Lucius D. Clay: An American Life

PREFACE

Lucius D. Clay headed the American occupation of Germany from 1945 to 1949, first as deputy to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, eventually as U.S. supreme commander in his own right. Under Clay’s stern tutelage, western Germany emerged from the shadow of Nazi tyranny. Under his leadership, a devastated country was rebuilt, an economy restored, and the foundations laid for a prosperous, stable, and democratic government. As Clay’s successor, John J. McCloy, once remarked, the Federal Republic is largely the story of the courage and persistence of this remarkable man.

For many, Clay is best remembered as the father of the Berlin airlift—that dramatic response to the Russian blockade in 1948. But the airlift distorts Clay’s role in Germany. He was not a militant cold warrior, and the attention devoted to the blockade obscures the more fundamental and enduring accomplishments of the Occupation, accomplishments due directly to Clay’s farsighted and fair-minded governance.

Clay’s four years in Germany may have been the most demanding period in his career, yet they are but a small part of the sixty years he devoted to public service. Indeed, his full life reached and touched many of this century’s most momentous and threatening events, and he himself was shaped by the tasks entrusted to him. He honed his impressive political skills in New Deal Washington; he developed his planning and engineering abilities while building dams and airports in Depression-wracked America; he established his reputation as a chaos-into-order man of global standing when he headed American military procurement during World War II. And through all of this, including the four years in Germany as America’s proconsul—with all the power and the privilege consequent upon that position—there was never a breath of scandal or a hint of impropriety. Sixty years dedicated to the public well-being without a dent on a reputation for probity and rectitude: Clay represents a particular type of American, one that, sadly, seems less in evidence as the century winds down.

Clay retired from the Army in 1949 and went on to make a successful career in business, though he consistently refused to work for defense contractors or to conduct any business with the Pentagon. He participated actively in politics, playing a pivotal role in Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign, and then helping Ike to select his first Cabinet. But Clay’s politics were essentially nonpartisan. He pioneered the interstate highway program for a Republican president, but returned to Berlin in 1961 as the special envoy of a Democratic president. He helped rebuild the Republican Party financially after the Goldwater defeat, but also provided the money for President Kennedy to ransom the prisoners of the Bay of Pigs. Throughout his long years of service, Clay remained faithful to an American tradition of honesty, independence, and straight-dealing. He was tough and decisive, and he never trimmed his sails to suit a prevailing wind. His integrity was as enduring as his resolve.

General Clay died in 1978, six days shy of his eightieth birthday. Some years before his death, he agreed to a series of interviews with me. In the end, the interviews extended over six years and some twenty-five hundred pages of transcript. He patiently answered every question—always candid, always precise. His extraordinary memory could recall cables twenty-five years old, almost verbatim. No detail was too small to be filed away in his recollection.

General Clay also made his personal papers available to me. The truth is, this was not as helpful as it might sound, because, unlike so many government officials, Clay took no records with him when he left public service. He deposited his official papers in the National Archives, where he believed they belonged. When I sought to use those papers, the Department of Defense resisted, claiming many were still classified. Clay could not understand how documents thirty years old could have any possible bearing on national security, and he intervened directly with the Secretary of Defense to force their declassification.

General Clay’s papers as Military Governor were edited by me and published by Indiana University Press. My interviews with him are on file and available to scholars at the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University and at the Eisenhower Library. The biography that follows is drawn insofar as possible from the words and opinions expressed by General Clay. In order to capture the essence of Clay’s thoughts as well as his style and manner, I have frequently quoted his answers to my questions directly. By so doing, the portrait that emerges is, I believe, both more accurate and more candid.

General Clay read the first twenty-five chapters of the manuscript in draft form. As was his way, he offered no suggestions or criticisms, except to query jokingly whether I really had to specify his exact birthday. (Clay had lied about his age to gain early admission to West Point.) It is a measure of the man, I believe, that throughout our relationship he encouraged me to probe deeply and write fairly, regardless of the consequences.

Jean Edward Smith

Berlin, 1989

Introduction

Lucius Clay represents the fiery type of fellow that you see in old-fashioned movies like Gone with the Wind. He’s the kind of military leader the Confederate Army produced in goodly numbers. They were proud people. They weren’t wild entirely, but they weren’t afraid of anything.

Robert A. Lovett

The American military tradition claims a variety of heroes. First, the demigods of martial spirit: Lee, Pershing, and MacArthur. Then the citizen-commanders, Grant and Eisenhower—men whose military judgment transcended narrow professionalism. Fighting generals like Patton and Stilwell, or Stonewall Jackson and William Tecumseh Sherman, compete for place with generations of military administrators: George C. Marshall, Peyton March in World War I, or Henry W. Halleck during the Civil War.

Lucius Clay fits none of those categories. His austere Roman bearing during the Berlin blockade may have resembled the aplomb of Lee outside Richmond, or the remoteness of MacArthur, yet he lacked the theatrical impulse that drove both to center stage. His executive ability rivaled that of General Marshall, but he lacked Marshall’s single-minded military presence. Perhaps he most resembled Grant and Eisenhower, yet Clay never held a wartime command. Both Grant and Eisenhower were rewarded for their victories with the highest office the nation could bestow. Clay, who was relatively unknown outside Washington when World War II ended, was thrust into the desolation of a defeated Germany, and from the ashes fashioned the first stable democracy in German history.

Clay’s career is inextricably tied to postwar Germany: the occupation of a defeated nation, its rebirth and reshaping. And were this the sum total of his achievements, it would rank among the major accomplishments of the Second World War. Yet Clay was more than a military proconsul. He was, as John Kenneth Galbraith observed, one of the most skillful politicians ever to wear the uniform of the United States Army. In a military tradition little noted for its political insight, Lucius Clay stands as a unique figure. His selection to head Germany’s occupation reflected a working relationship with the Roosevelt administration that was both close and of long standing.

Clay’s political acumen was born and bred in Georgia politics. According to Army records, he was born April 23, 1897.* His father, Alexander Stephens Clay, was a three-term U.S. Senator—a representative of the poor, white yeomanry of Georgia’s red clay hills, and Lucius spent several formative years shuttling with his father between Marietta and Washington.

Senator Clay died in 1910, and Lucius, the youngest of six children, was soon packed off to West Point. Like Grant and Eisenhower before him, Clay suffered the Academy with a large dose of skepticism. He graduated first in his class in English and history, but ranked at the bottom in conduct and discipline. As French Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, the hero of World War I, noted following a visit to the Academy in the 1920s, strong, independent personalities were likely to rebel at the tiresome makework that formed a large part of West Point’s curriculum. In fact, had Clay’s class not graduated one year early because of World War I, it is doubtful he would have finished.

Brevetted to the Corps of Engineers in 1918, Clay rose methodically through the ranks of the peacetime Army. But he was as much of a maverick in his way as George Patton would be in his. Clay was an original thinker. He read widely and rapidly—usually about nonmilitary subjects—and quickly formed his own opinions. He was quite sure that his judgment was correct after he reached it, and rather insisted on it, Defense Secretary Robert Lovett would say in later years, sometimes to the embarrassment of the people around him.

The trouble was, Clay did not suffer fools gladly—regardless of rank—and quickly tired of garrison routine. His early efficiency reports were peppered with below-average ratings in tact, judgment, and common sense. One commander went so far as to label him a bolshevik. And in the small peacetime Army, Clay quickly acquired a reputation as a military iconoclast. It was not until the 1930s, when he was given assignments that allowed greater scope for his initiative and independence, that Clay began to flourish.

Then too, Clay moved in unusual circles for an Army officer, most of whom spent the interwar years doing squads left and squads right at small posts scattered across America. As an Army Engineer, Clay experienced a wide range of civilian activity: public works, disaster relief, and local politics from county courthouse to New Deal Washington. Called to the Chief of Engineers’ office in Washington when the New Deal came to power, Clay worked closely with Harry Hopkins to establish the WPA (Works Progress Administration). For four crucial years under FDR, he was the Corps of Engineers’ principal spokesman on Capitol Hill. When Hopkins and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes feuded over the purposes of New Deal relief activity, it was Clay who levered the Corps onto Hopkins’s side. That, and the Civilian Conservation Corps, brought Hopkins into contact with the younger, progressive officers in the Army, and it was from these that America’s home-front leadership was chosen once war began.

On Capitol Hill, Clay became close friends with Sam Rayburn, a senior member of the Texas delegation, who would be elected House Majority Leader in 1937 and Speaker three years later. Following a brief year as Chief Engineer at MacArthur’s Philippine headquarters, Clay returned to the United States in 1938 to build the Denison Dam on the Red River in Mr. Sam’s congressional district. The largest earth-filled dam in the United States, it was the principal project undertaken by the Corps of Engineers that year.

In 1940, Clay was recalled to Washington to head the emergency airport construction program then being established under Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones. Between September 1940 and Pearl Harbor, Clay selected the sites and supervised the construction of some 450 airports in the United States, creating the nucleus of America’s commercial air network.

When the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, Clay requested immediate troop duty. Instead, he was sent to Brazil to negotiate for additional air bases, and then selected by General Stilwell to go to China as Stilwell’s chief engineer. But before Clay could leave, Dwight Eisenhower, then head of the Army’s War Plans Division, intervened to hold him in Washington. General Marshall announced a sweeping reorganization of the War Department immediately thereafter, and at the age of forty-three, Clay emerged as the youngest brigadier general in the U.S. Army and the head of all wartime military procurement—a very disappointing assignment, as Clay saw it.

From March 1942 until April 1945, Clay was America’s soldier in charge of defense production. As the War Department’s Director of Materiel, he supervised the vast procurement activities of the Army, set production schedules, doled out military aid to the Allies, and provided the weapons with which the war was won. As the Army’s member of the joint U.S.-British Munitions Assignment Board, he was again thrown into close contact with Harry Hopkins, who chaired it. Averell Harriman, who headed the Lend-Lease program in London, and who worked closely with the board, recalled that Lucius always kept his eye on the ball. He wasn’t interested in bureaucratic pettiness. Whenever I had procurement problems during the war, I went to Clay. He immediately saw what the problem was, and could usually figure a way around it.

Clay’s role in wartime Washington also brought him in close contact with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. In the summer of 1944, Clay joined the American delegation at the Bretton Woods Monetary and Financial Conference, where he and Morgenthau cooperated to thwart Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek’s continued raids on the U.S. Treasury.

In the autumn of 1944, Clay was invited by Eisenhower to come to Europe to replace the Allies’ supply chief, General John C. H. Lee. But by the time Clay arrived, Ike had had second thoughts about relieving Lee and sent Clay instead to Cherbourg to unsnarl a port tie-up of monumental proportions. Clay then returned to Washington, where he became Deputy Director of War Mobilization and Reconversion—second to former Supreme Court Justice James F. Byrnes in running the American economy.

In light of Clay’s extensive political experience in Washington—and his close and easy working relationship with Harry Hopkins, Jesse Jones, James Byrnes, Sam Rayburn, and Henry Morgenthau—it is not surprising that he was quickly tapped to head Germany’s occupation. President Roosevelt originally had wanted a civilian for the task, a man like John J. McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War, or Under Secretary Robert Patterson. But Secretary of War Stimson insisted that in the initial stages the Occupation ought to be headed by a military man. Morgenthau also objected strenuously to McCloy because of his extensive ties to the business world. In that stalemate, Clay emerged immediately as the consensus choice: an Army general who understood Washington’s political climate and who could be trusted to carry out Administration policy with the necessary vigor. In fact, Clay’s first order of business in Germany in 1945 was to wrest military government from the Army General Staff and place it directly under War Department civilian control.

Despite muted State Department misgivings (Clay had no experience in German matters), Clay’s appointment was widely applauded in Washington. Byrnes told FDR that if Clay was given six months, he could run General Motors or U.S. Steel. And Secretary Morgenthau, who was scarcely a friend of German recovery (or, for that matter, of General Motors or U.S. Steel), agreed with Byrnes’s assessment. The most able fellow around this town is General Clay, said Morgenthau.

In retrospect, it seems striking that Washington’s top civilian leadership—Hopkins, Stimson, Byrnes, and Morgenthau—could agree so quickly that Clay was the right man for Germany, while disagreeing so fundamentally on what American policy there should be. But Clay had been completely insulated from discussions about postwar Germany. He was not given a copy of the U.S. directive to govern the Occupation (JCS 1067) until he boarded his plane for Europe; he did not think it necessary to consult the State Department before leaving; and he did not read the Morgenthau Plan for eliminating Germany’s industry and creating a pastoral society until he reached Eisenhower’s headquarters in France.

Clay was no friend of the Germans in 1945. It was widely agreed in Washington that his tough-minded, disciplined direction of America’s wartime economy fitted him uniquely for the German task. On April 8, when his appointment was announced, The New York Times called him the Pentagon’s stormy petrel who would put the Germans in their place. The Baltimore Sun clucked that it served the Germans right for losing the war. And The Washington Post agreed: General Clay’s exceedingly high abilities are better suited to the German situation than our own. That task calls for authoritarianism. Or, as a senior American industrialist told Look magazine, They’ve found the right place for him. Ruling over enemies.

In Germany, Clay saw at first hand the devastation caused by the war and was genuinely appalled. The suffering in Berlin moved him deeply. It was like a city of the dead, wrote Clay, and I must confess that my exultation in victory was diminished as I witnessed this degradation of man. I decided then and there never to forget that we were responsible for the government of human beings.

As a Southerner who had grown up with first-hand tales of Reconstruction, Clay might have had an extra measure of sympathy with the plight of those being occupied. I don’t know whether it affected me, he said, but the Civil War was always with us when I was growing up. Whatever the reason, no defeated nation in modern history has fared better as a result of its occupation. And no occupation was more difficult. In Japan, MacArthur ruled and the Emperor reigned. But in Germany, the United States was merely one of four occupying powers, each of which had a veto, and there was no symbolic state on which to build. In addition, the physical destruction that greeted the Allies in 1945 was far more extensive than in Japan. Much of the Third Reich was a rubble-strewn wasteland in which the living often envied the dead. The tasks of political re-education, the eradication of the remnants of Nazism, and the punishment of those guilty of war crimes—crimes that exceeded human imagination in their enormity—were infinitely greater in Germany than in Japan. Finally, the justified hostility of a generation was directed at Germany. And that hostility often did not distinguish between those responsible for the blight of Nazism and the many Germans who suffered under its policies.

Clay’s messages from Berlin illustrate the profound changes that took place from 1945 to 1949. As Military Governor, Clay saw his primary task as establishing the foundation for a lasting democratic society. And for Clay, the two most important ingredients in teaching democracy were full bellies and strict impartiality. We have insisted on democratic processes in the U.S. zone and have maintained a strict neutrality between political parties, Clay told Washington in the bleak winter of 1946. As a result the Communist Party has made little inroad. However, there is no choice between becoming a Communist on 1500 calories and a believer in democracy on 1000 calories.

If compassion for the plight of the average German played a role in determining Clay’s policies, so too did his concern for America’s self-interest: if the United States was to be freed from supporting postwar Europe indefinitely, Germany had to be revived. The question of erecting a counterpoise to the Soviet Union did not enter Clay’s thinking until late 1947, and until then his relations with the Russians were warm and cordial. Indeed, the record of American military government illustrates the insistence of both Clay and Eisenhower that the United States honor its obligations to the Soviet Union in terms of reparations, German assets abroad, and German patents and scientific data. Many will be surprised that Clay’s cutoff of reparations deliveries from the U.S. zone in May 1946 was aimed primarily at the French, not the Russians, and that Clay, who since the Berlin blockade has symbolized American resistance to Communism, deplored the establishment of Radio Liberty in Munich (broadcasting anti-Communist messages in Russian to the Soviet Union) as inimical to the purposes of four-power government. The fact is, Clay believed cooperation with the Soviet Union was essential in Germany, and he blamed Washington for allowing France to scuttle German unity. Later, in 1947, Clay refused to provide American aid to non-Communist political parties in Berlin. After all, he archly cabled Washington, the tactics used by the Communists were not much different from election measures sometimes pursued in large cities in democratic countries. When the Truman administration eventually moved to divide Germany, Clay was the last holdout. In his view, German unity and free elections under effective four-power control would extend Western influence into the Soviet zone and assist democratic forces in Poland and Czechoslovakia, but no one in Washington in 1947 was prepared to take that chance.

Clay’s experience in government instilled in him a profound respect for constitutional processes. He firmly believed in the beneficial force of public opinion, and was the first Military Governor in history to hold regular, open, no-holds-barred press conferences with reporters from the local press—a lesson both for the press, which Clay believed too timid, and for a new generation of German politicians.

Later, when he became concerned that his orders to military sub-governors in hundreds of villages and hamlets throughout the American zone might go unheeded—or, worse, might be reinterpreted by overzealous commanders—Clay began issuing orders to subordinate commands over the ordinary AM radio so that the Germans might listen and be informed about U.S. policy.

In 1946, Clay successfully initiated free elections in Germany, contrary to the advice of his political advisers, both U.S. and German, and thus took Germany a massive step forward in postwar rehabilitation. In 1948, he overruled another set of advisers to free the German currency from price and wage controls, thereby initiating the astounding economic recovery Germany went on to enjoy.

It may seem curious in retrospect that Clay spoke no German. Furthermore, he deliberately avoided personal contact with Germans at all levels for fear that those whom he approached would be tagged collaborators. Despite this distancing, the Germans soon developed respect bordering on admiration for der Sieger (the victor). Reinhold Maier, later Minister-President of Württemberg-Baden, remembered Clay as personifying the best of the German General Staff: cultivated, taciturn, polished, and clear; an intellectual type with brown, melancholy eyes. Clay was firm and correct—as those who appointed him expected him to be. But he used every trip to Washington from 1945 to 1947 to get the Germans more food.

Clay’s readiness to take personal responsibility was the hallmark of his career. A contemporary audience will appreciate Clay’s innate political shrewdness in insisting that all U.S. agencies in Germany report to Washington through him exclusively. This was not done for personal aggrandizement but to ensure that American policy was coordinated. To achieve such coordination was a difficult and continuing problem, but Clay succeeded. In the end, even the long arm of U.S. intelligence reported to Washington through Clay’s headquarters.

As Military Governor, Clay insisted on doing things his way. If his superiors in Washington objected, they could relieve him, but Clay would not back down. When given orders he didn’t believe in, he automatically submitted his resignation. Of course I will carry out the instructions given me in this teleconference, Clay told Army Secretary Royall during crucial negotiations with Britain and France over creation of the West German government, concluding: then I will cable requesting my immediate retirement. Clay resigned at least eleven times while serving as Military Governor, but none of his resignations was accepted.

It was Clay’s determination to do things his way that saved him from interminable second-guessing in Washington. It also gave American policy a coherent focus. Above all, it provided the firm leadership that occupied Germany required. Clay was a pleasure to work for, said Donald McLean, a member of Clay’s staff and later director of Boston’s Leahy Clinic. I never saw a case in which he said, ‘I think we’d better discuss this with Washington.’ He made the decision right there. Clay’s British counterpart in Germany, General Sir Brian Robertson, phrased it somewhat more colorfully when he noted that Clay not only looked like a Roman emperor—a reference to Clay’s unarguably imperious nose—but sometimes acted like one.

Clay’s principal achievement was the creation of a prosperous, stable, and democratic Germany. For it was he who presided at the birth of the West German Basic Law (constitution)—goading both German politicians and Allied capitals to timely compromise. And when the Basic Law was approved, Clay retired from the Army. He rented a house on Cape Cod and wrote an account of his role in Germany (Decision in Germany). It was typical of Clay that he ignored Army regulations and did not submit his manuscript for military approval before publishing it. I sent a book to the adjutant general, said Clay. If he didn’t like it, he could have said so.

Clay was a man of quiet dignity: a liberal of the old school who resisted the notion of omnipotent government. Privacy was a right to be jealously guarded, his own as well as others. As Military Governor, Clay halted the military police practice of investigating the personal lives of his officers. The Army makes enough demands on one’s time, Clay once said. An officer’s personal life is nobody’s business but his own. Period.

Clay’s concern for privacy has obvious drawbacks for a biographer. Unlike Patton, whose personal memorabilia crammed fifty file cabinets, Clay saved virtually nothing. A man has to have a rather exalted opinion of himself to hang on to everything he ever wrote, Clay said.

Clay’s response represented a consistent, pragmatic theme that characterized his life and his achievements: an orientation toward the future, not the past, and an urgent desire to press on with the job at hand. In Clay’s case, a neglected childhood and ten years of barracks boredom in the peacetime Army were powerful formative influences. The youngest of six children, so much younger that his parents often overlooked him, Clay subscribed to a strenuous Puritan ethic: nothing could be achieved without hard work. In fact, one cannot understand Clay without appreciating the extraordinary competitiveness that drove him.

Clay was fifty-one years old when he retired from the Army. Too proud to seek out a new position, he waited for industry to come calling. And, as he said, It was not a very pleasant interlude. In a refreshing expression of old-time civic virtue, Clay refused to work for a defense contractor or any company that did a substantial business with the Pentagon. As the wartime director of all military procurement, Clay believed such employment would be unseemly and he declined to use his Defense Department connections for personal profit. Eventual succor came in an offer from Continental Can Company, which signed Clay on as chief executive officer.

When Clay retired from Continental Can in 1962, having driven it from a weak second to a strong first in the packaging field, an ailing Robert Lehman asked him to assume the direction of Lehman Brothers, then one of Wall Street’s most powerful and prestigious investment houses. Once again, Clay made the transition smoothly.

For years, Clay played a pivotal role in cementing the ties between big government and big business in the United States. His career is a unique blend of the military, political, and business spheres of American life, yet he was scarcely the enemy within that his close friend Dwight Eisenhower warned about. In business, as in the Army, Clay remained a paradox. On the one hand, he was a highly skillful and subtle manipulator of vast financial power; on the other, he remained a throwback to America’s past. Honor, Duty, Country, remained cardinal principles for Clay, and the thought of using personal influence for private gain was alien to his creed. (When he retired from the Army, having been Military Governor of Germany and, before that, head of all wartime military procurement, Clay’s total personal assets amounted to $3,000 in a family savings account.)

Clay’s strict sense of propriety imposed rigid limits on how he used his influence. When President Eisenhower flashed signals of not fully comprehending the dangerous import of the 1953 Bricker Amendment to the Constitution, Clay immediately intervened on a personal basis to set him straight. But when Ike’s Justice Department indicted Continental Can for antitrust violations, Clay refused to raise the matter.

His personal behavior reflected a similar dichotomy. Among an intimate circle of close friends he was warm and jovial, but his business associates were held at arm’s length. Lucius was an autocrat by nature, said Harold Boeschenstein, chairman of Owens-Corning Fiberglas. If we lived in an earlier age, he would have been a baron or a duke. He would be a benevolent one, but he’d be an autocrat nonetheless.

Ellison Hazard, who followed Clay as president of Continental Can, remarked: You never conducted a conversation with General Clay.… Either you’re telling him something he wants to know, or he’s telling you something. But there is no free and easy intercourse.

One of the reasons was that Clay’s life was rigidly compartmentalized. Clay had tremendous self-discipline, said James Boyd, who worked as Clay’s wartime executive officer (and later became president of the Colorado School of Mines, and then of Copper Range). I’d walk in and bring something to his attention—like copper or steel—and often I’d stop in the middle of a sentence. He might not have said anything, yet I would know if he agreed, or was satisfied, and I didn’t have to waste his time anymore.

Until the age of seventy-five, Clay continued to arrive at his Wall Street desk at 8:00 A.M. and work a full day. His patrician sense of duty—a combination of Victorian virtue and political cunning—made him available for any government request. President Truman recalled him to Washington in 1950 to help organize the home front during the Korean War. President Eisenhower delegated the initial selection of his Cabinet to Clay, and used him frequently as a personal troubleshooter. As chairman of the President’s Committee on Highways, Clay organized the interstate highway program and steered it successfully through Congress. John F. Kennedy sent him to Berlin in 1961, and then asked him to resolve the muddle of America’s foreign aid program. When the Kennedys needed funds instantly on Christmas Eve in 1962 to ransom the prisoners of the Bay of Pigs, it was perhaps natural that they should turn to Clay—by then a prominent Republican, but a man who made no political distinctions when the President of the United States was involved.

The book that follows deals with the life of General Clay. It deals with the man—his career, his place in American life, and, above all, his contribution to the development of the first enduring democracy in German history.

World War II and its aftermath were not a simpler time, nor one when the mettle of American leadership was less challenged than today. If anything, the struggle to achieve military victory and the subsequent reconstruction of Europe and Asia posed even greater challenges. Yet America rose to the occasion.

One of the reasons, it appears in retrospect, was the exceptional reservoir of accomplished, dedicated, and incorruptible leaders then in the armed forces. Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur, and Clay symbolized American virtue. All had endured the seeming stagnation of the peacetime Army, the endless wait for promotion, the pitiful lack of equipment and manpower. Yet when emergency came, they were ready. Thrust into unprecedented command positions, they excelled. And the political leadership they provided for the postwar world has been unrivaled in its accomplishment.

Strange as it may seem, the leaders of World War II rose to positions of authority through a military promotion system based strictly on seniority (at least through the rank of colonel). They chafed under it and cursed it, but its hidden virtue was that seniority permitted a certain independence of thought and action. A junior officer was not required to flatter his commanding officer’s whims to get that outstanding efficiency report upon which rapid promotions now hinge. There were no rapid promotions. Everyone stood in line. And while on the one hand that meant inordinate delays for men like Eisenhower and Marshall to get to the top, it also ensured that when they got there their independence of judgment was still intact.

The postwar establishment of democratic prosperity in Germany and Japan traces to two great military proconsuls: Clay and MacArthur. Were they fitted by their military experience for those responsibilities? It is difficult to say. But what one can say with assurance is that each enjoyed supreme confidence in his own judgment and was prepared to accept the full responsibility for his decisions.

Such a style has its limits. MacArthur’s errors and foibles have been widely documented. Clay’s are less well known, but equally present. As Paul Cabot, managing director of the First Boston Corporation, once reported, Lucius was the most arrogant, stubborn, opinionated man I ever met. I remember sitting with him and Sidney Weinberg at Sea Island, Georgia, just after Ike was elected in 1952, discussing possible Cabinet appointees. Lucius had a definite opinion about everyone. Good or bad. Yes or no. Finally, I said, ‘Jesus Christ, Lucius, there’s a word ‘maybe’ in the English language. Don’t you ever use it?’

Clay seldom did. At times his decisiveness betrayed a rare snap judgment. At other times his determination became pure stubbornness. Or, perhaps more accurately, he was most stubborn about his own snap judgments, his self-doubt filtered out by fifty years of command.

Clay was at his best in times of adversity. His decisiveness was legendary. The Berlin airlift was but one example: begun on his own initiative, without clearance from the Pentagon, without permission from the President. It was typical Clay, and it saved Berlin.

I once asked General Clay why Continental Can or Lehman Brothers were interested in a retired general. Well, said Clay, I don’t know of anyone who probably had as much experience with the full range of the nation’s economy as I did while Deputy Director of War Mobilization in World War II. And I don’t know of anyone else on Wall Street who ever conducted a major currency reform. Or for that matter, who established a government.

Book One

THE EARLY YEARS

1

The Clays of Georgia

Senator Clay is a magnificent specimen of the possibilities of American institutions, a splendid instance of a poor farm boy, who without other advantages than those he made for himself, has risen to eminence in his chosen profession.

Atlanta Constitution,

November 17, 1896

On November 16, 1896, seventeen months before Lucius Clay was born, his father, Alexander Stephens Clay, was elected to the United States Senate. Clay’s father was forty-three: the lawyer son of an impoverished farmer from northern Georgia’s red-clay hills. Alexander Stephens Clay symbolized Georgia’s New Democracy. As chairman of the state Democratic Party, he led the fight against the Populists in 1894 in the struggle to keep the working man Democratic. Following a decisive victory, he was elected president of the state senate (and lieutenant governor) in 1895. The following year, when General John B. Gordon, last of Georgia’s Bourbon triumvirate,* declined another term in Washington, Clay was chosen as his successor.

Senator Clay’s humble origin notwithstanding, the Clays of Georgia trace their ancestry to Sir John Claye, knighted by King Edward IV at the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471. The first American descendant, grenadier Captain John Thomas Clay, landed at Jamestown in 1613. Captain Clay’s son, Charles Clay (1638–86), a well-to-do planter, joined with Bacon in the abortive Virginia Rebellion of 1676, and is the common ancestor of the Clays of Kentucky and those of Georgia. But it was Lucius’s great-great-grandfather Pearce Clay, a brother of Henry Clay, who first moved to Georgia, shortly after the American Revolution. He established a large plantation at Buffalo Creek, near Milledgeville—three thousand acres of prime Georgia cropland.

In the early 1850s, Lucius’s grandfather, William James Clay, severed his family ties, claimed a small inheritance, and moved to Cobb County in northern Georgia, where he bought a rugged hill-country farm of 250 acres. In 1852, he married Edna Ann Peek, daughter of a nearby Baptist parson, and their first son, Alexander Stephens Clay, was born the following year. The name was not chosen randomly. Congressman Alexander Stephens was Georgia’s most distinguished spokesman for the cause of the Union in 1852 (though he later became the very reluctant vice president of the Confederacy), and for Will and Edna Clay to name their first son after him was a clear statement of political belief. In fact, the cause of the Union was far more popular in Cobb County than in the plantation country of south Georgia, from which Clay had come.

It was a moot question why my grandfather moved, said General Clay, except that he was one of the younger sons of a large family. There wasn’t much opportunity where he was, so he acted like they all did in those days: he went out looking for a new and better world. My grandfather was no world-beater, but his wife was an imaginative and wonderful person. Her father had been a minister, and she had a little bit better education. She was always pushing for her children to get better educations, but my father was the only one who responded.

Q: Cobb County is in northwestern Georgia?

CLAY: Yes. Cobb County was the most progressive of the counties in that region. The others were mountain counties, and mountain counties in those days took their politics and everything else very seriously. They were rough people. They were fine people, but they were rough people.

Q: Then it was not a rich agricultural area?

CLAY: North Georgia was a land of small farmers. It was settled relatively late by people who were fighting the Creeks and the Cherokees, and it was never a land of great plantations. Also, north Georgia never had an old, established aristocracy. North Georgia was settled by people who wanted to get away from that. The great houses and plantations are in south Georgia. North Georgia started with small, independent white men who wanted to go away and be independent—where they wouldn’t feel the class distinction they felt when they had to live in an area where the white people were rich and the Negroes were poor.

Will Clay, Lucius’s grandfather, was not a slaveholder and had little sympathy for Georgia’s planter aristocracy. When the Civil War came, he did not serve—except briefly, in the home guard, when Sherman marched through Marietta. He is described by his descendants as a man of fierce independence and striking figure: tall, ramrod-straight, white goatee, with a gracious and courtly manner somewhat out of keeping with his hard-scrabble existence.

The Clay farm in Cobb County was dirt-poor, and Lucius’s father worked on it daily until he was seventeen: plowing, hoeing, picking cotton, tending the animals—the never-ending chores of the cracker up-country. Whatever education the young senator received was given to him by his mother at the fireside. His first experience in a classroom came in 1870, when he went to high school in nearby Palmetto. After two years at Palmetto, he entered Hiwasee College, where he worked his way by raising cotton and teaching during the summer. Among his students, General Clay recalled, were my mother and a D. W. Blair, who later became his law partner. He then read law, which is what you did in those days, was admitted to the bar, and became a very successful lawyer, in the sense of a successful lawyer of the times. He practiced law actively until he went to the United States Senate.

Q: Why did your father enter politics?

CLAY: Lawyers and politics sort of went together in the South. My father had gone to the state legislature and been elected speaker. Then to the state senate, where he had been elected president. He became chairman of the Democratic Party and led it in the fight which prevented the Populists from taking over in Georgia. The result was that when General John B. Gordon’s seat became vacant, he was elected to fill the vacancy. In those days senators were elected by the state legislature. Of course, no two men could have been more different than my father and General John B. Gordon. General Gordon waved the banner of the Confederacy ’til his dying day. My father never mentioned it.

Q: Your father’s first campaign for the Senate was very close: thirty-one ballots. The second and third times he ran, he was elected without opposition. How do you account for that?

CLAY: This is sort of a habit in Georgia. The first battle is the tough one, then we keep re-electing them. We learned long ago that they get better with age.

The electoral campaigns of the 1890s, pitting the militant Populists against a proud Democratic tradition, were among the most hotly contested in Georgia’s political history. But Clay’s father emerged relatively unscathed from personal attack. The Atlanta Constitution, whose editor, E. P. Howell, was Clay’s senatorial opponent, reported that the nomination of Mr. Clay ends what will go down in Georgia’s history as one of the most remarkable campaigns ever known. It has been wonderfully free from bitterness. Mr. Clay’s personal relations with all of the candidates were of the very best. He counted on every one of them as his personal friends.

In later years, Senator Clay and Tom Watson, the fiery leader of American Populism, became friends. The fact was that the elder Clay did not oppose the Populist program—free coinage of silver, regulation of trusts and railroads, economic justice for the small farmer and small businessman. But he thought those goals could best be achieved within the Democratic Party.

In the U.S. Senate, Clay aligned himself with the liberal, Democratic minority. From the date of his entry until his death he formed a standing pair with Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts: an arrangement whereby two senators of opposite persuasion paired themselves on all issues. If one was absent from the chamber when a vote was taken, the other would rise, announce his pair, and refrain from voting.

Of course, it was only thirty-one years after the Civil War when Clay was first elected to the Senate, and the bitterness still ran deep in Georgia. But, like his famous namesake, Clay was devoted to the idea of Union—and to the United States. He rejected the politics of Southern sectionalism, and as chairman of the state Democratic Party (he remained so until his death) worked hard to bring Georgia back into the national consensus. In a front-page interview in 1902, The New York Times cited Senator Clay as the leader of liberal Southerners seeking to modernize the party and increase its appeal in the industrialized states of the North. We should be broad and liberal in our policy, tolerant in our spirit, and cordially invite all Democrats to unite, he was quoted as saying. Clay’s progressive views reflected both his upbringing and the principal source of his electoral support: the poor white working class and the dirt farmers of northern Georgia.

Clay was one of the first Senate sponsors of an income tax, a vigorous opponent of monopolies and special privilege, and first chairman of the Senate’s Select Committee on Woman Suffrage. His maiden speech in 1898 was a denunciation of U.S. imperialist claims in the Pacific. He opposed the annexation of the Philippines, and led the successful opposition to the Republican big navy appropriation bill in 1902 and the exorbitant sugar schedules of the Payne-Aldridge tariff of 1909. He also took up the cudgels on behalf of prohibition, leading an unsuccessful attempt in 1908 to allow the individual states to restrict the importation of liquor.

Clay was diligent, Senator Lodge said, and thorough, and especially industrious in that unadvertised but essential task, the work of committees, where law and policies are shaped and where the glaring and deceptive headline rarely penetrates. He was equally diligent and painstaking on the floor. Better than anyone else, perhaps, can I bear witness to his faithful attendance, to his rare absence from a vote. He came well prepared to debate and knew and understood the subjects he discussed, but although he took a due share in all discussions, he wasted no time and never sought to utter words merely for the pleasure of utterance.

Q: When you were a boy, did you go with your father to Washington?

CLAY: When my father went to the Senate, Congress didn’t meet year-round as it does now. It usually had a long session one year, and a relatively short session the following year. My mother would always go to Washington with him during the long session. She would not go during the short session. Usually some of the children would go with my mother. I made the trip three times, and, of course, while there I was in school in Washington. In the interim, my mother’s mother, my grandmother, lived with us and ran the house in Marietta for those children who stayed home.

Q: Did your early stay in Washington whet your appetite for a political career?

CLAY: No, I don’t think it did. I do think it gave me a pretty basic knowledge of how government functions. In those days, government was simple enough so you could see it function. Cabinet members really were the people who ran government, and their staffs were relatively small. You could walk around sightseeing and walk in and see a Cabinet member.

In Washington, Senator Clay and Theodore Roosevelt became close friends. Although they disagreed over America’s role in world affairs (Clay opposed foreign involvement), they were in complete accord on progressive domestic policy. My father once took me to the White House to meet President Roosevelt, said Clay, my sister and me. I remember Mr. Roosevelt took a rose from his lapel and gave it to my sister—he had quite a way with children. My father invited Mr. Roosevelt down to Marietta once—and Mr. Roosevelt came. His mother [Martha Bullock] was from Cobb County.

Q: According to The Washington Post, your father was frequently called upon by the Roosevelt administration to sponsor its legislation.

CLAY: That’s right. And because of this he was able to get more patronage and consideration for his appointments and things of that sort than would otherwise have been the case. But my father had a tremendous respect for government, for the apparatus of government, and for the President. He had a tremendous respect for his fellow senators.

Q: Did your father spend much time with you in Washington?

CLAY: Obviously, when we were in Washington he was very busy. But he would often take me down to the office. Then, after dinner, we’d sit around in the living room, in the apartment, unless something was doing.… However, I was a little too young to really have very worthwhile talks or discussions with him. I can’t say that I really knew my father. I knew the image perhaps better than I did the man.

Q: What impressed you about Washington?

CLAY: I think the thing that impressed me more than anything else was the Library of Congress, where, as a member of a senator’s family, I could get all of the books I wanted to read and take them home—which I used to do once a week at least. In fact, I read so much in Washington that I developed a twitch in my right eye. But if I hadn’t started to read, I don’t think I would have been so happy in Washington. At one time I must have been reading six or eight books a week.

Q: History and biography?

CLAY: Mostly fiction and literature. One book I remember was by a man named Stanley J. Weyman, called A Gentleman from France. I don’t know what happened to that, but it was a magnificent book in my young days. It was a chivalrous adventure story, like the works of Sir Walter Scott, and it made a tremendous impression on me.

Senator Clay was elected to a third term in 1908. But for several years his health had been failing. In February 1908, he had collapsed on the Senate floor while speaking against the Aldrich currency bill. Clay nevertheless rejected friends’ advice that he take a brief rest from Senate chores. When I become so ill that I cannot attend to the duties for which the people of Georgia have sent me here, he said, I shall resign and give way to someone who can.

In 1910, with three of his Senate colleagues dead that session, Senator Clay found himself the only Democrat remaining on the Appropriations Committee. When Congress adjourned, his health was spent. He returned to Marietta, rallied briefly, but could not recover. He died on November 13, 1910, at the age of fifty-seven. Lucius was twelve years old.

Senator Clay’s funeral in Marietta was attended by five thousand mourners. As the Atlanta Constitution records, not a wheel moved in any industrial plant throughout the day, as the laboring element of the city turned out in force to honor their friend and defender. Two years later, a bronze statue of the Senator, raised by popular subscription, was dedicated on Marietta’s courthouse square. According to the custom in Georgia, Clay’s likeness was mounted with his back to the north, though no Southern senator at that time was less parochial.

2

Marietta Boyhood (1898-1914)

At the turn of the century, Marietta basked in McKinley prosperity. The Civil War’s wounds had slowly healed; cotton was selling at 15 cents a pound; new peach orchards dotted the countryside; and, in nearby Atlanta, light processing industries were beginning to weaken Georgia’s agricultural dependency. Marietta thrived in Atlanta’s shadow, its hilly environs recognized as a temperate summer resort for affluent Georgians eager to escape the malaria and typhoid of coastal Savannah. Among its five thousand residents were two former governors, one future governor, a U.S. Senator, and the heads of both the Populist and Democratic parties.

According to official Army records, Clay was born in Marietta on April 23, 1897. The fact is, he was born on April 23, one year later, and lied about his age in order to enter West Point—a not uncommon occurrence, especially in the South, where counties traditionally kept no birth records.

I hate to put anything like that on the record, General Clay confessed, because it is so tied up with my whole legal existence—retirement, Social Security, the whole works. We knew you had to be a certain age to enter West Point, but the question was whether you had to be that age by March 17, when you accepted your appointment, or whether you had to be that age by the time of entry [in June]. And it was the time of entry. So there really was no need for anything to have been done in my case. But we didn’t know that. So for me it was much easier to change a year than it was to change my birthday. Everybody knows your birthday—family and whatnot. So it was much easier to change the year.

By 1898, the Clays were well established in Marietta. Lucius’ father had gone to the Senate two years before. Control of Georgia’s Democratic Party rested firmly in his hands, and the legal firm of Clay & Blair prospered. The Clay home reflected the Senator’s prominence: a large white-frame Victorian with a veranda overlooking rolling lawns and, across the street, the Confederate cemetery—final resting place for those who died at Kennesaw Mountain.

Lucius was the youngest of the six Clay children. So much younger, he recalls, that I knew my brothers much better after I graduated from West Point than I did as a youngster. They were away at college most of the time. Then I was away. I really got to know them much better after I graduated from college. General Clay’s Roman first name reflects a tradition of obscure origin but extensive observance among the several branches of the Clay family, which have named others among their offspring Brutus Junius and Cassius Marcellus. His second name, Dubignon, was for Charles Dubignon, Senator Clay’s campaign manager in 1896.

Lucius’s oldest brother, Herbert, was born in 1881. When Lucius was born, Herbert was already at the University of Georgia, well on his way to a promising political career: mayor of Marietta at twenty-seven, solicitor general of Georgia’s Blue Ridge Circuit, president of the state senate and lieutenant governor (1922–23). Herbert’s early success was his undoing. Utterly charming but completely self-indulgent, he died mysteriously in a run-down Atlanta hotel the night of June 22, 1923.

Herbert was lieutenant governor at the time, and had just returned from a trip to Washington. We never knew how my father died, said his son, Herbert Clay, Jr. "Some say he was murdered. But I don’t know. He was not an alcoholic, but he drank too much and he enjoyed life too much. He was completely self-centered and totally neglected his duties as head of the family after my grandfather’s death.

He would have been in the U.S. Senate long before that if it had not been for his drinking and womanizing. [Herbert Clay had been prominently mentioned as a candidate against Tom Watson and Walter George in 1920, but abruptly withdrew.] My mother said that he worked hard but had no sense of self-control, and thought he could get away with anything.

Out of deference to the family, Herbert Clay’s death was handled gingerly by the Atlanta press, and no taint of scandal was printed. The coroner’s jury ascribed death to a fatty degeneration of the heart tissues, and the appropriate eulogies were sung.

Self-indulgence and a lack of self-control were traits shared by all of Clay’s brothers as well as by his only sister, Evelyn. Accustomed to the luxury and easy living of a senator’s household, they made few concessions to the prevailing mores of Southern gentility, confident that their father’s position would secure them. They were headstrong, hard-drinking, and hard-living—and they burned out quickly.

Senator Clay’s second son, Lex (Alexander Stephens Clay, Jr.), twelve years older than Lucius, was dapper, handsome, and generally considered the brightest and wittiest of all the Clays. He was also the most dissolute. A star athlete in high school, he was an alcoholic by the time he left college. Afterward he lived at his parents’ home and never held a regular job.

Frank Butner Clay was the third of Lucius’s older brothers, born in 1888 and, like Herbert and Lex, high-spirited and undisciplined. Senator Clay often told the story that the University of Georgia had ruined his first two sons, so he sent Frank to ruin the university.

Denied admission to law school after two years as a hell-raising undergraduate, Frank went to West Point, was given a general court martial for disciplinary reasons, put back a year, and graduated with the class of 1911. He developed aphasia in the Philippines in 1914, was hospitalized off and on, and died in Walter Reed Army Hospital, August 22, 1920.

Ryburn Clay, the fourth Clay brother, was seven years older than Lucius, and for his education insisted on going to Princeton. Unwilling to bear the expense of an Ivy League diploma, Senator Clay told Ryburn he could go either to the University of Georgia or to West Point, but nowhere else. Ryburn’s response was typical Clay: if he could not go to Princeton, he wouldn’t go anywhere. Instead, he began work at a nearby bank, and by his mid-thirties was president of Atlanta’s Fulton National Bank, a member of the Federal Reserve Board, financial kingpin of Georgia’s Democratic Party, and one of the most successful bankers in the South. By his mid-forties—after the death of his first wife—he too succumbed to the vices of his elder brothers and lost out at the bank, though, as Georgia politico Jim Carmichael reported, Drunk or sober, Ryburn was always the smartest banker in the state.

General Clay’s only sister was a similar tragic case. Plump, homely, unable to compete with her handsome and successful brothers, Evelyn Clay flitted about on the fringes of the Democratic Party, living in the reflected glory of her father’s reputation: the spoiled, only daughter of a too-indulgent family. She could not stay married, could not hold a job, and shared the family’s addiction to strong drink.

When Lucius was born, his mother was thirty-eight. His older brothers, and Evelyn especially, occupied whatever limited time his parents’ busy schedule allowed. As a result, Lucius was left to his own devices. Herbert Clay, Jr., who was a number of years younger, recalls that "As a boy, Lucius used to stay with my mother a great deal, because she wouldn’t stay in the house alone. And she considered him a nice boy, yet wild and undisciplined. I don’t think that meant anything except that his mother didn’t pay a hell of a lot of attention to him.

"As it is, Lucius won’t show any emotion. Everything is held right smack inside at any price. It all comes from neglect, and the determination to get by in spite of it. His brothers all had the world at their feet, and they went haywire. He saw that, plus unbelievable fits of emotion. Temper tantrums. There used to be a special flowerpot on the front porch in Marietta for people to kick over when they got mad. It was a situation of extreme self-indulgence with a lot of brilliant people going to pot.

"Of course, as far as he was concerned, he was just leading a normal life of a boy in Marietta. I don’t think he felt particularly neglected—although he may have later on, especially with the drop in finances at the Senator’s death. He occasionally talks as though the family didn’t have a cent at that time. That’s absolutely not true. It was just that his mother was pouring out every cent she had on her daughter: for clothes, for parties, for schools—anything that Evelyn wanted.

Like Ryburn, Lucius was told that the only way he could go to college was to go to West Point. And it became a very bitter part of his career. No one ever went up to see him. No one ever commented on his grades. In fact, no one ever wrote to him about anything. He never received one letter whatever while he was at West Point. To stick it out under those circumstances is almost beyond comprehension. You can’t help develop a certain fortitude, a certain stoicism.

General Clay’s childhood recollections differ, but not markedly. His brothers were too successful too early, a fact Clay never forgot. They didn’t have to work for what they achieved, and therefore attached too little value to it. For Lucius, life was different: not only as a neglected, perhaps unexpected and unwanted sixth child, but as a junior officer in America’s stagnant peacetime Army. Eleven years as a first lieutenant—few challenges, little responsibility, no opportunities to excel. A long, tedious climb that grinds most men down from boredom and inactivity. Clay’s childhood necessity for self-motivation, for self-discipline, to succeed in spite of parental neglect where his pampered brothers and sister had failed, gave him an inner confidence that obviously kept him alert during the dreary military routine of the twenties and thirties. Like his siblings, Clay resisted conformity; unlike his siblings, he had a fierce competitiveness that always bridled the family capacity to self-destruct.

As a boy, Clay never really knew his father. His brothers were much closer in later life than he remembers during childhood, and his mother was fully occupied in Marietta’s civic affairs as the wife of a United States Senator. Ryburn Clay’s daughter Zaida remembers that Momma Clay was old-fashioned, not only in her living, but in her dress. She always wore skirts to the floor. I think she fancied herself as something special. But she was not about to come out for anything. It all revolved around her.

Momma Clay—Sarah Frances White—had been born in nearby Lithia Springs in 1860. Unlike her husband, she was a rabid Southerner and an unreconstructed rebel. Her father, Andrew Jackson White, had been a prosperous farmer who joined Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia when the Civil War began, was captured at Chancellorsville, imprisoned at Fort Morton, Indiana, and presumably died there.

She was very bitter about the North, and didn’t like Yankees, reports one grandson. "This always made it very