In C. Wright Mills’s 1956 book, “The Power Elite,” John J. McCloy was characterized as the epitome of the behind-the-scenes establishment that ran America. His career in government began in 1917, when, as a 22-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department, he was assigned the task of investigating the 1917 Black Tom munitions explosion in Hoboken, N.J. Through brilliant investigative work, he identified it as German state-sponsored terrorism. He then moved back and forth between the private sector and government, serving as assistant secretary of war, president of the World Bank, high commissioner for Germany, and finally, under President Kennedy, as disarmament adviser. President Lyndon Johnson chose him to represent the private sector on the Warren Commission.
I met McCloy at 2:35 PM in his office on the 46th Floor of the Chase Manhattan Bank, of which he had been chairman. He was now, in his early seventies, a senior partner at the corporate law firm of Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy., As he rose slightly to greet me, his body seemed much too small for his massive head. He asked his secretary, a Miss Wilson, to hold all his calls.
He began the interview by telling me that he viewed his appointment to the Warren Commission as a continuation of his government service. He joked that since he was unemployed at the time, unlike the four Congressional members of the Commission, he had time to attend all of the hearings in which witnesses had testified. He leisurely told me how his work on the Black Tom had led him to believe that an investigation should have its own investigators. So he convinced Chief Justice Warren to set aside the FBI report and organize an independent investigation staffed by young lawyers.
I asked him why he opposed using FBI agents for the investigation. He replied coolly, “J. Edgar Hoover likes to close doors. I told Warren we had to re-open them.”
Had the commission’s investigation faced limits in what it could report?, I asked.
He answered by describing Thornton Wilder’s novel “The Bridge Of San Luis Rey,” in which an investigation uncovered a series of sexual liaisons. He compared the book to the investigation, saying, “We had uncovered a lot of minor scandals, but they were not relevant to our investigation. We decided not to publish them in the report.”
When I pressed him on what these scandals involved, he replied, “It was as if someone picked up a rock and the light caused all sorts of bugs to run for cover.” He said the Secret Service needed to obscure indiscretions of its agents the night before the assassination, the FBI had to expunge embarrassing incidents from its reports, and the CIA had to hide its domestic activities. He added that even Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother, had put his own man, Howard Willens, on the staff, to deal with “inappropriate revelations.”
I had already interviewed Willens at his office at the Justice Department, and he had told me that the attorney general had dispatched him to the commission to make sure it had assistance from the Justice Department, but he said nothing about suppressing any material. So I asked McCloy about what Willens had done.
“He locked away material in his desk,” he replied. According to McCloy, Willens did not believe the staff had any need to see it. He said it concerned a “national security issue” he was not free to discuss.
I asked whether the commission had fully explored Oswald’s foreign connections.
He said that he himself believed there was persuasive evidence that Oswald had been trained in espionage and that Oswald might have been “a sleeper agent who went haywire.” He said Warren did not buy his theory, and he lost the argument because “Warren was, you need to understand, stubborn as a mule.”