Business: New Boss for Chase

When John Jay McCloy became president of the World Bank six years ago, without any past experience in banking, he laughingly called himself “an illegitimate banker.” Last week he was legitimatized. He was named to succeed Winthrop Aldrich, the new Ambassador to England, as chairman of Manhattan’s Chase National Bank, the nation’s third biggest.

Jack McCloy, 57, a Philadelphia-born lawyer, has had experience in many fields other than banking. His two chief talents are tireless energy and the ability to bring warring viewpoints together. He used both to good effect in his three years (1949-52) as U.S. High Commissioner in Germany, where he won and kept the respect of conflicting political parties and, as chief architect of the peace contract, was the godfather of the Bonn Republic.

He showed the same capacity for getting things done in his two years (1947-49) as boss of the World Bank. When he took over, the bank had sold no bonds, made no loans, was all but falling apart. McCloy built enough confidence in the bank to float $250 million in bonds in the U.S., lent $650 million to eight nations after satisfying himself that they were good risks. “This is a bank, not a relief agency,” was his attitude.

McCloy came out of Amherst cum laude in 1916 and headed for the Plattsburg military training camp. He came out of the war a captain, breezed through Harvard Law (’21), spent ten years ferreting out the facts to prove German guilt for World War I’s “Black Tom” explosion, thus enabling his client, Bethlehem Steel, and others, to collect $26 million in damages from German funds held by the alien property custodian. At 35, he married Ellen Zinsser, sister of Mrs. Lewis Douglas.

McCloy’s work on German sabotage gained him an intimate knowledge of Germany, Germans and espionage, which caused Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to make him an assistant in 1941. Among other tasks in that job, McCloy helped write the Lend-Lease bill, opposed the ill-conceived “Morgenthau Plan” to de-industrialize Germany, served as chairman of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee. Stimson wrote of him: “So varied were his labors and so catholic his interests that they defy summary . . . His energy was enormous, and his optimism almost unquenchable.”