National Affairs: The General’s Successor

The Senate took exactly four minutes to confirm Robert Abercrombie Lovett as the new Secretary of Defense; it happened to be on Lovett’s 56th birthday. There was only one hitch. North Dakota’s isolated Bill Langer wanted to know whether this was the Robert Morss Lovett who had been investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1943.* Assured that it was not, Langer made the vote unanimous.

Over the last eleven years. Defense’s Bob Lovett has held down three important top policy-making jobs, just a short taxi ride across Washington from Capitol Hill. But Lovett, a tall, slender man with the poise and features of a balding Caesar, has nimbly sidestepped the publicity that might have made his name known even to Bill Langer. In a time of crisis, he is well content to work in the shadow of greater names.

Diplomatic Save. Lovett was one of many Wall Streeters (foremost: James Forrestal) who did outstanding work for Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. Wise old Henry Stimson, F.D.R.’s Republican Secretary of War, drafted Lovett as Assistant Secretary of War for Air in 1941. The smooth-working, selfless Stimson team, which included Lovett and Chief of Staff George Marshall, became a legend of administrative efficiency and warm mutual loyalty.

In Washington, Air Secretary Lovett took one look at U.S. defense nakedness, another at the tremendous lesson of Nazi air victories in Europe, and fought a campaign to get top priorities for a big U.S. bomber fleet. Then, holding down impulsive Air Chief “Hap” Arnold with a gentle hand, he skillfully got the air corps raised to the status of a semi-independent air force.

When General Marshall was named Secretary of State in 1947, he urged Lovett to come back from Wall Street to be his Under Secretary. Although Lovett was still recuperating from a serious operation, he came, commenting: “There are only three people to whom I can never say no —my wife, Henry Stimson and George Catlett Marshall.” Half the time Lovett ran the department while Marshall was away in Europe. In 1948 Lovett was quick to see the implications of the Russian blockade of Berlin, strongly backed the Berlin airlift as a counterchallenge. A few months later he saved Harry Truman from a major diplomatic blunder. The President was all ready to go on the air and announce that he was sending Chief Justice Vinson to Moscow to reason with Stalin. Lovett heard about the plan, telephoned General Marshall in Paris, and confronted Truman with a joint ultimatum that both of them would resign if the plan went through.

Bob Lovett was born in Texas, the son of Robert Scott Lovett, general counsel and then president of Union Pacific. Young Bob left Yale (Phi Beta Kappa, Skull & Bones) during his third year to go overseas with the Yale Unit in the naval air force. In France he flew the lumbering British Handley Pages on some of the first night glide-bombing attacks, made a careful study of dive-bombing tactics which amazed his friends and delighted the Navy brass. The unit’s historian summed up Lieut. Lovett in three words: “Observation, reflection, deduction—and there you were!”

“Let’s Get Out of the Trap.” After the war he tried a year of law at Harvard, then switched to business administration. In 1919 he married Adele Brown, the daughter of Manhattan Financier James Brown. Father-in-law Brown gave Lovett the up-from-messenger treatment in Brown Brothers (later Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.), finally made him a full partner and sent him abroad to survey the world with a banker’s cool eye. In the 1930s, the eye spotted trouble in Germany, and Lovett warned the firm to get its investments out. In early 1940, from Switzerland, he wrote a penetrating report of the phony war, and accurately predicted the fall of France.

A man with a long history of stomach trouble, Republican Bob Lovett has saved himself from total frustration in Democratic Washington by exercising a deft sense of humor. (Once, after a long pounding by a congressional committee, he told a friend: “It was like getting a shave and having your appendix out at the same time.”) He likes movies, painting and jive, detests physical exercise, and reads everything from Thomas Mann to whodunits.

To his new job Bob Lovett brings a thoroughgoing realism much like that of his good friend and predecessor, Jim Forrestal. “This is a severe emergency,” said he a year ago. “This is perhaps the last clear chance to get ourselves in shape for the unknown future . . . We tried peace through weakness for generations, with no profit in it, and it seems to me as a matter of conviction that peace through strength might be an enlightening experience.”

Or, as he likes to say privately, “To hell with the cheese. Let’s get out of the trap.”

***

For his Deputy Secretary of Defense, Lovett picked ECAdministrator William C. Foster, 54, one of the ablest desk men in Washington. Foster’s deputy, Economist Richard Bissell, moved up to be acting boss of ECA, which will probably shrink to a shadow of its former self under congressional insistence that military aid to Europe is a substitute for (not an addition to) economic aid.

*As uninformed as Senator Langer, Manhattan’s Communist Daily Worker ran a picture of Robert Morss Lovett, old war horse of U.S. native radicalism, as “Lovett, Wall Street Banker.” Robert Morss Lovett taught writing and English literature at the University of Chicago for 43 years, was an editor of the New Republic for 19. In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt appointed him government secretary of the Virgin Islands. In 1943 (after the Dies hearings), Congress cut off his pay. The U.S. Court of Claims two years later restored it.