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A shock-haired youth named John J. (for Jay) McCloy, then just out of Amherst, later was to spend ten years of his life proving that the rumors were true, and hanging the Black Tom guilt on the German government. He learned the worst of the Germans as he threaded his way through a maze of false leads up & down Europe; he learned of German deceit and arrogance and violence that had led to one world calamity and was to lead to another.
Between Hate & Love. Between wars, too, Jack McCloy learned something of the Germans at their best. On an eastbound train in 1929 he ran into his Amherst classmate, Lew Douglas (now Ambassador to Great Britain), and Mrs. Douglas. Arriving in New York, they introduced McCloy to Mrs. Douglas' sister, Ellen Zinsser. McCloy liked Ellen, and liked the Zinsser home at Hastings-on-Hudson. Her father, Frederick, a chemist, was a brother of Harvard's famed Bacteriologist Hans (Rats, Lice and History) Zinsser. Although the elder Zinssers were U.S.-born, the Zinsser family had a German-American flavor of stability, culture and family affection.
Fifteen years after he had married Ellen, Jack McCloy, a U.S. Assistant Secretary of War, heard Lieut. General Courtney Hodges explain that he was about to shell Rothenburg. McCloy had visited Rothenburg and he remembered it —the narrow cobbled streets within the wall, the Gothic spires, the Renaissance houses. "Do you have to destroy Rothenburg?" he pleaded. "Maybe not," said Hodges. "Maybe the town can be induced to surrender." Negotiations were begun. Next day Rothenburg surrendered, and in 1948, out of gratitude, it made Jack McCloy an honorary citizen.
This week, McCloy, who has good reasons for hating the worst and loving the best of Germany, is getting ready to go back there as U.S. High Commissioner, the civilian successor to General Lucius D. Clay. McCloy will have to negotiate (which is what he does best) with the French, the British and the Russians, but his main job will be to bear a heavy share of the responsibility for suppressing the worst in the Germans, drawing out the best. For this people have the greatest capacity for good & evil in Europe, and the future of the world may turn upon whether they can be made a democratic, peace-loving people.
"There is some destiny about all this business," says Jack McCloy. "Germany seems to dog my footsteps."
Between Camp & Campus. Jack McCloy's first steps were taken in Philadelphia where he was born in 1895 ("north of Market Street, on the wrong side of the railroad tracks," McCloy explains). His father, who came of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian stock, worked for an insurance company. When Jack was six his father died, leaving no insurance. Mother Anna May Snader McCloy, of Pennsylvania Dutch (i.e., German) background, learned nursing, told Jack his father had hoped he would be a lawyer, skimped & saved to send him to Maplewood, a Quaker boarding school, then to Peddie, Amherst College and finally Harvard Law School.