ronde,'' an elite group of some 90 European leaders, businessmen, and intellectuals, Bird quotes McCloy:
``|`I am not prepared to debate the point as to where we should draw the line--certainly not to go into the problem of Vietnam. I have no doubt, however, that the line should include Western Europe.' The crisis in NATO, the withdrawal of France from the military alliance, the resurgence of `hoary' nationalisms--all these trends were undermining the West's `sense of community in all of our international affairs.'|'' [fn17]Whether McCloy orchestrated the overthrow of de Gaulle in 1968, one can only speculate. He certainly created the climate in which the British-American-Canadian (BAC) assassination teams tried repeatedly to kill the French President. McCloy was certainly out to get de Gaulle in the same way that he was out to get Kennedy, and this succeeded with the 1968 rioting that brought down his government. With the assassination of JFK, the overthrow of de Gaulle, and the death of Adenauer, many of the obstacles in the way of McCloy's ``vision'' had been removed. Events would now move inexorably to their conclusion: A unified Europe would proceed toward the ``euro'' insanity of today; ``globalization'' and other free-trade nostrums would tear apart the world economy and rip nations to shreds; and various UN ``inspection teams'' would roam the planet, enforcing demilitarization and deindustrialization. The time has come, to rid the world of the wretched heritage of John J. McCloy.
Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p.|28: ``It was [McGeorge] Bundy who wrote a memo for Lyndon Johnson entitled `Backing from the Establishment,' which set the stage for the formation of the group that became known as the Wise Men. `The key to these people,' Bundy advised, `is McCloy.'|''
McCloy rose through the ranks of the British-American-Canadian establishment from his sponsorship by the notorious Anglophile lawyer Paul Cravath (Lord Beaverbrook's friend and Lord Mountbatten's lawyer) in the 1920s, to become a power in his own right. Along the way, he had been Henry Stimson's Assistant Secretary of War during World War II, High Commissioner for Germany, and the second president of the World Bank, a position for which he was sponsored by the Warburg and Morgan banks. In the 1950s, he was simultaneously chairman of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, chairman of the Ford Foundation, and chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.
Grenville Clark was the son of a prominent banker of the banking house of Clark, Dodge, and Co. His family had been endowing Harvard University since 1672, and he, like his father, was a Harvard graduate. While still at Harvard, Clark was befriended by then-Vice President Teddy Roosevelt, which would lead to a long association. Clark also became friends with future Justice Felix Frankfurter, and Elihu Root, Jr., son of the incumbent Secretary of War.
After Harvard, Clark founded a law practice with Root's son and others that would become a prominent Wall Street firm. In 1915-16, Clark initiated the Plattsburgh military training camps at the direction of Teddy Roosevelt. These camps recruited ``the best and the brightest'' Wall Street, Eastern Establishment sons, including McCloy.
Clark remained a life-long friend of McCloy. Both practiced law on Wall Street; both entered into politics--McCloy as a Republican; Clark as a Democrat. A longtime friend of Franklin Roosevelt, Clark founded the National Economy League in 1932, upon the election of FDR as President. While Adm. Richard Byrd was honorary chairman, the leaders were Teddy Roosevelt's son Archibald, former President Calvin Coolidge, Lewis Douglas (McCloy's brother-in-law and longtime associate), and Clark. Like today's New Democrats, the League led a mobilization in 1933 to force the President to slash the budget and adopt every austerity policy imaginable. The result was a disaster, but it was this tight-fisted ``Wall Street-style'' austerity that animated both Clark and McCloy's entire economic approach.
While he was attempting to destroy Roosevelt in 1933, Clark also intervened on behalf of the treacherous Bertrand Russell in New York. When Russell, the apostle of libertinism, was booted out of City College of New York, Clark rushed to his defense, providing him legal counsel and arguing on his behalf at Harvard.
As a lawyer in the War Department at the end of the 1930s, Clark led the effort that brought Clark ally Henry Stimson into the department and paved the way for McCloy, Robert Lovett, and other Wall Street types to run the department during World War II.
This Anglophile tradition in American foreign policy was started in earnest by Teddy Roosevelt, whose administration was dominated by British imperialist policies, in what became known as the Spanish-American War. The watchword of these men was ``military preparedness,'' and their dogma was British geopolitics and balance of power--State Department lingo for Hobbesian wars of each against all. The leading practitioners were Teddy Roosevelt, his Secretary of War Elihu Root, Grenville Clark ally Henry Stimson, McCloy, Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, and McGeorge Bundy. More recently, this outlook typified the Bush administrations.
Don Cook, Forging the Alliance: NATO 1945-1950 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989), p.|109. According to Cook, at the point that the British decided to launch the NATO initiative: ``On that day at the Foreign Office, [British Foreign Secretary Ernest] Bevin decided that the moment at last had come for the most crucial move of his long-term foreign policy--the initiation of discussion to draw the United States into some new multilateral security arrangement for the West. But it was to be kept vague, diffuse and obscure. Bevin told his staff that he felt the essential thing was simply to start the idea and let the outcome emerge, much as Marshall had done with the recovery program. So he played like an experienced fly-fisherman trying to hook a big salmon at the end of a long line cast over rapid waters, taking care to entice and attract without scaring the fish away.''
Kai Bird, The Chairman, p.|512.
Gerald Dunne, Grenville Clark, Public Citizen (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986), p.|141.
Grenville Clark and Louis Sohn, World Peace through World Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), p.|xii.
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