Word: mccloy
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bureaucrat's Lawyer. The Black Tom case brought McCloy to the attention of a shrewd judge of men, Elder Statesman Henry Stimson. In 1940, when Stimsori went to Washington as Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of War, he made McCloy his special consultant on German espionage...
...McCloy, as coordinator of 20-odd lawyers, representing many clients, took part in the melodramatic hunt for evidence, which the German secret service tried desperately to cover up. One bizarre episode concerned a Czarist Russian adventurer, Count Alexander Nelidoff, who said he had documents linking the German government with the Black Tom saboteurs. McCloy plucked a pencil from Nelidoff's vest pocket to take some notes. The Russian gasped in horror, snatched the pencil back, explained that it was a tiny pistol loaded with gas pellets which could quickly asphyxiate everybody in the room. Later, checking with British Intelligence...
...penned in lemon juice (invisible until pressed with a hot iron) on the pages of a copy of Blue Book Magazine, to old check stubs found in a discarded suitcase in a Baltimore attic, to memoranda from the German secret service uncovered in the archives of the Austrian government. McCloy traveled from Dublin to Warsaw, interviewing Irish Republicans and such German characters as the late Franz von Rintelen, who masterminded German espionage in the U.S., and Rudolph Nadolny, who was then a German secret service man in the Wilhelmstrasse and is now active in behalf of Soviet Germany...
...that point, McCloy's career was clearly consistent and easy to follow. What happened next is harder-and more important-to understand. Within a few months of McCloy's arrival in Washington, Stimson got Roosevelt to appoint McCloy Assistant Secretary of War. If this was a "policy job," it had been given to a man who had little experience with either policy or politics. If it was an "administrative job," it had gone to a man with no experience of administration...
...McCloy's assignment, in which he made a brilliant contribution to the war, arose out of the complexity of modern government, beset as it is by problems outside clear-cut administrative lines and party politics. McCloy became a troubleshooter, and expert in the solution of conflicts between people and between ideas. The business of the law is to find a way through difficult human problems toward workable and just answers. What McCloy did from 1941 to 1945 in Washington and on half a dozen battlefields was a lawyer's job-not the courtroom lawyer, but the lawyer...