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Oral History Interview with
July 3, 1973 Richard D. McKinzie
MCKINZIE: Mr. Stokes, how did you come to select a career with the Government? STOKES: Well, since I was in college, if not earlier, I was always interested in the possibility of getting into Government service or some other kind of public service. I originally decided to go to law school. I had always envied the opportunities for interesting experience and service of people like [Henry L.] Stimson and [Dean] Acheson, who combined successful private law practice and public careers. So, that was my general attitude. When I got out of law school I took a job in one of the great downtown New York law firms, but after a few weeks I moved to Washington, because one of my professors, James
Landis asked me to come down and work with him. He had been the draftsman of the Securities Act of 1933, which was the first Federal regulation of the securities business, and Roosevelt had appointed him to the Federal Trade Commission, which administered the Act. He asked me to come down to Washington as his "clerk" or personal assistant, and I jumped at the opportunity. I went down there theoretically for a year, but I stayed for three years and had an opportunity to participate in the drafting of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which regulated the Stock Exchange and set up the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") to administer both the 1933 and the 1934 Acts. I served for two years on the legal staff of the SEC. That was a very interesting time. I then went back to private practice with a smaller firm in New York. In the fall of '41, there came another call. Milton Katz, whom I had known in law school, where he was a couple of years ahead of me, and whom I had got to know better during the
New Deal days in Washington, asked me if I would come down and work on the legal staff of what was then called the Office of Production Management. After Pearl Harbor it was renamed the War Production Board. So I did that, thinking that this was a good opportunity for service in the war effort. Although we were not in the war yet, I was very strongly in favor of maximum U.S. aid to the Allies and had been active in the American Committee to Aid the Allies. MCKINZIE: So you had already developed a rather strong personal position on international affairs? STOKES: Yes. I was very much for maximum American aid against Hitler, even to the point of war, if necessary. So, I went down to Washington in October of '41, fully expecting that this would be for the duration, as it turned out to be. In the War Production Board I was primarily concerned with what we called "legal clearance" of the orders and regulations which the Board issued. The War Production Board generally was responsible for the allocation or distribution of scarce materials, components and some finished
products. We had to see that the military got what it needed, and that the civilian economy also got what it needed, on the other hand. There were a few major exceptions to the WPB's jurisdiction. Petroleum products were handled by the Department of Interior, agricultural products, up to some level of processing, were handled by the Department of Agriculture, and rationing to consumers, as distinct from industrial purchasers, was the responsibility of the Office of Price Administration. We issued what we called "orders" and "regulations." Orders usually pertained to a particular commodity of product. They regulated its distribution to assure priority for the most important needs, and in some cases restricted its use so as to curtail demand. For example, all metal, except what we call "joining hardware," like nails, nuts, bolts and screws, was completely prohibited in a number of products, such as toys and most furniture. Some production was prohibited completely. The automobile plants were closed down except for a trickle of automobiles for police, doctors, etc.
Well, it's not quite accurate to say they were closed down. They were converted. They produced some automobiles for the military, but primarily tanks, military trucks, aircraft, and so on. Regulations were of more general import. They described the working of the systems of priorities and allocation. The General Counsel was John Lord O'Brian, who died a couple of months ago, an absolutely marvelous man, and a liberal of the old school. He'd been in Republican politics, but was by no means reactionary. He was aware especially of antitrust problems. We had lawyers assigned to each division. There would be a lawyer for the Steel Division, a lawyer for the Copper Division, a lawyer for the Containers Division, and so on. Then we had some lawyers whose responsibilities crossed division lines--enforcement was one. My responsibility for most of the period was to be in charge of the legal clearance of orders and regulations. A particular division would decide that some system of priorities, allocations, or
limitations should be set up for a particular industry, and with the aid of the division lawyer it would prepare an order regulating that industry. The order would come to my office for legal clearance and then a committee of non-legal officials to see that it was in line with overall policy. We couldn't have one division with one philosophy of regulation and another one with an entirely different one, unless there were intrinsic reasons why they should be different. My responsibility--I had several assistants--was to see that these orders, first of all, were within the law. The War Production Board didn't have unlimited power. Congress had enacted a broad statute authorizing the President--and that authority was delegated to the War Production Board--to allocate scarce materials and supplies. We didn't confine our review to strictly legal matters. Lawyers in Government and in industry in this country tend to get into policy matters. We tried to see that orders did not regulate more than was necessary. The question we'd ask very often
was, "Does this have to apply to the little fellow or should this only apply to the big companies in the business?" A particular hobby of mine in passing on orders and regulations was that they should be understandable. This started when one of the officials--most of our officials were so-called "dollar-a-year" men from industry--came to me and said, "Couldn't you issue with each of these documents a brief summary in ordinary layman's language, saying what it means?" Well, I took this as a challenge--why should we have to translate these orders and regulations? They should be understandable in the first place, so that translation would be unnecessary. Also, it seemed to me that if we had to choose between a document being legally airtight with no loopholes and a document being easily understandable, understandability was really more important. In a wartime atmosphere the great majority of the people, for patriotic reasons, wanted to cooperate. It was more important that the honest man could understand a regulation than it was to have it so elaborately drafted that the
chiseler couldn't find a loophole. Actually, I concluded that we didn't have to choose between those objectives. A document could be legally airtight and at the same time understandable. I was inspired to this largely by a fellow named Cavers, who was then in a similar job in the Office of Price Administration, which handled price regulation and consumer rationing. He really started the movement, as far as I know. In fact, we had a nickname for it; we called it "Caverization" of orders and regulations. I prepared and distributed to the legal staff a list of legal terms that drive the layman mad and for which there are perfectly good ordinary English equivalents. You don't have to say, "provided however that;" you can say "but," and it means exactly the same thing. I remember one of our regulations or orders came to my desk containing a sentence something like, "If a dealer is unable to obtain a sufficient supply of--widgets or whatever it was--he should do so and so." Well, I translated that to, "If you cannot get enough widgets do so and so." We actually did put some of our orders in the second person--"you"
instead of "the Producer," "the manufacturer," and so on, depending on what sort of an audience they were aimed at. Well, I had a lot of fun with this. There was some resistance, but it did catch on. The other thing that I think we performed a good job on was narrowing the scope of orders and regulations to what was really necessary, making exceptions for unimportant transactions or small operators. The typical "dollar-a-year " businessman official of the WPB would propose an order speaking in terms of no one shall do this and everyone must do that. But when you pinned him down and asked, "Does it matter whether the guy with two employees and a total business of a few thousand dollars a year does this or that?" Hed say, "No, it doesn't." He just didn't think in those terms. He was thinking of the big businesses that he came from. Another very interesting part of it to me was the philosophy of businessmen in Government. They tend to think in terms of the job to be done and they tend to be quite impatient with legal restrictions.
I remember talking to one of these fellows. He was very impatient with what he considered nit-picking at the order that he wanted to get out. I was concerned as to whether it exceeded our powers and, on the merits, as to whether it was really necessary to go this far. And his answer was, "Well, we shouldn't worry about whether it's in our powers. We've got a war to win," and so on. And I said, "Well, now look here. You are exactly the kind of businessman who has been griping for years about Government bureaucrats exceeding their powers, doing more than Congress meant them to do, and butting into the running of business. Now you are doing exactly the same thing yourself." He sort of grinned sheepishly, but it was true. This was also my experience way back, when I was with the SEC. The businessman in a Government position, once he gets on that side of the fence, is more ruthless towards other businessmen who are still in business than the professor of economics or the lawyer in Government whom the businessman who is still in business looks upon as the impractical, theoretical bureaucrat. MCKINZIE: Toward the end of the war, there were some economists who believed that a planned economy had evolved as a result of the activity of this board and it was working so well that it ought to be continued. Did you hear any of this kind of talk? STOKES: No, I don't remember hearing that. I did serve towards the end of the war on a committee that was set up when the victory in Europe was imminent, called the "Committee on Decontrol After V-E Day." We called it "CODCAVE." It was charged with recommending steps for decontrolling the economy in the transition from wartime control to a free peacetime economy. We had economists and other specialists, including myself as counsel, and officials with more general responsibilities. I forget who all the members were. I remember that Lincoln Gordon, who has since become fairly well-known, was on that committee. One of the bits of data that we were given to work with by the economists was that, within six months after the end of the war, the United States
would be faced with six million unemployed. It's always been a favorite example to me of what an inexact science economics is, if it even is a science. MCKINZIE: Do you recall what your reaction was at the time to that? Did you have faith in those people? STOKES: Well, faith may be too strong a word, but I didn't question that assumption, as I remember it. I don't remember being skeptical about it. So, as far as my experience went, there was no thought of continuing the WPB beyond the war, although I have no doubt that the idea did occur to some people. Well, we had these orders relating to a particular industry or product. Some of them dealt primarily with what we call priorities: in what order the manufacturer must fill different types of incoming orders, depending on the preference rating that they were given. We had an elaborate system of preference ratings called "P" orders. Then we had "M" orders, which dealt with the use of the
particular materials--such as just what you could use leather for or steel for. The "M" stood for "materials." Then we had limitation or "L" orders which were limitations on the end product, like shutting down the manufacture of automobiles. One of the most controversial orders that we issued was the one that closed down the gold mines. We were on rather thin ice there, because the Government never did have, during the war, complete legal authority to allocate manpower. There was the military draft, and there were various inducements to get men and women into essential industry, but there was no labor draft as such. So, we were constantly called upon to use our powers to cut down industries that were using a lot of unnecessary manpower. We were quite willing to do that where they also used scarce materials. Forbidding the use of a scarce material or scarce machinery in a particular industry that was also using a lot of manpower, cutting down or even closing down that industry, would release more manpower for more important jobs. Now, gold mining was the most
controversial case, because gold miners were needed in copper mines, but we didn't have the power to say that you cannot employ miners in gold mines. We could only approach the problem indirectly on the ground that gold mines used scarce mining equipment, operating supplies, or transportation facilities. However, I don't think it's any secret that the real purpose of closing down the gold mines was to release manpower for more essential mining or other activities. The actual supplies that were used in gold mining were not all that big. This was, I think, the toughest decision that we had to make, because it strained our legal consciences a bit. On the other hand, it was a big issue from the point of view of releasing manpower for the copper mines. Also, there was an important psychological, morale element. Gold symbolized luxury. There was no need for it. MCKINZIE: Did a decision such as this have to be cleared with Don [Donald M.] Nelson or some other higher up?
STOKES: Oh, yes. A decision of this kind would go to the very top, Mr. Nelson or whoever it was at the time. Also I was not taking final authority myself on close legal questions. On a thing like that, I would go to John Lord O'Brian. And we did issue the order. There was litigation that came up after the war. I remember that I had to testify at a hearing before the Court of Claims. The gold mines complied. They didn't challenge enforcement of the order, but they sued for compensation. My impression, but it is only an impression and I'm sure this would be easy to check, is that there was some remedial legislation after the war which granted some compensation to the gold mines. After all, one of the most important provisions in the Constitution is that no one can be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. About midway during the war--I forget when it was--we set up an entirely new system modeled on the British system. It was called the Controlled Materials plan and dealt with three basic commodities in war production--steel, copper, and aluminum. We
had a system under which there would be a quarterly allocation made by the War Production Board of the entire projected output of the metal mills between various so-called "claimant agencies"--War Department, Navy, merchant shipbuilding, civilian economy, exports, and so on. I forget how many claimant agencies we had. They would all present their estimated quarterly needs in terms of tonnage--or thousands of pounds, I guess it was, for copper and aluminum--to the War Production Board. It would then allocate the expected output between these claimant agencies. Then each claimant agency would sub-allocate. The Army would give so much steel to tanks, so much to guns and ammunition and so on. The Navy would allocate so much to the destroyer program, so much to the manufacture of something else that it wanted, and so on. So, the producer of, say, tanks would get an allocation from the War Department of so many thousands of tons of steel, and then he would, in turn, allocate that to his suppliers. He would allocate so much to the company that was making the treads, so much to the
company that was making the tank frame itself, or so much to the company that was making the engines. You couldn't carry that allocation process all the way along to the nuts and bolts. At some point we had to allocate directly to the manufacturer of components, so that the allocation of raw material didn't pass through too many hands. For example, the War Production Board would allocate the ball bearing industry so much steel, and it wouldn't have to go through all the line from the War Department through tank manufacturer, engine manufacturer, transmission manufacturer, and so on. This was modeled on the British scheme, but it was much more elaborate. I worked night and day for a period of weeks, I guess months, on the drafting of the basic regulations. It was really one of the most interesting things that I worked on. We had a British expert who came over to advise us on his experience. MCKINZIE: Were you conscious at the time that you were, in effect, one of the architects of the most controlled economy that ever existed in the United
States? Never before nor since has there been such orchestration at the central point of the economic life. STOKES: Basically it worked, and the important thing was that the claimant agencies had to cut the suit to fit the cloth--they couldn't make these sweeping demands. I remember that fairly early on in the war, before this system came in, the War Department said it would need the entire output of copper for a given period. Well, according to their books they needed it, but what would happen to the railroads, the public utilities, and everything that was essential to supply the Army, if it got all the copper? There was always this tendency for the claimant agencies--especially the military--to think just in terms of what they needed. I remember sitting in on one meeting with [Julius A.] Krug, who succeeded Nelson--I forget if there was somebody in between. He was a very able man. I thought he did a magnificent job. This was when the North African invasions were being planned. The military said that they needed a sort of a super-priority--
ahead of everything else--in order to get the necessary landing craft. He was under tremendous pressure to grant this request. It's very hard for a civilian, with no military experience himself, to tell the military that they can't have something--that he is going to decide what he thinks is more important. The only super-priority, the only thing that overrode everything without question, as far as I know, was the Manhattan Project. For a long time I had no idea what the Manhattan Project was. I gradually caught on from the indiscretion of somebody who probably wasn't supposed to know himself. I gathered that it had something to do with atomic energy. Anyway, I happened to sit in on the meeting when Krug was to make the final decision on this question of an overriding priority for landing craft. He just said that it was his feeling that, in the interest of the overall war effort, it would be wrong to give this absolute priority. He would do everything he could to push the program; but he could not keep his eyes closed to the consequences
and say that, regardless of what happened, orders for this program would come ahead of everything else. MCKINZIE: How did you happen to be involved in these kinds of allocation meetings? STOKES: Well, my official title was Assistant General Counsel, and we had several Assistant General Counsels. There was a General Counsel, who was John Lord O'Brian; towards the end of the war he was succeeded by Fred [Fredrick M.] Eaton. The number two man was Solicitor. That was Fred Eaton, and when he moved up to be General Counsel, Laurence Lombard became Solicitor. After the Japanese surrender, Lombard became General Counsel and I served very briefly as Solicitor before moving to the State Department. There were several Assistant General Counsels. There was one in charge of enforcement. I guess there were some in charge of groups of the division counsels. And I was in charge of clearance, the okaying of orders and regulations before they were issued. I was, likewise, counsel to the Clearance Committee--I am not sure that was
its official name--the group that normally approved the issuance of orders and regulations. It included representatives of the different claimant agencies. There were several men in charge of that successively, and the one that I remember most clearly and who was there the longest was Tom [Thomas C., Jr.] Blaisdell. Where one of the members thought a matter was sufficiently important or crucial, it would go up to Krug, or whoever was the Chairman of the War Production Board at the time. As I told you at the outset, I had always been interested in Government service. My idea had been that I would get far enough in private practice so that I would be independent and could go into Government, but leave if I didn't like it. I did not plan to have necessarily enough money saved up to live on, but at least a practice that I could go back to. So, my original thought had been to stay in private practice for ten years or so or until I felt I was really established. Then, I would try to get into the Government or
politics in a position where I would be independent enough to go back to it. However, having made the break with the war, I thought that, even at the sacrifice of independence, this was such an interesting time to get involved in things that I should go in right away. I was particularly interested in the United Nations. I had spent one summer, when I was in law school, in Geneva, where I had a job showing American tourists around the League of Nations. I had got to know Manly Hudson quite well--he was Professor of International Law at Harvard. I was very much interested. I had been brought up as a kid to believe in the League of Nations and thought that the defeat of the U.S. ratification of the Versailles Treaty was one of the great tragedies of history. I thought that the U.N. was a chance for a new start and I'd very much like to be in on this. So, I went to see Alger Hiss, whom I had known, not well, but pleasantly and casually, in law school. He was a couple years ahead of me, but I'd gotten to know him better during the New Deal days, and we had
good friends in common. So, I went to him to see what the possibilities were of working on U.N. matters in the State Department, and that was how I got into the State Department. And of course, Alger Hiss is a long story in itself. MCKINZIE: Do you have some knowledge of his case? STOKES: I have no knowledge of his guilt or innocence. I admired him tremendously--let me say that--when I worked under him. I had a tremendous respect and liking for him. I didn't know him intimately, but I got to know him, I guess, well--I went to his house occasionally and he came to mine. When this whole thing broke, first on the Hill and later in the trial, I was, at the start, absolutely convinced of his innocence. I didn't have the slightest question in my mind. I can't say that I'm convinced now. The things that came out at the trial and even afterwards were certainly very disturbing to anyone who thought he couldn't have done it. I am still convinced that he was a man of the highest character and ideals, and that, whatever he did, he did because he thought it was right. If he was a Communist, he
was a dedicated Communist and he was doing what he thought was right. And, of course, the thing that a lot of people forget is that he was never even accused of treason. Treason is aiding the enemy, and the Soviet Union was on our side of the war. People throw this word "treason" around. Of course--if his conviction was proper--he definitely violated the law, as did [Daniel] Ellsberg. Legally, that was probably no greater an offense than Ellsberg's, and I admire them both. Now, of course, Ellsberg was tried for the actual offense of releasing classified information. Hiss couldn't be tried for the offense of releasing classified information, because the statute of limitations had run out. So, he was tried for perjury in denying that he had done it, and of course, that is a difference between him and Ellsberg, because Ellsberg never denied that he had done it and Hiss did. So, all I can say is that I think it was a tremendous tragedy and I feel confident that he was a man of highest ideals. Whether those ideals got somehow twisted and he did what he was
accused of doing, I just don't know. It's possible that he did. I remember looking back afterwards to see if I could think of any cases where, in my work under him in the State Department, I could detect any particular slant he had in regard to the Soviet position. I've forgotten what the issues were. I could only think of two important ones where there was a difference between the Soviet and the American position. On one of them Hiss, as I recall it, thought we were wrong in opposing the Soviets. On the other, he thought we were right. So, there was no indication to me that he was working for the Communists at the time. MCKINZIE: You transferred in 1945, after the San Francisco Conference. Did you think that the APB was going to phase out? STOKES: It was beginning to phase out. There had already been victory in Europe, and the victory in Japan was imminent. I don't remember when I went to see Hiss, but I think it was after the
bomb was dropped, when the surrender had actually taken place. It was obvious that the things was being wrapped up. Well, I went over to the Department then in the fall of '45 in what was called the Division of International Organization Affairs, which was headed by Hiss and included all international organization activities. It had several divisions. One was primarily concerned with the Security Council, and I think it was called Security Affairs. Another was primarily concerned with the Trusteeship Council. The division I joined was concerned generally with the rest of the U.N.'s activities, of which the most important was the Economic and Social Council. It was also concerned with non-UN international organizations, of which there were a great many. Some grew out of the UN, and others, that had existed before the U.N., were brought into relationship to it. That division was headed by Durward Sandifer -- I have recently been reading the two volumes on Eleanor Roosevelt, in which he figures quite a bit. I was initially assigned to the branch
in this division which was concerned, not with the Economic and Social Council, but with the miscellaneous international organizations. We were concerned generally with United States participation in those and in developing their relationship to the UN They were gradually all brought into some kind of relationship, as so-called "specialized agencies," with the United Nations. So, that was my responsibility on paper. However, I soon got involved in a particular thing that could have crossed all these division lines, and that was the matter of the location of the headquarters of the United Nations. I was the guy in the State Department who, I guess, had the most to do with it--not in terms of level of responsibility but in terms of time devoted to the matter. I had most to do with two things. First was the question of where the United Nations headquarters should be located. Secondly, although I was not on the legal staff in the State Department, I got involved as a lawyer in the legal arrangements for the setting up of the United Nations Headquarters in New York, when the decision had been made to locate there.
San Francisco left open the question of where the headquarters should be. The first part of the first session of the General Assembly, which was held in London in the winter of '45-'46, decided that it should be in the United States, that it should be within either Westchester or Fairfield County--both in suburban areas of New York City--and that it should be an area of ten square miles--or perhaps it was ten miles square. Anyway, the idea at that point was a sort of international District of Columbia, and the decision was to put it in Westchester County, New York, or Fairfield County, Connecticut, so as to be near a big city but not in it. It soon became evident that that decision might not stick. A lot of homeowners in Westchester and Fairfield got alarmed about the idea of all these foreigners with diplomatic immunity tearing around, running over their children, and having property that couldn't be taxed. There was quite a furor about it. The first session of the General Assembly established a committee under a distinguished Yugoslav, whose name I've forgotten, to come and look over
the situation. But, meanwhile, there was a lot of agitation not to have it there, and I had to deal with it when people came to the State Department, at a low level. If they didn't have direct access to the Secretary or some other senior official, they came to see me. So, I saw people from Westchester and Fairfield, and I also saw people from chambers of commerce of various places all over the country who thought that they had "the place" for the United Nations--convention centers like Atlantic City and various places. I remember Virginia Beach coming in. Well, the first thing I said to them was, "You've got to face one fact. There are black members in the UN." I guess at that point there were only two, Haiti and Ethiopia. But there were some very dark Indians and so on. They obviously had second thoughts after that. I told them that there couldn't be any discrimination. In fact, the resolution deciding on Westchester and Fairfield said that the location must be in an area where there was no discrimination, at least no official discrimination.
Now, I said that the Assembly decision, that it should be in Westchester or Connecticut--I think that's right. It may have been only that priority was to be given to those locations--but anyway that decision became unstuck during the second part of the first session, which occurred in the fall of '46 in New York City. At that point, people were taking a second look at this. I think it was not so much because of the attitude of the local residents, but because of the fact that people just started thinking realistically in terms of the facilities that would be needed for the headquarters. You would have to have hundreds and hundreds of hotel rooms available for the period of the General Assembly, and a large proportion of those rooms would be unneeded between assemblies. You would need vast printing and communication facilities, all kinds of support facilities, and to build all those from scratch out in the country didn't make sense at that point. And what was more, the Secretary-General of the UN was going to have plenty to do without being the mayor of a town, in
addition. So, when it came to the second part of the first session of the General Assembly, people realized that this wasn't feasible. It was bad enough to get in a car and drive from a New York hotel out to Lake Success on Long Island where they were meeting then, without having to go all the way to Westchester or Connecticut. Everyone realized the importance of being near established hotels, and other facilities; printing, communications, and all that. A committee of the General Assembly, the "Headquarters Committee," was set up to make a recommendation to the General Assembly on the location of the headquarters. Everyone agreed it should be in the United States, and I think the basic reason for that was that they didn't want any repetition of what had happened with the League of Nations. They felt that if it was in the United States, this would cement the U.S. commitment to the U.N. and the U.S. would be much less likely to lose interest and pull out or, at least, not adequately support it. -- Whether it has done so is another question.--
So, it was decided it would be in the U.S., and the Headquarters Committee of the General Assembly set up a subcommittee to consider four American cities--New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. I was the American representative on that subcommittee. I had been assigned to the staff of the U.S. Delegation to the General Assembly. Of course, we didn't have to do much around New York; everyone knew what the facilities were there. We chartered a plane and we flew to Boston, then to Philadelphia, and San Francisco. I've never enjoyed anything more in my life than that trip. It was really most interesting. MCKINZIE: Will you tell me how you were received, by whom, and what they did? STOKES: In Boston we were given a dinner with Mayor [James] Curley, a famous Irish-American politician who had an amazingly cultivated manner, considering his background--loved to quote Shakespeare in his speeches and so on. We were shown around various sites in the environs of Boston. We knew it was a
fairly futile exercise, because the Soviet Union had already come out very strongly against Boston. Archbishop [Richard J.] Cushing had issued a blast about Godless, atheistic Russia, and it was quite obvious that the Soviet Union thought that there was too much Catholic influence in Boston. They just said that it would be unacceptable. MCKINZIE: Were the people in Boston acquainted with this, so that they might try to counter it? STOKES: Well, the blast had come out, yes. I don't remember too much. We were given a courteous reception, but the thing wasn't too well organized. Philadelphia, by contrast, gave us an extremely pleasant and efficient reception. They had a planning committee or whatever it was called, a city planning agency of some kind, with a real professional at the head. They had done all their homework; they had all the charts, all of the statistics, and everything else about what they could offer. There was a delightful old judge whose name I can't remember. He was a local judge,
not a Federal judge, and had gotten this idea that we really should be there. He had just given a tremendous amount of time to it himself. They were prepared to offer practically the entire Fairmont Park--there was still this ten square mile idea--to the UN, and there was a lot going for it. We flew to San Francisco, and while I was there we looked at the Presidio. I forget if it was while we were there or if it was shortly afterwards, but the President held a Cabinet meeting and they decided to offer the Presidio to the United Nations. Personally, I was all for that. I thought it would be a great place. The Asiatic countries were all for it, but the European countries were mostly opposed to it, principally, I believe, because it was too far from Europe. Of course, this was in the days before jets, and people who had sat up all night, taking at least fourteen hours to get from Europe to the United States, didn't like the idea of having another plane trip to San Francisco.
So we came back to New York. At that point, a fellow named Jack Ross, who was deputy to Alger Hiss, had seen a big story in Life magazine about how a New York real estate promoter--I think that it was [William] Zeckendorf, one of these big New York promoters--had bought up an area on the East Side and was prepared to build a vast complex there, a sort of a new Rockefeller Center type of thing. When Jack read this, he said to himself, "Well, this is where the United Nations should be." I think that it was his idea to see if John D. Rockefeller, Jr. would buy the property from Zeckendorf and give it to the UN Webb and Knapp was the firm, I believe, and Mr. Zeckendorf was the power behind the throne. Anyway, to make a long story short, Rockefeller said that he would buy it--for a million dollars, if I remember rightly-- and give it to the United Nations, if the State Department could get an act of Congress allowing him to take the whole thing as an income tax deduction. I think that he needed two exceptions to the Internal Revenue Code. In the first place,
a gift to an international organization, rather than to a charity organized in the United States, or to the U.S. or one of its states or subdivisions, would not qualify as a contribution for which a deduction would be allowed. Secondly, there was a limit on how much you could deduct per year; I think it was 10 percent of income. Rich as Rockefeller was, a million dollars was more than 10 percent of his income, apparently. So, we got a special bill through Congress. This was after the General Assembly session, and I had to go up on the Hill for a hearing on that bill. Anyway, that was gotten through. The decision at the General Assembly was to accept this offer. It was very dramatically presented at a meeting of the Headquarters Committee. If Rockefeller had not come through with this--of course, it was assumed that the legislation would go through-- then I think it would have been Philadelphia. MCKINZIE: Rather than San Francisco? STOKES: Rather than San Francisco, yes. There was too
much opposition from the European countries--especially the big countries. I forget what the exact parliamentary situation was. I know there was a vote to accept this offer, and whether there was an alternative vote to accept Philadelphia if it didn't come through, or whether the thing was just put off, I don't remember. But, it was quite clear to me that it would have been Philadelphia, if it hadn't been for this. Afterwards, I was assigned to work with the Office of the Legal Advisor on the necessary legal arrangements. Although I never served on the Legal Advisor's staff officially, I spent practically all my time for a while on the problem of the necessary legal arrangements. This in itself was extremely interesting work. There were some precedents, of course, for other international organizations--the best one being the League of Nations. Switzerland had granted, as I remember, virtually complete diplomatic immunity to the officials of, and representatives to, the League of Nations, so they had the status of diplomats. I don't want to get too much
[38] involved in the legal question. There were two major areas of negotiation. One was to what extent U.S. law was to be operative within the so-called headquarters district--the actual area that was acquired by the United Nations. Second was the extent to which personnel of the Secretariat, or of the delegations to the United Nations, were to have diplomatic immunity. Diplomats under accepted international law, have virtually complete immunity. An Ambassador in Washington can commit murder and the United States cannot try him unless his country waives immunity, and they sometimes do. I don't know of any murder case, but if it's a relatively minor thing, they may waive. They rarely do waive, they are more apt to simply recall the individual. In ordinary bilateral diplomatic relations, the host country can declare a diplomat persona non grata for any reason or no reason, and then his country has to withdraw him. Well, this analogy didn't seem to apply to the United Nations, because a representative of a member country to the United Nations is not accredited to the United States; he
is accredited to the United Nations. So, the United States couldn't claim the right of declaring anybody it didn't like at the United Nations persona non grata and say "go home." This presented a real problem. Of course, we hadn't reached the McCarthy era yet; there were advanced rumblings of it, and people were concerned about subversives. We entered into quite a long negotiation. To go back a minute to the first question, how far U.S. law should apply, the State of New York claimed that New York law applied and the United States couldn't waive the application of New York law. Think they were wrong on that, but we never came to a showdown on it because the New York Legislature appointed a committee under the chairmanship of a delightful old New York Senator named Pliny Williamson. He was very cooperative, but he was standing up for the rights of New York. What he recommended, and what was done, was that New York pass legislation waiving jurisdiction to the extent necessary to comply with the agreement that was worked out for the U.N. Then also, the U.N. wasn't prepared
to insist on immunity in all respects. It was agreed, for example, that the building should conform with the New York Building Code. I remember that the classic case that was brought up was, "What happens if an Arab delegate wants to bring two wives?" Could New York prosecute him for bigamy? The Secretary-General wanted the protection of local law for most things. For example, he wanted New York to prosecute somebody who committed an assault in the headquarters building. He didn't want to have to set up a whole legal system to prosecute a guy who snatched a purse in the lobby of the UN Building or something like that. He wanted generally New York law to apply. So, we wrote into the agreement which we negotiated a provision saying, in substance, that American law, which was defined to mean Federal, state, and city, whatever was applicable to the situation, would apply within the headquarters district, except to the extent that the Secretary-General found he had to make an affirmative finding, that compliance with American law would interfere with the efficient operation of the United Nations.
I checked a few years ago on how often that power had been invoked, and, as I remember, the first invocation was a rather amusing one. New York law forbade the service of liquor in any place of public accommodation on Election Day. The Secretary-General found that that interfered with the efficient functioning of the United Nations, and the bar in the UN headquarters was allowed to stay open on Election Day. The second one had something to do with Social Security, exempting the UN from the application of U.S. Social Security laws because it had its own system for its employees. Another one had to do with qualification for practice. The UN had its own medical staff for the personnel, and the Secretary-General decided that they shouldn't have to be licensed to practice in New York. There may be one or two others that I forget. The most controversial problem, as far as the public was concerned and politically, was the matter of subversives. On the one hand, the extreme security-minded people wanted the U.S. to have the same right that it had for diplomats--to declare
anyone persona non grata and required their removal or not let them into the U.S. in the first place. The U.N. took the position--and so did people in the Government who wanted to build up the U.N.--that the U.S. should not have any veto power over the naming of representatives to the U.N. and their staff or over appointments to the Secretariat of the U.N., or any power to remove persons occupying such positions. It was soon agreed that a limited group of high rank and their immediate families would have complete diplomatic immunity and that the other persons involved were to have immunity with respect only to activities performed in their official capacity. But the tough question was how to get rid of people who committed serious violations of American law. This was worked out on a compromise that I dreamed up. I'm sure somebody else would have dreamed it up if I hadn't, but I did. The compromise was that if any person abused such privileges, the Secretary of State could take up with the Secretary-General the matter of his or her removal. If they could not reach agreement, the matter would be arbitrated. The Secretary of State and the Secretary-General would each name one arbitrator, and if
they couldn't agree on a third, the latter would be named by the President of the International Court of Justice, commonly known as the "World Court." All persons having legitimate business at the headquarters should be given access, but the U.S. could impose reasonable restrictions on their travel beyond the U.N. Headquarters, and so on. Now, that has worked reasonably well but not completely satisfactorily. There was at least one case where the U.S. dragged its feet on the visa of somebody who had legitimate business at the U.N. He wasn't a top delegate, but he was some kind of a consultant or something. By the time that it got to a high enough level in the State Department to have all the security-minded bureaucrats overruled, the meeting that the guy was supposed to come to had already been held and it was too late for him to come. There have been a number of cases where members of the Soviet delegation or Soviet nationals on the staff of the Secretariat have been caught engaging in one kind or another of espionage. In those cases, as far
as I know--this was a fact a few years ago; I checked it--the Soviet Government had never asked for the arbitration procedure. They just yanked their guy out right away. STOKES: Also, Trygve Lie, as the Secretary-General, worked out a deal.--This I had little to do with. I was concerned with the drafting of the headquarters agreement.--An operating arrangement was worked out between him and the U.S. under which the United States would make its own loyalty-security checks of U.S. nationals in the Secretariat and would advise the Secretary-General of the results. He was not bound by that advice, but it is my impression--I had no first hand experience with this--that Trygve Lie, at least, just fired any U.S. national that the United States told him was a security risk. He took the position that this was in the interest of the U.N. He didn't want anyone on his staff who was not a good security risk. This was a delicate subject, because the U.N. Charter provides that members of the Secretariat are, in effect, international civil servants and
that they must not accept instructions from their governments. Everybody knows that the Soviet Union doesn't pay much attention to that, but at least that's the principle. I think that, in varying degrees, most non-totalitarian governments observe it. In the early days of the UN, there were a great many nationals of Communist countries who were quite out of favor with their governments. For example, a great many Czechs went into the Secretariat before the Communists took over Czechoslovakia. They remained in the Secretariat. Of course, there have been many anti-[Marshal Josif] Tito Yugoslavs and so on. Well, I'd say that the most interesting job that I had when I was with the State Department, as far as actually doing things was concerned, was working out these legal arrangements and drafting the Headquarters Agreement. There was also a document called the Convention on Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, which did not deal specifically with the U.N. Headquarters in the U.S., but was adopted by the General Assembly to
define the privileges and immunities of representatives to the U.N. and members of the Secretariat in all member countries. It was called the General Convention. The Headquarters Agreement left some matters open because they were to be covered by the General. Convention. However, the United States did not get around to ratifying the General Convention until sometime during the last couple of years. This left various people in the U.N. without adequate privileges and immunities. The Headquarters Agreement covered representatives to the U.N. in detail, but it didn't cover the Secretariat hardly at all. U.S. legislation took care of it in part, but there were two sticky points: income tax on U.N. salaries of U.S. nationals and compulsory military service. Most of the original member nations were willing to waive income tax on their nationals employed by the U.N. and many of them waived compulsory military service, on the theory that these were international civil servants who should not be beholden to their own countries. On the other hand, from the U.S, domestic political point of view it was obviously extremely difficult. The income tax situation
was solved for a long time on a practical basis with a fund that the various countries contributed to, out of which the UN, in effect, paid people's income taxes for them. The final ratification by the U.S. of the General Convention--I haven't looked at it but I was told this--did include U.S. reservations on those two points. My next job in the State Department--in some ways a more interesting job, although I didn't really feel I was doing anything in it--was to sit for a few months on the Policy Planning Staff under George Kennan. MCKINZIE: How did the appointment come about? STOKES: The staff was made up of people in the different areas of what's now known as expertise. I don't think that word had come into the jargon up to then. There would be a fellow who was expert on the Far East, let's say, one on Europe, and that kind of thing. I guess there was somebody on Economic Affairs. I remember that there was John Davies,
who recently had this horrible experience about his security clearance. He was the one I remember the most clearly, because he and I shared an office. In those days bureaucrats didn't have all the plush facilities that they have now. I was supposed to be the expert on UN aspects and I had to brief Kennan on UN things. Kennan was one of the two or three most brilliant people I've ever been in contact with. He had the most beautiful mastery of the English language. On any subject that he took on, his choice of words, his expression, his figures of speech, his humor were really superb. I enjoyed that experience very much. I had one reservation about him. This may have been just due to my being a naive, eager-beaver one-worlder, but I felt that he was not sufficiently aware of the United Nations and the whole multilateral approach to things as opposed to the old-fashioned bilateral diplomacy. MCKINZIE: Did you tell him that? STOKES: I don't remember telling him in so many words, but I certainly made it clear to him in a number of discussions.
MCKINZIE: The Marshall plan had already passed out of the focus of most Policy Planning Staff discussions by that time? STOKES: I guess so, yes. I had been in on that a little bit at a lower level. After the Headquarters Agreement was out of the way, I had been a representative of our division on a group planning the Greek-Turkish aid program, which preceded the Marshall plan. I sat on the committee that was drafting and preparing legislation on that. I sort of represented the UN point of view. I thought the Department was much too narrow-minded in its bilateral approach to the problem. I believe I'm right in that it was [Arthur] Vandenberg, of all people, who insisted on a provision in the legislation for the Greek-Turkish aid program that the U.N. could take it over whenever it wanted to, or words to that effect. My particular job on the Policy Planning Staff was to prepare, as I remember it, every day, a digest of important developments in the area of the U.N. and the other international organizations. It was a fascinating job, because we saw top secret cables from all over the world. I suppose there were some that were "eyes
only" for the Secretary that we didn't see, but we had very high security clearance. We would go to top secret lectures at the War College. For three months I, as a spectator, was in on practically all the highest level things that were going on, as a participant in the Policy Planning Staff. It was pretty much like Lincoln's Cabinet: George made all the decisions. I did set a precedent. I don't know if it was ever followed again, but I wrote a dissenting opinion once to a recommendation which I thought was clearly wrong. MCKINZIE: You mentioned that you didn't think that George Kennan had quite as much respect or concern for the United Nations as he might have had. At what point do you think that the United Nations maybe lost its chance? There was a lot of talk after the San Francisco Conference about what it might do in the future. There was some question about whether it should have a military contingent and what it should do in the economic and social field. Do you recall at any point thinking,
"Well, we almost had it, but we missed it? STOKES: No. Of course, the big gap in the implementation of the Charter has been the military. The Charter provides for, in effect, a U.N. security force, which is to be made up of forces contributed by member nations. There have been ad hoc forces for the Congo, Cyprus, and so on, but there hasn't been the standing force that had been contemplated in the Charter. Of course, it is primarily the Soviet Union that has blocked that. I think that it's hard to say. I guess the U.N. really reached its height after I left the Department, in the Korean crisis. Owing to the lucky fluke that the Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council for entirely different reasons, it didn't attend the vital meetings that set underway the U.N. intervention in Korea. Now, I suppose that Korea was the great case where the U.N. met a crisis and did what it was supposed to do. Since then there's been, I suppose, a decline in some ways, but in other ways a very interesting, very promising growth. I just happened to read recently the July
issue of Foreign Affairs. In fact I'm in the process of writing a letter to the editor commenting on two articles in this. There is one which is called, "U.S. Foreign Policy: The Search for Focus," by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a professor at Columbia. It's a brilliant article, making an analysis of U.S. foreign policy and indicating what it should be, and the words "United Nations" do not appear in that article. It is, to me, almost incredible. Next to it is an article by Maurice F. Strong, "One Year After Stockholm: An Ecological Approach to Management," describing what the UN is doing about the environment and indicating that this whole international approach to a major world crisis would be almost impossible without the UN. To me, the two articles make a very interesting contrast. MCKINZIE: In that period, between the time you joined the Department and up to the time when you joined the Policy Planning Staff, the precedents were really being set. Of course, they went through the atomic energy issue. They went through the attempt
to establish some kind of military standing force. They went through plans to try to do something on the economic and social scale. All of those things were a little less than at least some visionaries at the end of the war had hoped that they could do. STOKES: Well, I suppose so. On the other hand, I think a lot was accomplished. The whole story of what was done in the Declaration of Human Rights, I think, is a very good one. And take the whole Middle East thing. It hasn't been solved, but at least the lid has been kept on most of the time. The same is true of Cyprus. The Congo, I suppose, was on balance a success. Back in the early days there was a crisis between the Soviet Union and Iran--Azerbaijan. The Soviet Union backed down when the U.N. took an interest. Of course, the glaring exception is the whole Vietnamese matter. But the curious thing is that nobody ever tried to bring that up before the U.N. It wasn't just that the United States didn't bring it up; nobody else brought it up. I don't know the whole story, but
that is a fact. MCKINZE: Everybody talks about George Kennan and the Policy Planning Staff, and from the way you described it you were there to sort of represent a U.N. position. STOKES: Well, I wouldn't say a UN position. I was not under instructions from my division to present any particular point of view to him. I was there really to see that they knew what the UN considerations were on any matter and to see that they knew what was going on. He used the Board as a sounding board, really. We would discuss a particular paper, and sometimes he would prepare a draft or somebody else would prepare a draft of a position paper. We would all discuss it, and then he would submit the final version to the Secretary or Under Secretary. I don't remember ever being asked to prepare a paper. The only lengthy document I prepared, as I say, as a dissenting opinion when I found something wrong. MCKINZIE: Could you comment about the status of the
Policy Planning Staff in the State Department? It was set up so that the decisions in the Policy Planning Staff didn't have to go through the general chain of command in the staff. It went directly to the Secretary. STOKES: That's true, I think the idea was that the decisions which went through the chain of command were the day-to-day decisions: the clearance of instructions to the U.S. Ambassadors in foreign countries, U.S. representatives in international organizations, and so on. There was the most ridiculous, to me, system--as far as I know it still exists--for signing the Secretary's name. All instructions to an ambassador or to a U.S. representative to an international organization went by telegram or cable, signed in the name of the Secretary--Acheson, Marshall, or whoever it was. If he was away and the Under Secretary was acting, then it would be in his name. There was a very detailed procedure indicating who would have the authority to sign the Secretary's or Acting Secretary's name and whose clearance had
to be obtained. Sometimes to get a cable out, you would have to collect a half a dozen initials on it. But, unless it was a terribly important matter, the guy whose name was signed never actually signed, or even saw, the message. It was the same at the other end, coming in. Messages were always signed in the name of the Ambassador, or whoever was in charge, even though he didn't see them. When I was in Paris I had that authority to clear cables. I don't think I had it in Harriman's day, but I had it for Katz or whoever was the U.S. Special Representative at the time. In my mind, it is a senseless procedure, and the silly thing is that if you write a letter, you can't do this. Any letter that went out of the Department was actually signed by the guy who had authority to send it, with his title underneath, but a cable was not so. This was the reason why Uncle Sam had such a huge cable bill. Often there would have been plenty of time to send an airmail letter, but you couldn't physically sign the Secretary's name and the signature of a lower official would not carry enough authority. Bureaucratic problems will always be with us, but this
is one area where I think that there is room for improvement. I think that instructions should be sent in the name of the topmost guy that authorizes them. If the guy at the other end doesn't like it, then he can send back word that he wants instructions from a higher level. But the theory of it is that the guy in the field who gets instructions has got to follow them. He has to have faith that back in Washington they will be properly cleared. MCKINZIE: I think that George Kennan says in his memoirs some place that you had to have a position paper cleared by the people on the various European desks, Eastern European desks, and then somebody on the Russian desk, and in the process of all this they begin to whittle away. The Policy Planning Staff needed to have to be able to present strong ideas which could go directly to the Secretary without this erosion. STOKES: That's very true. Basically though, at least as I remember it, these papers that went to the Secretary were more sort of long range think pieces
than they were instructions as to what to do in an immediate crisis. Now, I am sure that sometimes George Kennan did draft a cable that went through only two or three people, or maybe no one, before the Secretary signed it. But generally the policy planning was what you might call long-range strategy, and the day-to-day instructions went through the chain of command. I was only there two or three months, so I really don't know that much about it, but I would think that the typical case would be that the Policy Planning Staff would prepare a general statement of policy that would be approved, adopted, and distributed. The individual instructions implementing that policy would still go through the clearance procedure. MCKINZIE: When the Policy Planning Staff was first started in March or April of 1947 and they had the first group of people in there, they talked about the need for an economic recovery program in Europe. Kennan, some place, has written that the discussion within the group was so tough, that the people were stating their positions so strongly, and that the
arguments raged with such fervor that at a point he walked out and walked around the building and wept because of the difficulty of accepting all of these things. By the time you were serving in the Policy Planning Staff were there still those rough arguments? STOKES: I don't remember any at all. I was not the first member to be there with the U.N. point of view. I was preceded by Joe [Joseph] Johnson. Generally speaking, my service on the Policy Planning Staff I found fascinating, just from the point of view of keeping informed, but rather frustrating from the point of view of getting anything done. The demands on our time were not at all heavy. I spent a lot of time just reading incoming and outgoing cables, going to lectures at the War College, and I did some background reading too. I thought that I should know all the basic treaties which we were operating under and that kind of thing. It was very much of a one-man show. I didn't resent it really, because I admired George so much. He was such a brilliant guy and I
thought he was doing a great job, I think I would have found it frustrating to stay in that line of work for more than a year or so. MCKINZIE: You didn't stay, in it too long. What happened then? STOKES: Well, by that point--I believe it was before I joined the Policy Planning Staff--Dean Rusk had succeeded Hiss. Rusk, incidentally, was a very different type from Hiss, but I admired him a good deal, too. Much as I have disagreed with what he did in Vietnam, I have felt that the people who just accused him of being imperialist were absolutely wrong. I felt that he was very dedicated to peace and was trying to seek it in the ways that he thought would be effective. I can't remember if he called me up or if George Kennan called me in. I was told, anyway, that they had agreed between them I was more needed back in my former position. Now, whether Kennan wasn't fully satisfied with what I was doing or whether Rusk really needed me back, I don't know. I didn't argue about it at the time, although I was
enjoying being on the Policy Planning Staff. If my dissenting opinion had anything to do with it, I don't know. Anyway, I went back, but only for a few months. Very shortly after that, Milton Katz again came into my life and recommended my name to Harriman, who was looking for a new Solicitor for the Department of Commerce. So, I became Solicitor of the Department of Commerce in February of '48. I don't really remember too much of what I did during those few months that I was back in the Division of International Organization Affairs. I imagine that part of it may have been on some of the Marshall Plan implications and a lot of fairly routine work, such as the U.S. position in various international organizations. MCKINZIE: Did Milton Katz expect that the work you would be doing in the Commerce Department would have some bearing on international work? STOKES: Yes. It had a pretty wide appeal to me, because Harriman was very much an international figure, of course. He had been working on Marshall plan matters
and he was very much aware of the whole international commerce side of the thing. So, this appealed to me. It was a promotion, it was a presidential appointment, and I suppose I found that flattering. It was a more senior job, perhaps in an agency that wasn't quite as close to what I was interested in, but I thought it might be a good stepping stone to come back and do other things in the Department. MCKINZE: By this time you had given up the idea of returning to a private practice? STOKES: When I went with the Department I had decided that this was a chance to get in on the ground floor of building a new world and I would seize this opportunity even though it came earlier than my original plan called for. I had gotten out of private practice in '41 and at that point--when I joined the Department--I didn't think I was ever going back. I thought that I'd just generally devote my career to Government service. So, I went over to Commerce and I enjoyed very much working with Harriman. Of course, he
didn't stay there very long. It was shortly after I came that he left. The principal thing I remember working on with him was the Condon case. The head of the Bureau of Standards was a perfectly delightful character named Dr. [Edward U.] Condon, a distinguished physicist and a very independent guy. But McCarthyism was beginning to raise its head. I don't remember whether McCarthy himself had come into the limelight, but, anyway, the loyalty security thing was beginning to be a problem. Condon was the kind of guy who just went out of his way to be photographed attending a reception at the Soviet Embassy and that sort of thing. He just loved to get people mad, and, of course, there was a huge furor about his being a security risk and that he had all this classified information and so on. As Solicitor, which is the job that is now called General Counsel, I was ex officio a member of the Department's Loyalty Board and had to pass on all these things. Well, there was a big stink about him. I don't remember all the details, but I remember going up on the Hill once with Bill
[William C.] Foster, who was the Under Secretary, and appearing before, I guess, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the committee that [Richard M.] Nixon was then on as a Congressman. It was my only face-to-face exposure to Nixon. Although I'm not an admirer of his, some of his questions were quite reasonable and intelligent. Anyway, I think that was the principal and most interesting thing that I worked on with Harriman. I enjoyed very much getting to know him. MCKINZIE: Did you find him an easy person to work with? STOKES: Well, in a way, yes, in a way, no. He was very approachable, very frank. He didn't stand on his dignity at all. He liked to be called by his first name. He was the kind of fellow--and of course I worked for him later in Paris--that I found I'd go weeks without seeing, thinking that he wasn't particularly interested in what my opinions were about things. Then he'd suddenly call me in and he would just discuss everything that was on his mind--whether it was anything I had to know
about or not--in a very frank, friendly way. I felt that he was a poor administrator, a lousy chairman of a meeting, but he had absolutely superb judgment in this whole business of liberal versus conservative, idealism versus realism. He was a man with real vision, real liberalism, and at the same time he was a realist. I felt that he trod the difficult line between realism and idealism as well as anyone I've ever known. I can't think of anyone that I've worked with in whose judgment I'd have more confidence as to what is the right thing to do in any situation. MCKINZIE: His perception of the national interest seemed to you to be right? STOKES: Yes. And I could make another speech on that subject of "national interest." I'm not convinced that the national interest is the best criterion. I think there is such a thing as international responsibility which sometimes overrides the national interest. Of course, it's a little bit like God or something: everybody has their own
definition of what the "national interest" is. If you say that the national interest is to have a decent world--that this is best for the United States, or to paraphrase Charlie Wilson, "What's good for the United States is good for the world," the test of national interest is all right in that sense. But I feel that the use of the phrase "national interest" encourages looking at things from a completely selfish point of view. I think that a country of the size and power of the United States has to put world interest ahead of the national interest in many cases. So, I quarrel with that phrase "national interest." It is a great pity that it has become such standard jargon in policy making. I think that it's used far too much. Obviously, we think of the national interest first, but I think it's not too different from the way some patriotic Senators will vote for things that are in the national interest against the interest of their own state, occasionally--if an election is far enough away. I think that the United States should think in terms of world
interest. When you get down to rock bottom in discussing this with a lot of people who use the phrase "national interest," they will agree in the long run that there are cases where the national interest is to make a sacrifice in favor of the world interest. MCKINZIE: Well, such a man, I think, is Averell Harriman in some ways. He did equate national interest with improvement of conditions abroad. Wasn't that his view of "international responsibility," to use the words you prefer? STOKES: I think it was his view of what was the right thing to do. I had very high respect for his judgment--tremendous. MCKINZIE: Of course, he deserted you very shortly thereafter. STOKES: Yes, but he was there four or five months. I then worked under [Charles] Sawyer. He was very different--a politician. I didn't see too much of this myself, but I heard instances showing that he was probably a vain person, very concerned about
his prestige and so on. But he was a very able fellow and a very good administrator. He was excellent at a lot of things that Harriman was not good at. He was very good at staff meetings. I used to go around with him to see the different divisions and offices in the Department. He was excellent at knowing what was going on and having orderly channels of communication. It seemed that the right people were consulted about the right things. He ran a very tidy ship in that respect. MCKINZIE: His policies as the Secretary of Commerce and his ideas about the role of the Department of Commerce were somewhat different than Averell Harriman's, I think. For one thing, Secretary Sawyer opposed the aid program for Europe; at least he opposed any grants. He wanted loans on what he called a business-like basis. STOKES: Yes. I don't think he was a man of great vision at all, but he was a very efficient administrator. And this interested me; I remember asking one of my colleagues in the Department about previous
Secretaries, and apparently [Henry A.] Wallace was considered an extremely efficient administrator. People might not like his policies but he ran the Department very efficiently. I think efficiency of administration is something that is entirely different from other qualities, and some people are very good on administration that you might disagree with on policy. Another very efficient administrator was old Joe Kennedy who was Chairman of the SEC when I was there. He was extremely good--really outstanding. MCKINZIE: Did Secretary Sawyer detail you to deal with any particular problems during the period that you worked under him? STOKES: Not that I remember. I just generally had responsibility for legal problems. A lot of it was commenting on legislation that was going to the Hill. One of the more interesting cases that I remember working on, and I don't remember whether Harriman or Sawyer was then Secretary, was the beginnings of the desegregation program. Civil
Aviation was generally under the jurisdiction of the Department of Commerce, and there was a restaurant or cafeteria at Washington's National Airport in nearby Virginia which was segregated as required by Virginia law. Some blacks were objecting. At first blush, it seemed to me that there was nothing we could do about it. Although my whole background had made me very much concerned with Negro problems, it seemed to me that there was nothing we could do about it because of a law known as the "Conformity Act," which provided that on U.S. Government-owned land, local state law applies to matters not covered by Federal law. If somebody commits murder in Yellowstone Park, he's tried in the courts of the state. It isn't a Federal offense unless it comes under some particular Federal statute, such as robbing the mails, killing a U.S. official in the course of his duty, etc. I'm no criminal lawyer, so I don't know just what the exact rule is, but, anyway, that's the general rule. So, it seemed to me that there was nothing we could do about it, and I found that this was the assumption on which the
thing had been allowed to continue for some years before my day. But, I consulted the Department of Justice. We had a general arrangement on which problems that might be broader than the concern of a particular department would be cleared with the Department of Justice. I dealt initially with the Assistant Solicitor General, who was in charge of the general advice-giving function in the Department of Justice. There was a great New Deal lawyer over there, whom I had known in law school, named Melvin Siegel. He said he wanted to take a look at this. Siegel came up with the principle that the Conformity Act did not apply if the local law in question was inconsistent with a basic national policy. His precedent was that there was some case where, I think, the Officers Club at Fort Leavenworth didn't want to comply with the Kansas dry law, and it had been decided that the Kansas dry law was inconsistent with the Army drinking policy. Well, anyway, he found a way around it, and on the strength of this we were able to give the opinion that the Conformity Act did not apply,
and that the facilities should be desegregated. MCKINZIE: Was that done forthwith? STOKES: It was done quite promptly. I just remember giving the answer and I didn't have the job of checking up, but I was told that it was. It seems so obvious now, but the problem was tough in those days. MCKINZIE: How did you come to go to Paris shortly thereafter? STOKES: Well, again, Milton Katz comes into the picture. He got me to Washington in '41 and then he had gotten me out of State into Commerce. Harriman had been named U.S. Special Representative in Europe, and he got Katz to go as his counsel. Katz agreed to go for a year initially, I believe, from the Harvard Law School. I forget when it was, but I think in the summer of '48 when he told me that he could only commit himself for a year and he would like to recommend that I assist and then succeed him. This appealed to me a great deal, although it was really a demotion, I guess, from my Presidential
appointment as Solicitor of the Department of Commerce. In Commerce, I was number four or five in rank. Owing to various vacancies and absences, there were a few days in the summer doldrums when I was Acting Secretary of Commerce, because nobody of higher rank was around--unfortunately, never when there was a Cabinet meeting. I did represent the Department in interdepartmental dealings of a kind but never had anything important to do as Acting Secretary. Anyway, I really jumped at this. I thought it would be a very interesting experience; my wife was interested in the idea of going abroad for a while, so I agreed to do this. I gave Mr. Sawyer ample notice. It was Mr. Sawyer and it was Averell Harriman. Sawyer was a rather stiff fellow; I never got to call him Charlie. And so we went to Paris in February of '49. I went as Assistant General Counsel to the U.S. Special Representative in Europe. Very soon, almost immediately I think, I became Acting General Counsel, because Bill Foster,
the Deputy U.S. Special Representative, came back, very shortly after I got there, to some important job in the United States, and Katz moved up from General Counsel to Deputy U.S. Special Representative. So, I was Acting General Counsel almost immediately and, in due course, became General Counsel. Then after a while Harriman came back to the U.S., and Katz became the Special Representative. I became Special Assistant to Katz and ceased to be General Counsel for a while. In a later reorganization, I became General Counsel again, after the U.S. Special Representative's job was expanded and included NATO as well as the economic thing. It was all fairly complicated. So, during my stay in Paris I was part of the time General Counsel to the U.S. Special Representative, part of the time Special Assistant to the U.S. Special Representative, and probably part of the time acting as both. The work as Special Representative I found much more interesting than the work as General Counsel. As General Counsel, my responsibilities were just primarily interpreting American law: what we could
and couldn't do under the Act of Congress that authorized the program and established the Agency. The most difficult decisions were those involving the use of what we called counterpart funds. MCKINZIE: Would you address yourself to the whole idea of counterpart funds? There are some people who, after the fact, think that the sheer existence of those was unnecessary. STOKES: Well, as of that time I thought they were a great idea. They served several purposes. They served a political purpose--it wasn't a give-away. The European countries were paying for what they needed. There was a frightful dollar shortage, the opposite of what there is now. Europe was trying to rebuild after the war, and nearly everything they needed had to be paid for in dollars--even coal was shipped from the United States to Europe. It just seems incredible, but this is true. They needed, desperately, things that could only be paid for in dollars. Sure, they needed money, too, but there was a great deal that they
could pay for in their own currencies. The trouble was they just didn't have the dollars. With all the complications in the exchange rates and everything, they couldn't get the dollars--they couldn't sell enough to the U.S. to earn the dollars. So, counterpart funds meant that they paid in their own currencies. Then the funds paid in those currencies were made available for two purposes. One was U.S. expenses in Europe. Although my salary was paid in dollars, my living allowance for rent was paid in counterpart funds. Basically, all of the local expenses of American missions in Europe were paid out of counterpart funds. The U.S. also used counterpart funds to stockpile strategic materials. My office had the responsibility for negotiating and drafting contracts for the purchase of strategic materials which the United States was stockpiling. The other use of counterpart funds was for expenses of the European governments, for things that we--the U.S.--thought were good for them, so to speak, to expand their economy or whatnot. Those were released with U.S. approval. To me, it seemed like
a very useful device. There has been one difficulty. These counterpart funds in some countries have grown to such huge proportions. I saw something in the paper recently to the effect that the amount of counterpart funds that are impounded in India, for example, is fantastic. All the aid that we have given India, grains that they bought and so on, comes to an absolutely fantastic amount. So, the United States just owns so many rupees or so much of the Indian economy. I'm not an economist and I don't want to get too far into technical ground, but basically I thought counterpart funds were a good idea. MCKINZIE: Didn't some people at that time contend that the U.S. control of the counterpart funds constituted direct intervention in the internal affairs of foreign governments? STOKES: I was not too aware of that at the time. This was still in the days when they were awfully glad to get help. There wasn't as much resentment, probably, as there was later. Of course, this is
the basic dilemma of foreign aid that there's no easy answer to. The United States is accused, constantly, of either or both of two courses of action. One is in handing over the money and letting the foreign government decide what to do with it, which sometimes means that it is spent on palaces for presidents, Mercedes for officials, and that it is all skimmed off at high levels and never gets down to improve the lot of the poor peasant or worker. On the other hand, we were accused of interfering in the country, and this I think is more of a problem in Latin America, especially. I only know from what I read in the papers. You constantly see aid to Latin America criticized on these two completely inconsistent grounds: One, we are aiding the rich, the military cliques, the landowners, and all the rest of them. Two, it is Yankee imperialism and we are interfering in how they run their countries. Well, you can't have it both ways. I don't know what the answer is, and that is I think the basic dilemma of our aid. There is no easy answer. You just have to try to strike
a reasonable balance between the two. MCKINZIE: At that time, though, it was not a burning issue or something you'd lay awake at night thinking about? STOKES: No, it wasn't. To begin with, the European countries that we were dealing with were democracies. There wasn't the general criticism that the money wasn't getting down to the right people. Of course, I did not deal much with Europeans themselves, except at the OEEC meetings. I didn't negotiate with individual countries, so I was not too aware of these problems. But my general impression was that they welcomed assistance. I'm sure that there was some resentment, but I personally didn't see it. To digress a little bit from counterpart funds, one thing that, as a lawyer, interested me a great deal, was the whole matter of the difference between our antitrust laws and the European cartel practices. This was an area where I felt that the United States was extremely helpful to Europe, in getting Europeans
aware of some of the evils of cartelization. I happened to sit in on a meeting when the Schuman Plan had just been broached. There was a fellow named Thompson in the Embassy, a very brilliant guy. He was a Treasury representative at the Embassy and he knew [Jean] Monnet well. I sat in on a meeting with him and Monnet in the early days of the Schuman Plan, when he wanted a lawyer there. We were discussing with Monnet the whole problem of antitrust and cartel. Monnet was very alert to antitrust problems and very concerned that the European coal and steel cartels could be a very baneful influence. He asked very intelligent questions. I think that this fellow Thompson had a good deal to do with encouraging Monnet to write strong antimonopoly provisions into the Schuman Plan for the European Coal and Steel Community, which later, of course, was expanded into the European Economic Community. I think that one of the most beneficial things that Europe learned from the United States in the postwar years was an appreciation of the importance of a reasonable amount of
competition and eliminating many of the abuses of cartels. Now, you can't say that they should take over our system lock, stock, and barrel. Europeans, rightly or wrongly, and I think in some cases rightly, attach more importance to security than they do to prosperity. Labor is not, or at least then was not, nearly as mobile as it is in the United States. The European worker would expect to work in a factory in his hometown and expect to work there the rest of his life. The boss of that factory also would expect to run it the rest of his life and wasn't interested in mergers, or combines, or some big conglomerate or something. And the whole tendency of the tradition of European industry was a more static one. They weren't nearly as competitive as our industry was. They tended to allocate markets and products between themselves. "You make gadgets and I'll make widgets; you make exterior paint and I'll make interior paint," or whatnot. They agreed on prices--not to try to undercut each other--and to compete--where they
did compete--only on quality, on service, and so on. All that meant a great deal of encouragement for a static approach to things, a lack of innovation, lack of research and development, use of obsolete machinery and equipment, and so on. But it also meant greater security--greater job security at all levels. So, it's a matter of different values. I wouldn't say that they should take over completely our antitrust philosophy, but there were, undoubtedly, a great many serious abuses of cartels, where the big fellows froze out the little ones, and so on. I think that this is getting beyond the Marshall plan itself, but along the way the Marshall plan contributed to this in the general contacts that it promoted between American and European industry. I think that one of the best things the Marshall plan did was the technical assistance program. We would have American technicians go to Europe and give technical advice on a great many things and vice versa: a great many Europeans were invited to come to the United States and visit American
plants, not only technicians but also labor leaders. I think this did a great deal to alert management to the importance of research, development, more active competition, and more concern for labor, too. I remember reading one report saying that the biggest impression that the Europeans had when they came to the United States was to see American management in shirtsleeves, just that approach, with more contact with labor and more concern with what was going on. I think the program helped also to get labor more amenable to increasing productivity. The European labor unions' attitude had been--again I'm generalizing a view not based on my first hand familiarity--against labor-saving devices, wanting to keep labor input as great as possible. American labor, with a few exceptions like the railroad unions and the construction unions, has generally not opposed labor-saving devices. In fact, whatever else you may say about him, old John L. Lewis encouraged them in the coal industry, believing that in the long run labor would be higher paid if it had to run complicated machinery.
I think that those two things, the antitrust approach and the productivity of labor, were two of the big side benefits from the contacts between American and European industry and labor that grew out of the Marshall plan. Of course, one aspect of the counterpart funds, that I knew practically nothing about, but has come into the limelight occasionally, is their use by the CIA. Those are interesting problems. It's hard to know what's right. I mean, if you see a Communist labor union that's got a fat subsidy from Moscow, it's very easy to convince yourself that the anti-Communist labor union, which is trying to do a better job for the working man and at the same time preserve civil liberties, should be in a position to compete. The Communist organization has all that money, and here is all this counterpart around. The same thing goes for the subsidized press and all the rest of it. I heard occasionally of such uses, but I didn't get into it much. That undoubtedly was one use--how big I don't know; I never saw the figures.
MCKINZIE: You went from counsel then to Special Assistant. You mentioned that that was more interesting--why so? STOKES: Well, I guess it was more interesting. The legal problems as such were not terribly fascinating. It was mostly interpreting the acts of Congress--what we could and couldn't do. There was some contact with French lawyers, renting office space and so on, but they weren't of great importance. As Special Assistant I really had two functions. The Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) met on two levels, what they called the official level and the ministerial or government level. Every few months they would have a ministerial meeting. The United States was not a member then. It's a member of the present organization, the OECD. In the OEEC then we had an observer status, but that didn't prevent very active participation. At the ministerial meetings, the European nations were represented by Cabinet ministers--such as Foreign Ministers, Finance Ministers or Ministers of Trade or Economics--and the U.S.
was represented by Harriman, Foster, Katz, Porter, or whoever was in charge as U.S. Special Representative in Europe. There were much more frequent "official level" meetings, at which the European countries were represented by their permanent representatives to the OEEC. Each of the participating Marshall Plan countries had a delegation to the OEEC, and the U.S. Special Representative in Europe was the U.S. observer. Well, I was normally, for quite a period, the U.S. representative at these official-level meetings, and that I found extremely interesting. There were general discussions of what the OEEC should be doing. I didn't hesitate to put in my oar when I felt like it. So, that took up a good deal of my time. I was also in the cable clearance system that I described before. We had a very peculiar system under which the Office of the U.S. Special Representative was not only represented at the OEEC, but was also a sort of field headquarters for administration of the Marshall Plan. So, we sent instructions to the Marshall Plan missions in the
capitals of the participating countries. They got some instructions from Washington and some from us. On paper it was an outrageous setup, but actually it worked reasonably well. There was not that much conflict between us and Washington, and we would generally clear ahead with Washington the instructions that we were to give to the missions--it went quite well. So, I was a signing officer for the cables to Washington saying, "We think this should be done or that should be done," or cables to the field instructing them to do this and that. I didn't draft these cables. They were drafted by the responsible officials who were the monetary experts, trade experts, economic experts, or what have you. I was one of several, who had this clearing authority. Another was Philip Bonsal, the Political Adviser to the U.S. Special Representative. I think his last important job was Ambassador to Spain when Castro came in. He also had this authority, and I forget just how we divided it up. We alternated staying late in the evening to get the cables out. Well, this got me into policy
making. Of course, I didn't actually make policy, but I had the responsibility of seeing that the cables that went out were in line with what I knew to be established policies. Getting back to my old hobby about our problems with clarity in the War Production Board, here it wasn't so much a matter of clarity as a matter of brevity. In those days cables were mostly still ciphered and deciphered by individual cipher clerks. There were very few machines, and this was a tremendous expense. I remember we sent out a circular cable to the U.S. missions in the Marshall Plan countries once, and it went out as classified so it went in code. We got a message back from the guy in the Netherlands saying, "Your cable so and so has occupied our entire code room for three days," or some such figure. I had constant battles with the writers of cables to make them short, mostly from the point of expense and from the point of efficiency, not tying up the code rooms. It was a very difficult battle. Often I'd just do it myself by eliminating obviously superfluous words. Again, we got into this ridiculous situation that I mentioned in the
State Department where cables were signed in the name of the Chief of the office, but you had to sign a letter yourself. Fortunately, there was a halfway measure that helped a lot, called "airgrams." They weren't manually signed because they went through some printing device like the cables, but not in code. It was perfectly ridiculous. I remember one fellow who was pleading with me to approve a long cable. I said, "Well, why can't this go as an airgram?" He had plenty of time; there was no security problem; the only reason he wanted this long thing to go as a cable was so it would get top level attention. He thought an airgram wouldn't seem important enough to reach the mission chief. So, finally I said, "Well, all right. Send this by airgram, and you can send a short cable to the guy at the top saying, 'I call your personal attention to airgram so and so. These were just little housekeeping chores, but they're of interest. MCKINZIE: This whole period that you were serving in Paris was a period when a great deal of change
had taken place in Europe and also in the U.S. aid program. About that time were all these negotiations, the signing of NATO and the beginning of rearmament or the efforts to rearm. There was a sort of shift, perhaps imperceptible on the spot, of that aid program from one which was fully economic to one where military aid programs were dovetailed with it. I wonder if you could comment on that? STOKES: Well, I really don't feel very helpful on that. It was sort of a gradual shift. Of course, I was terribly interested in what was going on. When NATO headquarters were moved from London to Paris, the Office of Special Representative thus became involved with more military affairs than it had been before. It was roughly at that time that I shifted back to being General Counsel and not being Special Assistant to the U.S. Special Representative, so I did not get nearly as much into policy at that period as I had in the exclusively economic period. My last year in Paris was really not as interesting as the others. I was operating
at a somewhat lower level and I didn't feel terribly involved in this whole policy, the rearmament angle of the thing. We had legal problems arising out of NATO's moving to Paris and all that, but I don't think I'm really very helpful on that. I might comment on another aspect that I did see something of, and that was the economic blockade--almost--of the Soviet Union. I forget when it started, but fairly early on we got concerned with blocking or discouraging the shipments to the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe of strategic materials and components. We had a committee, that I was not on, concerned specifically with this. It wasn't officially part of OEEC, but it was a committee in which the United States was very active in discouraging shipment of strategic supplies to the Soviet Union. There were various controls to prevent the reshipment to Eastern Europe of shipments that were financed with our economic aid. Now, on all that I had no policy role at all; I did not sit on any committees. As an individual I remember feeling that our policy
was unnecessarily restrictive. Although I had no first hand impressions of the Soviet Union since the war, I just felt that the figures spoke for themselves. After the amount of loss of life and physical destruction that the Soviet Union had suffered during World War II, they were not about to mount an offensive against Western Europe. It seemed to be perfectly clear that they were interested in taking over Western Europe but that they wanted to do it by subversion, fifth column and so on. They might be prepared to give a little military help here and there at the right moment, but they were not planning a massive military offensive. They couldn't afford it in terms of their own human resources and their own public relations. Also, though they wanted to take over Western Europe they wanted to take it over as a going concern. They didn't want to take over a Europe devastated by their own bombs. They wanted to take it over to communize it and have it like the satellites in Eastern Europe. So, it seemed to me that we were greatly exaggerating the danger.
Of course, I didn't know all the secret information that a lot of other people did, but, simply looking at the figures and what one heard about the desire for peace of the Russian people, I thought we were grossly exaggerating the military threat--not the Communist threat from the point of view of subversion--I was aware of that. Also, by cutting them off from strategic materials, we were simply forcing them to build up their own facilities for providing them, so in the long run they would be more self-sufficient and less dependent on supplies from us. I was definitely concerned with that aspect of the Cold War. MCKINZIE: By the same reasoning, you'd be inclined to think that NATO was somewhat less necessary as an organization with military hardware end-items production and that kind of thing? STOKES: I really didn't study the figures enough to know. I wouldn't question that the Soviet Union would have taken over Western Europe, if it could have done it with a minimal military effort, just
landing a few paratroopers here and there to seize the important buildings and so on. I didn't question that, but I felt that a mass invasion was not a real threat. Again, of course, I didn't know. I have no doubt they were building up a huge army, and the Berlin blockade indicated that they were prepared to do some fairly drastic things. I didn't question that some rearmament in Europe was necessary. I hadn't questioned that at all. I think I was more familiar with the economic than the military. I did feel that the need for an economic blockade was exaggerated. I wouldn't say that we should ship them atom bombs, but that by doing what we did we were increasing their suspicion of us. I suppose that it's the truth that almost any preparation for self-defense makes the other side feel that it may not be self-defense, it may be for attack. In a sense, some preparations for war make war more likely rather than less. It's a difficult decision and I don't pretend to know enough about the basic military and security matters to be called an expert. This was my general view.
MCKINZIE: Was the Marshall Plan fully carried out? Of course, it brought recovery, that's an undeniable fact, but from your perspective was there any highly desired goal which was somehow diverted by virtue of the military aspect? STOKES: No. I couldn't say that. I think you have to take into account that the Marshall Plan money had to be appropriated by Congress. You can't assume that they would have been willing to appropriate for economic and social objectives all that they appropriated for the military objectives. I think that basically the Marshall Plan was a huge success in the economic field. MCKINZIE: Why did you decide to come back from Paris? STOKES: Well, I was, in effect, doing less interesting work. It was also due to family considerations. We sort of felt that we had had an interesting European experience but didn't want to stay there indefinitely. John Kenney, who by the summer of '52 was in charge of the Mutual Security Agency in Washington, asked me if I would succeed Jim [James] Cooley as General
Counsel of the Mutual Security Agency. One thing that influenced my decision was that it looked as if the Republicans were coming in, and I didn't know what my future would be. I was interested in staying in Government and I thought that back in Washington I would be in a better position to look around for something else in Government. I very seriously considered taking the opportunity to go into the Foreign Service, because there was legislation then which permitted some lateral entry if you'd been in related work. You could get in without taking the exams and everything. And I seriously thought of applying for admission to the Foreign Service. So, I accepted this job of General Counsel in Washington and I got back in the fall of '52. This was a sort of peculiar setup. There was the Mutual Security Agency run by John Kenney. Harriman then had an office, I guess, in the Executive Office of the President. I think he was Director of the Office of Mutual Security or something like that. He had overall responsibility that included relations
with NATO. He had his own legal adviser in this job, Bob [Robert] Eicholz. It was really a very complicated setup. Harriman set the overall policy and we were the operating agency for economic aid. After the Republicans came in, Stassen was appointed to both jobs--both Harriman's and Kenneys. He merged the two and in the process I got pretty well merged out. Bob Eichholz was General Counsel and I became "Special Counsel" or "Special Consultant," I think I was called. At that point it was pretty clear that there was no future there for me. I don't know if I'd have been fired, but Bob wasn't going to stay either. A Republican was going to get the General Counsel job, anyway. I said that I considered trying to get into the Foreign Service, but basically for family reasons I didn't. We weren't that sure that we wanted to live abroad. We wanted to see something of our parents and wanted our children to know them better. I had a very interesting few months in a completely unofficial job. I remained on the Mutual
Security Agency payroll but I was loaned as Acting Special Counsel, or something, to the U.S. Information operation, which was then being reorganized. Bob Johnson, the old Time-Life fellow, was in charge. This was in the State Department and it was being reorganized into a more or less independent agency--I'd have to check the titles as to whether it was then the U.S. Office of Information, the U.S. Information Agency, or whatever. Anyway, I was loaned as Special Counsel to Bob Johnson to aid in the reorganization of the information program--that meant working on legislation and various things. Bob Johnson was a very nice, high-minded fellow, but not at all in good health. The power behind the throne was a wonderful guy named Martin Merson, who was some kind of a special assistant to Johnson. [See Mersons book, The Private Diary of a Public Servant, MacMillan, 1955. ] Martin did a tremendous amount of work and really ran the show, and there were various other interesting people there. I worked very hard for two or three months and enjoyed it a great deal. McCarthyism was really in the limelight then, McCarthy had been making his
book-burning speeches about the books by dangerous radicals, in his opinion, that were carried in the U.S. Information Libraries abroad. I had a lot of work in helping to draft speeches for Johnson. That was great fun. Norman Cousins was pressed into service. He came down, very unofficially, to help us with these speeches. He was a great writer, and I enjoyed that a lot. We had a very interesting time, those few months. It was mostly writing speeches or justifications for legislation, working on legislation, and so on. There was the old problem, that keeps coming up, as to the extent to which these various peripheral foreign activities should be in the Department of State or should be in separate agencies. I had seen it in the Department of Commerce, where the issue was whether it or State should control the commercial attachés. [See his book, The Private Diary of a Public Servant, MacMillan, 1995.] MCKINZIE: You mentioned at the very beginning that at the end of the war you made a conscious decision to take up Government service rather than go back into private practice because you wanted to be a
part of what you considered the opportunity to build a new world. In 1953, where there was a break in your career, did you feel that there was a brave new world beginning? Did you feel fulfilled by the part you had played in that world? STOKES: I thought that certainly the UN hadn't accomplished everything that we hoped, and certainly the Cold War was something that became apparent fairly soon after the war. The Soviet Union was going to present a great problem. I never felt that war with the Soviet Union was as likely as some people contended, as I have already explained. But, I felt that a lot was being done and that it wasn't hopeless. I was very grateful for the opportunity that I had had to see something of what was going on and play a very small role in it. MCKINZIE: Perhaps then you could say something about people who had been very influential. STOKES: Well, in addition to what I said about people like Kennan and Harriman, I would like to say a little about Milton Katz.
Entirely apart from the personal sense of gratitude toward him for the fact that he got me into the work in the War Production Board, Commerce, and the foreign aid program, I felt that the job he did in Paris as U.S. Special Representative was really outstanding. I would put him in the same bracket with Kennan--an extraordinarily brilliant mind and a man who can express himself superbly. I remember when I was in law school, hearing some students that were in his class describe an incident when there had been a class discussion. Everyone was floundering around, including the professor, and finally Katz said, "Professor _______, don't you mean...?" then spelled it all out, one, two, three. Everybody sort of sighed with relief, and the professor said, "Well, Mr. Katz, maybe you'd better come up and take over." This story is probably exaggerated. Anyway, he had the most extraordinary capacity for analyzing a complicated problem and describing it in clear terms and, I also thought, a great ability as a negotiator, as a speaker, and as an administrator. The particular thing that was highly technical, and that I don't know too
much about the technical side of, was the monetary crisis, which was confronting Europe at the time when he was Acting U.S. Special Representative. A plan for the European Payments Union was finally worked out. Bob [Robert] Triffin, who was one of the economists on the staff, was, I guess, the principal economics brain on the thing. But without Katz's analysis and realistic political and diplomatic approach, I don't think it ever would have been done. I think he did a tremendous job, as far as I can make out--I was not in these conferences myself--from what I saw of communications, hearing him discuss the thing, and generally hearing it talked about. I think the job that he did in helping to develop this plan, and in selling the British on it, was great. The British Labour government was apparently very much opposed to it at the start. Katz established a very close relationship with the Chancellor of the Exchequer [Hugh] Caitskell. I think that Katz really saved that situation more than any other one man in getting agreement on that European Payments Union. In
other things too, I just thought he did a really tremendous job. Of the people that I worked with in the Truman period, he was the one I knew the best and saw the most of, so perhaps I am not completely in focus in appraising all of them. But he and Kennan were, just from the point of view of brains, the ones that I was most impressed with. As I say, Harriman is a real statesman from the point of view of judgment, and Katz, I thought, had superb judgment, too. MCKINZIE: From the point of view of your career, was all of this the smart thing for you to have done? STOKES: Well, it depends on how you define career. From the point of view of personal satisfaction in life, I would not hesitate to do it all over again. From the point of view of strictly a professional career, to be realistic, I would have to say this: I left Government after having been in it from '41 to '53. I left to go back to private practice, having reached the stage in Government where I was sufficiently advanced so that my job had to go to a Republican.
Then it was not easy to find Government work that I considered of sufficient interest to me, although I'm sure I could have found something to do. At the same time, I went back to private practice without being a national figure to whom clients would flock because of my success in Government. So, I have no doubt, from the narrow professional point of view, that if I had gone back to law practice immediately after the war, I would have made more money in the practice of law. But I don't think that's the way to judge it, and from the point of view of satisfaction, I did find it extremely satisfying. I had an interesting law practice when I went back, although it wasn't as lucrative or perhaps as fascinating as it would have been if I had gotten into bigger things.
[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
American Committee to Aid the Allies, 3
Blaisdell, Thomas C., 21 Cartels, European, 80-82 Davies, John Paton, 47-48 Eaton, Frederick M., 20 Gaitskell, Hugh, 102 Harriman, Averell, 61-65, 67,
72, 74, 96-97,
103 India, use of counterpart funds, 77 Johnson, Joseph, 59 Katz, Milton, 2, 61, 72,
74, 100-103 Labor unions, U.S. vs. European, 83-84 McCarthy, Joseph R., 98-99 National Airport restaurant, Washington, D.C.,
"National interest" vs. internationalism, 65-67 Nelson, Donald M., 14-15 New York, N.Y. as U.N. site, 35-36 Nixon, Richard M., 64 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 90-91 O'Brian, John L., 5, 15, 20 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as U.N. site, 33-34, 36-37 Rockefeller, John F., Jr., 35-36 Sandifer, Durward V., 26
Iran crisis, 1946, 53 strategic materials, restriction on shipments to, 91-93 UN security forces, opposition, 50, 51 Stimson, Henry L., 1 Stokes, Isaac, background, 1-4 Strategic materials, cold war, 91-93 Strong, Maurice F., 52 Switzerland, League of Nations site, 37 Triffin, Robert, 102 Un-American Activities Committee, 64
Economic and Social Council, 26-27 espionage activities of Secretariat personnel, 43-45 General Convention on Privileges and Humanities, 46-47 headquarters, establishment of, 27-37 international security, failure to promote, 50-53 New York law, application to personnel of, 39-41 U.S. Special Representative in Europe, Office of, 93-95 Vandenberg, Arthur H., 49 Wallace, Henry A., 69 Zeckendorf, William, 35
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