Nation: The Man Behind the Legend

Bernard M. Baruch was a millionaire at 30, a celebrated national figure at 50, and—as park-bench philosopher, adviser to Presidents and reaper of honors—a legend by the time he was 70. As with most legends, this one was somewhat larger than life, a fact that Baruch himself wryly recognized, but behind it, nevertheless, was a most remarkable man. Last week, two months before he would have turned 95, Bernard Baruch died in Manhattan of a heart attack.

$100,000 a Year. Baruch was born in Camden, S.C., the son of a German-Jewish immigrant who became a Confederate Army surgeon, and of a mother descended from Portuguese-Spanish Jews who had settled in the U.S. in the 17th century. When Bernard was ten, his father moved the family to New York City, became physician to such eminent families as the Guggenheims. Bernard graduated from New York’s City College at 19, also became an enthusiastic boxer who ever after took enormous pride in his well-muscled, 6-ft. 3-in. physique; well into his 70s, he worked out with dumbbells. After college, he went to work on Wall Street, took with him the conviction that “all there is to economics is the law of supply and demand. The rest is hokum.”

Adhering steadfastly to that law, Baruch quickly made a fortune on Wall Street. “I am a speculator, and I make no apologies for it,” he said. “The word comes from the Latin speculari —to observe. I observe.” So carefully did he observe that he was able to write in his two-volume autobiography, “At 32, I had $100,000 for every year of my age, and I had it in cash.”

But making money and caring for a wife and three children were not enough to exhaust Baruch’s energies. He sought a wider stage and found it in Washington. In 1915, having caught the attention of Woodrow Wilson’s Administration with a well-thought-out plan for mobilizing U.S. defenses, Baruch set foot in the White House for the first time. Through the next half-century, he returned often.

“Dr. Facts.” After the U.S. entered World War I, Baruch became chairman of the War Industries Board, did so masterful a job that Wilson (who called him “Dr. Facts”) awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal. As Wilson’s economic adviser at the Versailles peace talks, Baruch warned against imposing overly heavy reparations on Germany. Nobody listened.

That happened often. “It is true that my advice has been asked by Presidents,” he said, “but it must be confessed that my recommendations have been honored as much ‘in the breach as in the observance.’ ”

Nominally a Democrat, Baruch was also a conservative economist, kept warning that inflation is “the single greatest peril to our economic health.” That philosophy did not endear him to the New Deal, but during World War II, F.D.R. nonetheless named him special adviser to the Office of War Mobilization. In the early war years, Baruch occasionally met with Harvard President James Bryant Conant and M.I.T. President Karl Comptonon an oak bench in Lafayette Park, opposite the White House, to discuss an official report on rubber resources. That bench —facing the wrong end of an equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson—became Baruch’s symbol.

The Quick & the Dead. The high point of Baruch’s later life was his role as U.S. delegate to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. In 1946, at the U.N.’s temporary home at Hunter College in The Bronx, he unveiled what came to be called “the Baruch Plan.”

“We are here,” he said, “to make a choice between the quick and the dead. We must provide the mechanism to assure that atomic energy is used for peaceful purposes and preclude its use in war.” Dramatically, he announced that the U.S. was willing to share its secrets in exchange for firm international controls over atomic resources and uses. The U.S., he said, “stands ready to proscribe and destroy this instrument—to lift its use from death to life—if the world will join in a pact to that end.” But the Soviet Union refused to accept firm controls, and after six months Baruch resigned his post.

Baruch and Harry Truman, two strong-willed men whose personalities were bound to clash, finally parted ways in 1948. In an angry outburst that was never meant to see print—but was nonetheless published by Columnist Westbrook Pegler—Baruch at that time blistered Truman as “a rude, uncouth, ignorant man.” Truman, for his part, was more restrained. “His concern,” he wrote of Baruch in his memoirs, “was really whether he would receive public recognition. He had always seen to it that his suggestions and recommendations, not always requested by the President, would be given publicity.”

Truman hit Baruch where he was most vulnerable, for Baruch wanted—and usually got—a good press. A Who’s Who of acquaintances streamed to his Manhattan house and to Hobcaw Barony, his 17,000-acre plantation near Georgetown, S.C., and there was generally a newspaperman in the crowd. If not, the press would usually get a tip from the late Herbert Bayard Swope, famed, dynamic executive editor of the old New York World, and for nearly 40 years both friend and public relations counsel to Baruch.

The Tragedy. Despite his obvious talents and his feeling for power, Baruch never sought public office. “I have always felt that I could contribute more as an independent private citizen than as a public officeholder,” he explained. Others saw it differently, among them Biographer Margaret Coit, whom Baruch asked to write his story after he had read her Pulitzer Prizewinning study of John C. Calhoun. “Here, then, is the tragedy,” she wrote. “Baruch, unwilling to face defeat—Baruch, who has always had to win—has taken refuge behind his legend.”

Baruch devoted his last years to his memoirs, to the philanthropies into which his father had steered him—colleges, medical schools and rehabilitation projects—and to gathering a generous sheaf of awards and honors. “To me,” he was fond of saying, “old age is 15 years older than I am.” In the end, the irrepressible Bernard Baruch finally caught up with old age.