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Baruch always operated alone, always held high his reputation for personal integrity. Twice unfriendly Congressional committees tried to spear him; each time he emerged without a scratch.
When he joined the World War I Industries Board, Baruch liquidated his market holdings and put $5,000,000 into Liberty Bonds: his taxable income dropped from its prewar $2,300,000 to $617,000 in 1917 and a loss in 1918. He spent $85,000 of his own money to send a government mission to England, and many more thousands to transport his board's 4,000 women workers back to their homes after the Armistice. (In the last 25 years, he has probably spent $2,500,000 on public service. Once in the '30s, alarmed by U.S. unpreparedness, he offered the Army $3,300,000 to buy machinery to make smokeless powder.)
Wartime Czar. Baruch was one of the few advisers who remained close to Woodrow Wilson throughout the war and the bitter days that followed. Woodrow Wilson called him "Dr. Facts"; he still refers to the President as "the most Christlike man who ever lived."
In wartime Washington, Baruch—with his stockmarket millions and his undisguised taste for race horses, horse trainers and prizefight managers—was a distinctly gaudy character. One excited White House caller shuddered: "Why, this man is nothing but a speculator!" Said Woodrow Wilson: "I thought he was a good speculator."
On the War Industries Board, Baruch surpassed Wilson's faith in him. In many ways, he wielded more power than Wilson himself. The military was dependent on his board for all munitions, as civilians were for their sustenance.
His record, in a battle of economies uncharted in previous U.S. history, was brilliant. His first job was to provide raw materials. With a speculator's foresight, he bought up a supply of toluol (for TNT) before the Army was fully aware of its importance. By adroit bluffing, he got the Chilean Government to help knock the price of nitrates from 7½¢ to 4⅛¢ a lb. He got jute from India at his price by threatening to withhold the silver shipments that stabilized India's rupee. He got iron ore from Sweden, wangled mules from Spain. In effect, he invented modern economic warfare.
Blueprinter. Baruch's master blueprint for industrial mobilization brought order out of the war's early confusion. As all-powerful chairman of the War Industries Board, he established the first wartime priorities system for materials and labor, set up production schedules, cut down civilian industries.
By 1943 standards, U.S. mobilization in 1918 was far from total war: the nation spent $35,000,000,000 in all of World War I v. an estimated $106,000,000,000 this year alone. Yet the industrial achievements under Baruch were near-miracles at the time. They awed the Germans, as the Junkers confessed in postwar memoirs.
After the war, Bernie Baruch went back to finance—this time as a creative investor. He made money during the '20s, quietly liquidated his investments before the 1929 crash. He went on serving as unofficial adviser to Presidents: Harding, Coolidge, Hoover. Under Franklin Roosevelt he has been a mother lode of fact and theory to the Administration—as well as its severest friendly critic.