By Max Holland
In August 1964, presidential adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote Lyndon Johnson a spare but revealing memorandum. The Republicans had just nominated Barry Goldwater in San Francisco, rejecting if not humiliating the Rockefeller-led, internationalist wing of the party. Bundy sensed a golden opportunity for LBJ to court the “very first team of businessmen, bankers, et al.” orphaned politically by Goldwater. And the key to these people, claimed Bundy, was a Wall Street lawyer, banker, and diplomat named John J. McCloy:
He is for us, but he is under very heavy pressure from Eisenhower and others to keep quiet. I have told him that this is no posture for a man trained by Stimson . . . . [McCloy] belongs to the class of people who take their orders from presidents and nobody else.
My suggestion is that you should . . . ask him down for a frankly political discussion next week . . . . I think with McCloy on your side, a remarkable bunch of people can be gathered; this is something he does extremely well.
Nine years later, in the middle of the Watergate scandal, McCloy again came to mind when another leading Democrat sought to communicate with the “very first team.” As W. Averell Harriman recounted in a 1973 memo for his files,
I called Jack McCloy . . . to tell him that I thought the New York Republican establishment should review the seriousness of the White House situation and take some action. They had a responsibility to get the president to clean up and put in some honorable people that would help to reestablish the credibility and confidence in the White House . . . .
He asked me who I had in mind as the New York establishment and I said that I was too much removed from the scene to give him names. If Tom Dewey were alive he would be the one to talk to and the responsible heads of the banks that were greatly concerned by the economic instability and the international lack of confidence in the dollar. I said unfortunately Nelson Rockefeller is too competitive with Nixon to take any leadership. He suggested Herbert Brownell, whom I endorsed.
As journalist Richard Rovere observed in a famous 1961 essay, members of the American Establishment routinely deny that it exists, preferring to maintain that they are merely good citizens exercising their individual rights and responsibilities.[1] This unofficial policy of self-denial makes these candid memos all the more impressive. The authors are impeccable sources; Bundy even indiscreetly entitled his memo “Backing from the Establishment.”
The notion of an American Establishment, or, or more generally, of a governing elite in America, is accepted by some scholars, primarily sociologists and anthropologists who have studied inequality and stratification in various societies. But the concept has not won full acceptance in other disciplines or by the American public. Inequality is as dear to the status-conscious American heart as liberty itself, William Dean Howells once noted, but America self-consciously celebrates egalitarian man. “Elite” is practically a fighting word. No one seriously asserts that power and authority are evenly distributed in America, but the notion of anything akin to a privileged, self-perpetuating Establishment – an elite that governs, and therefore classes that are governed – sounds profoundly out of key, so counter to American myth that it would seem worth of an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee were it still in existence.
On those occasions when it is noticed, the American Establishment is usually accorded inordinate power and foresight, most often by polemicists at the extreme ends of the political spectrum, where conspiracy theories abound. Considering the Establishment’s significance, though, there is a dearth of serious research and writing about its composition, culture, and contributions. One British historian, borrowing from Sherlock Holmes, has likened the situation to the dog that did not bark in the night: The American Establishment is made all the more conspicuous by the absence of literature about it.
After a belated discovery in the mid-1950s, and some hot pursuit and scathing treatment in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Establishment and the role of elites are once again being more or less ignored. Following the American debacle in Vietnam, it was widely suggested that the Establishment, then badly fractured, should never again be entrusted with the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, where since World War II it has been most visible and active. In a famous declaration before Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, the Georgian’s close adviser, Hamilton Jordan, announced, “If you find a Cy Vance as secretary of state, and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of national security, then I would say we failed . . . . The government is going to be run by people you never heard of.”
After Carter’s feat in 1980 by yet another self-proclaimed outsider, Brzezinski himself declared the Establishment all but dead, and successive pundits have tended to agree. But these reports, as Mark Twain might put it, have been exaggerated. After all, today’s executive branch features blue-bloods George Bush (Phillips Academy, Yale), James Baker (Princeton, corporate law), and Nicholas Brady (Wall Street’s Dillon, Read). If the position of these men does not prove the staying power of the Establishment’s Republican strain, it at least illustrates the continuing influence of individual White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites in America.
A society without a class structure, and therefore a governing elite, has never been constructed and may be a hopelessly utopian ideal, to judge from recent communist regimes. The more interesting question is, who comprises society’s governing elite and what does it do? For if stratification is inescapable, it follows that a society will largely reflect the goals and beliefs of elites from its most powerful class.
When exploring a complex subject, the philosopher Descartes once advised, divide it into as many parts as possible; when each part is more easily conceived, the whole becomes more intelligible. To follow this principle with respect to the American Establishment leads inexorably to one of its more significant parts, the same lawyer, banker, and diplomat whom Bundy advised Lyndon Johnson to cultivate in August 1964, and whom Averell Harriman called in 1973 during the Watergate crisis. John McCloy’s life is a classic guide to the American Establishment of the 20th century. His origins in Philadelphia, his ethnic background, and even his lifespan all coincide with, and thereby illuminate, the trajectory of the 20th century Establishment.
The creation of a national Establishment, or what sociologist E. Digby Baltzell called a “primary group of prestige and power,” was a social consequence of industrialization, of business and then political activities that were by the 1880s fast growing beyond traditional city boundaries. As a preindustrial ethos based on family ties and on landed and inherited wealth melted away, new social formations arose to bind together the industrial-era upper class on a national scale and to provide a semblance of tradition while absorbing and regulating new money. In the eastern financial centers of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Cleveland rose the citadels – the banks, corporations, law firms, and investment houses – that set the rules. The boarding schools, Ivy League colleges, fraternities, and metropolitan men’s clubs became the training grounds of upper-class society. And each of these institutions figured prominently in the life of John McCloy.
