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At Amherst, Anna McCloy's boy studied hard (a cum laude graduate), earned part of his way by waiting on tables for meals, tutoring during vacation, won a letter in tennis. The war in Europe invaded the Amherst campus in 1916. Jack McCloy plumped for "preparedness" as against "pacifism." He spent the summer after graduation training at Plattsburg. The U.S. was in the war as he finished his first year at Harvard Law. He hurried to Plattsburg again.
Lieut. McCloy caught the eye of his commanding officer, General Guy Preston, a salty cavalryman who had fought at the Battle of Wounded Knee near the Cheyenne River, where in 1890 the Sioux made their last stand. McCloy went to France as Preston's operations officer in the 160th Field Artillery Brigade. Years later, Preston told another officer why he had chosen McCloy as staff aide. "One day at Fort Ethan Allen, I walked behind him after he had been riding. I could see blood all over his pants. I said to myself, any man who could keep riding with that much pain must be a damn good officer."
When they got back to mustering-out camp in Virginia, Preston asked his young aide to take a permanent Army commission. But McCloy was already haunting the law libraries. Last week the general, now 85 and retired in Palo Alto (Calif.), described the scene: "One evening McCloy came to eat with me. I saw he was preoccupied. Finally he exclaimed: 'General, that abstract law is beautiful stuff.'
"I saw his face was radiant as an angel's. I said at once: 'I'll never again ask you to stay in this man's army. Your destiny is too manifest.' "
Lawyer's Lawyer. McCloy graduated from Harvard Law in 1921 with good grades, though he missed Law Review by a shadow. Nowadays a good friend as well as former student of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, McCloy jokes over the fact that the Justice did not remember him at Harvard: "He kept all the smart boys in the front row." McCloy headed for the big law firms of Wall Street. First with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, later with Cravath, De Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood, he and other fledgling "clerks" read and studied morning & night, drafting contracts, charters and all the other documents of corporate and financial law.
The juniors were made to stand on their feet. The pace was swift, the competition was stern. Says a friend who has known McCloy ever since those days: "Jack learned not to depend on others. It is surprising how many men in Washington have never learned how to handle anything themselves, and depend on other people to shape up the work. The one thing McCloy has never had to do is to depend on somebody else to do his draft ing; he can do it better himself and he knows it."
One of Cravath's clients, Bethlehem Steel, had a stake in the Black Tom case, then being argued before the International Court at The Hague. McCloy, who on his wedding day in 1930 had sailed to take over Cravath's Paris office, went to observe the Hague proceedings and came away fascinated. He devoted the better part of his next ten years to the case, one of the most celebrated in modern international law.