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At the other end, Forrestal, himself in no little awe of Stimson, was properly impressed, looked at McCloy, and said: "I never knew you were on such intimate terms with the Secretary."
Control, Not Vengeance. McCloy attended the Casablanca, Cairo and Potsdam conferences. Although deeply immersed in the war, he did not forget the war's purpose. In 1944 the U.S. had worked out no clear policy of what it wanted to do with defeated Germany. Strictly speaking, such a policy should have been the responsibility of the State Department; but in those years Washington expected little from the State Department, and was rarely surprised. A German policy was cooked up at the Treasury, of all places, and presented to Roosevelt on the eve of the Quebec conference.
Published reports that McCloy had a hand in concocting this Morgenthau "goat pasture" plan for Germany are the precise opposite of the truth. McCloy gave Stimson his first tip on the Morgenthau plan's existence, and it was Stimson with MCloy's help who finally defeated the plan— but only after irreparable harm had been done. The press disclosed that Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had initialed the Morgenthau plan at Quebec, and the Nazis were able to turn this fact into a powerful propaganda weapon for bolstering German resistance in the last year of the war. Stimson and McCloy took the position that the Atlantic Charter pledged the U.S. and Britain to help "victor and vanquished" toward equal economic opportunity. McCloy helped Stimson to draft a memorandum which pleaded for a principle of control, rather than vengeance, and for German reconstruction for the sake of a stable Europe. When he dropped the Morgenthau plan, Roosevelt confessed (to Stimson) that he had "no idea" how he could ever have initialed such a proposal.
Confidence, Not Crusading. In late 1946 McCloy was out of the War Department (with a Distinguished Service Medal) and back in private law (Milbank, Tweed, Hope, Hadley and McCloy) when his old colleagues in Washington pressured him to come back as President of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
The Bank, created at Bretton Woods, with capital subscribed by 48 nations (largest contributor, 31%, is the U.S.), was in an organizational mess. The job was a challenge to an old troubleshooter. McCloy picked it up, after carefully scouting the terrain and laying down conditions. It was his first real administrative job, and the result, while impressive, has not been universally praised.
McCloy had had no previous banking experience except "writing contracts for bankers." This practice in protecting a notably cautious fraternity from its possible recklessness was not exactly conducive to an openhanded policy of administration at the World Bank during McCloy's tenure. Many of his foreign colleagues complain that he missed a great opportunity to push a development program along the lines later suggested by President Truman's "bold, new program" for backward countries. McCloy did not see it that way. He thought the first task was to give the U.S. investing public some confidence in the Bank. He succeeded, to the extent of selling $250 million of Bank bonds to U.S. investors.