Neil Mallon

Henry Neil Mallon (born January 11, 1895, in Cincinnati, Ohio) was a member of Skull and Bones in the Yale University class of 1917 who served as president and chief executive of Dresser Industries from 1928 until his retirement in 1962.¹² He founded the Dallas Council on World Affairs in 1951,³ corresponded with Allen Dulles in the 1950s,⁴ and hired George H.W. Bush for a Dresser subsidiary after Bush left Yale in 1948.⁵

Yale and the Class of 1917

Mallon was the son of Guy Ward Mallon, a Yale graduate of 1885 who was senior partner in the Cincinnati law firm of Mallon & Vordenberg. His mother was Hannah Neil of Columbus, Ohio, before her marriage.¹ He prepared at the Hughes High School in Cincinnati and at the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. At Yale he played on the class baseball team and the varsity basketball team, was chosen an all-collegiate guard by the Intercollegiate Basketball League, and served as a vice president of the Yale University Young Men's Christian Association.¹ Throughout his college course he roomed with Clive C. Day. The class history lists his Yale relatives as an uncle, Neil Bernard Mallon of the class of 1896, and a brother, John Howard Mallon of 1919.¹ Isaac Collier Gifford, a member of the same class, lists "Neil Mallon, '17" among his Yale relatives in the same history.⁶

The class history states of him: "He is a member of Psi Upsilon and Skull and Bones." It also says that Mallon "expects to enter business with the Superior Portland Cement Company," and gives his permanent address as Cincinnati.¹ The same history names E. Roland Harriman as a member of Psi Upsilon and Skull and Bones and lists his brother W. Averell Harriman, of the class of 1913, among his Yale relatives. It gives the same membership to Knight Woolley.⁷ It gives Prescott Bush the words "He belongs to the Whiffenpoofs, Psi Upsilon, and Skull and Bones."⁸ The index of members by class year in Antony C. Sutton's 1983 study of the society lists "Mallon, Henry Neil" under the class of 1917.⁹ The corporate history of Dresser published in 1979 records that Harriman, Bush, Woolley and Mallon had been fellow members of the society.¹⁰

Army Service and the Fort Sill Account

The company history of Dresser Industries says that Mallon "had seen the war's end as a major" before he took a job in Chicago, Illinois with the Continental Can Company, where he rose to general manager.¹¹ A 1989 biography of Bush states that Mallon, at 23, had been the army's youngest major.¹² Kris Millegan wrote that Bush and Mallon were both commissioned in the Field Artillery after graduation, and he gives Mallon's assignment as "Captain Henry Mallon 323d Regiment Field Artillery."¹³

The Yale Alumni Magazine reported in 2006 that a centennial history of the society by F. O. Matthiessen names Ellery James, Henry Neil Mallon and Prescott Bush, all of the class of 1917, among the men who were at Fort Sill in early 1918 and who unearthed a skull there.¹⁴ The same article reports a letter of June 7, 1918, from Winter Mead to F. Trubee Davison, which Marc Wortman found in the Davison papers at Sterling Memorial Library. The printed text reads "exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club & the K[night] Haffner," and the magazine ties Charles C. Haffner Jr. to the artillery school at Fort Sill between August 1917 and July 1918.¹⁵

Continental Can and the 1928 Purchase of Dresser

A 1928 directory of directors lists Mallon at a Cincinnati address.¹⁶ In 1928 the Dresser family sold the business to W. A. Harriman & Company, an investment-banking firm that intended to make the company a public company with separate ownership and management. The number of shares rose from 5,000 to 300,000. Of these, 100,000 were designated Class A and offered at $48 each, and the remainder were Class B, held back until 1931. The aging Fred Miller, who had run the business, stayed on as chairman of the board in a consultative capacity, and Mallon became president at the age of thirty-three.¹¹ The Handbook of Texas entry on the company by Darwin Payne gives the same sequence. It states that Mallon "was selected as president and chief executive officer" and held that position until his retirement in 1962. It also says that Prescott Bush "had been a W. A. Harriman and Company executive who had been involved in the conversion of Dresser to a public company, and he served on the board of directors for twenty-two years."²

Payne's 1979 history of the company lists the presidents of Dresser Industries with Fred A. Miller as president from 1911 to 1929 and Mallon from 1929 to 1962, and it describes the principals of the Harriman firm, among them E. Roland Harriman, as sons of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman.¹⁷ The same history says that Mallon had never been to Bradford, Pennsylvania, the site of the Dresser Manufacturing plant, before the purchase.¹⁷ Garry Wills quoted Prescott Bush's recollection that dates the purchase to 1929: "In 1929 we bought Dresser Company of Bradford, Pennsylvania for four million dollars, and we sold securities against that company and refinanced it, you see, so that we retained a substantial measure of control."¹⁸ The company histories give 1928 and Bush's recollection gives 1929.

Dresser's own annual report for the fiscal year 1993 gives a different corporate lineage. The company "was incorporated under the laws of Delaware in 1956 as a successor to a Pennsylvania corporation organized in 1938 by the consolidation of S. R. Dresser Manufacturing Company and Clark Bros. Company," and both predecessors were "carrying on businesses founded in 1880."¹⁹

Dresser Under Mallon, 1928 to 1962

The company history reports a gross profit of $1.29 million for 1929, despite the October 1929 stock market crash. It describes the threat to Dresser's couplings business from welding, which led to a program of acquisitions.²¹¹ A Toronto plant opened in 1931 as a subsidiary, the Dresser Manufacturing Company, Ltd., after Canada limited imports. Profit for 1932 was $11,621. In 1933 Dresser bought the common stock of the Bryant Heater Company for $65,000, and in 1937 it acquired the Clark Brothers Company of Olean, New York, a maker of gas engines and compressors, which merged with Dresser in 1938.¹¹ The merger is the 1938 consolidation recorded in the later annual report.¹⁹ Between 1930 and the entry of the United States into the war, Dresser also acquired makers of valves, heaters and pumps.²

During the Second World War the company supplied pipeline components to military posts, engines for freighters, and aircraft parts including landing gear, wing flaps and bomb doors. One of its most urgent assignments was at the secret Manhattan Project. Sales for 1944 were just under $55 million.¹¹ The company's Pacific Pumps subsidiary of Huntington Park, California, supplied more than six hundred pumps to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.¹⁷ The company's name changed to Dresser Industries in October 1944, and operations moved to Cleveland, Ohio five months later; the new Cleveland offices opened on March 19, 1945.¹¹¹⁷

International Derrick and Equipment Company (IDECO), a maker of derricks and drilling rigs, was acquired by Dresser in 1944.¹⁷ In November 1945 the company acquired Security Engineering of Whittier, California, a maker of drilling bits.¹¹¹⁷ In November 1949 it bought the Magnet Cove Barium Corporation of Houston, Texas, for $2.8 million. The company history says that Magnet Cove was later known as Magcobar.¹¹ The same history credits the executive vice president John O'Connor with persuading the Soviet Union to build a $6 million natural gas liquefaction plant outside Moscow. The plant was slated for completion in 1949, fell victim to a United States Department of Commerce trade ban early in 1948, and was unfinished until 1954.¹¹

The headquarters moved to Dallas, Texas in 1950, which the company history describes as moving the company to "the epicenter of the U.S. oil business."²¹¹ A July 1955 issue of the magazine of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce counted nine affiliated Dresser companies: Ideco and the Security Engineering Division in Dallas, and Clark, Dresser-Ideco, Dresser Manufacturing, Lane-Wells, Magcobar, Pacific and Roots-Connersville elsewhere. The same issue reports that Security Engineering was moving its executive offices from Whittier to Dallas, and that Clark Brothers had built a 5,500 kilowatt gas turbine power plant, mounted on a railroad car, under a Navy contract.²⁰ Mallon announced his retirement in early 1962, after his sixty-seventh birthday, effective March 19;²¹⁷ John Lawrence succeeded as head of the company and served until 1970.¹⁷

Foreign Policy Association, Uranium and Dallas Civic Posts

A proxy for the annual meeting of the Foreign Policy Association on December 10, 1949, printed in its Foreign Policy Bulletin, lists "H. Neil Mallon" as a director at large in the class of 1950 and describes him as president of Dresser Industries, Cleveland, Ohio.²¹ Dan Smoot later wrote that Mallon was "a former official of the Foreign Policy Association."²²

The July 1955 issue of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce magazine reports the formation of the General Minerals Corporation, headed by S. Y. Guthrie, to engage in exploration, development and processing of uranium, which absorbed the Dallas firm Research, Inc., a company that had done development work for the Atomic Energy Commission. The directors named are Guthrie, H. Neil Mallon, Everett DeGolyer, Thomas A. Knight, Malcolm E. Wilson Sr., A. H. Meadows, and Gordon Simpson, all of Dallas, with Kenneth M. Willson of Carmel, California, and P. H. Freeney of Pierre, South Dakota.²³ The same issue pictures Mallon with Joe C. Thompson and Angus G. Wynne Jr. on the Chamber's Aviation Committee, whose chairman before 1954 was Stanley Marcus; the committee's 1952 studies led to a January 1953 bond issue of $10.5 million for Dallas Love Field.²⁴

Smoot's book The Invisible Government quotes a November 11, 1958 report in the Dallas Morning News that a steering group "composed of Dallas and Southwestern business, industrial and educational leaders" had laid the groundwork, in a weekend meeting at Southern Methodist University, for a Dallas Committee for Economic Development and a research center at the university, and that the group included George C. McGhee and Neil Mallon. Smoot added that Dresser Industries was among the corporations listed as contributors to the Council on Foreign Relations in its 1960-61 fiscal year, in a list that also includes Brown Brothers Harriman and the Continental Can Company.²²²⁵

The Dallas Council on World Affairs

The World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth says on its history page that the council was founded in 1951, when Dresser Industries' chairman and president Henry Neil Mallon "saw the need for a local institution to encourage citizen understanding, engagement, and involvement in international affairs." He gathered a select group from the corporate and civic communities to form the Dallas Council on World Affairs. The page lists seventeen founders, among them J. Woodall Rodgers, Brooks Keller, John A. Steel, Charles P. Storey, Tom E. Braniff, J. C. Karcher and Stanley Marcus. The council's top award is named the H. Neil Mallon Award.³ A 2011 resolution of the Texas House of Representatives recites that the council, "Founded in 1951," presents its annual H. Neil Mallon Award.²⁶

A Dallas News editorial of October 27, 1953, held in the CIA reading room as a clipping, refers to the council's meeting the previous week, which had drawn interest in what the head of the Central Intelligence Agency might say. The editorial credits "H. N. Mallon, Mr. Costin, and others" with the council's start: "Under the aegis of H. N. Mallon, Mr. Costin, and others, the Dallas Council on World Affairs has proved itself in the short span of only two years to be an extremely valuable adjunct to the educational life of the community."²⁷ Glen Costin is named in the same editorial as the council's executive director.

On February 27, 1954, Dulles wrote to Vice President Richard M. Nixon about the council. A Texas correspondent had sent Dulles a copy of his own February 24, 1954 letter to Nixon on the council, and Dulles described the council as "an excellent forum of persons who take a deep interest in our foreign relations." Dulles wrote of "Neil Mallon, whom I have known for several years," and of his "real accomplishment in organizing the Council and keeping it a live and vigorous organization." The distribution block of the letter shows a copy sent to Mallon.⁴

On February 5, 1958, the council's executive director, Roger Kennedy, wrote to Dulles at the Central Intelligence Agency, thanking him for seeing Kennedy in Washington and for "such well-upholstered transportation to my next appointment," and saying the council would be grateful to hear him in Dallas in April or May "on the record and for an audience of substantial size." Dulles's reply to Kennedy, dated February 13, 1958 (drafted February 7), declined the invitation at that time.²⁸ The council's letterhead, printed on the Kennedy letter, lists "H. N. Mallon" among its members, marked as a member of the executive committee. It also lists Earle Cabell, Judge Sarah T. Hughes, Karl Hoblitzelle, George C. McGhee, Trammell Crow, Stanley Marcus and A. H. Meadows. The officers printed on it are W. W. Overton Jr., chairman of the board, and Charles E. Beard, president.²⁸

The Handbook of Texas entry on Earle Cabell, mayor of Dallas from 1961 and later a congressman, names the Dallas Council on World Affairs among the civic organizations he had served as president or director, and names his brothers as Ben and Charles. The entry on Charles Pearre Cabell, born in Dallas in 1903, states that he was deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1953 until his retirement as a four-star general.²⁹³⁰ Earle Cabell greeted President John F. Kennedy at Love Field on November 22, 1963 and rode in the motorcade.²⁹

Central Intelligence Agency Contacts

Anthony L. Kimery's article "George Bush and the CIA: In the Company of Friends" appeared in the CovertAction Information Bulletin, number 41 (Summer 1992). Kimery wrote that Mallon "was a friend to numerous ranking Cold War era intelligence officials, including Allen Dulles," and that "Mallon steered prospective candidates for spy work to Dulles and often provided cover employment to CIA operatives."³¹ Kimery wrote that Dresser "had routinely served as a CIA cover," and gave as his basis for that statement interviews in 1990 and 1991 with two former Operations Directorate field officers, one of whom claimed to have worked for Dresser as his cover. His note for the sentence on Mallon's recruiting cites a March 25, 1953 letter from Prescott Bush to the president's national security adviser.³¹ For the wider point about Yale's ties to the agency, Kimery cites Robin W. Winks's account of the Yale recruiting connection and quotes Winks that Yale "influenced the CIA more than any other institution."³²

Kimery also wrote that Mallon introduced the Russian-born petroleum geologist George de Mohrenschildt to Bush at about the time Mallon gave Bush responsibility for dealings with East-bloc oil officials, and that a Yugoslav oil official who came to the United States in 1948 to talk to Dresser went directly to Bush in Midland.³¹

Millegan wrote that on April 10, 1953, Mallon sent a letter to Dulles about a proposed meeting at the Carlton Hotel, at which Mallon, Prescott Bush and Dulles discussed the use of drilling rigs in the Caribbean. Millegan wrote that Dresser Industries had "often provided cover employment to CIA operatives."³³

The Washington Post profile by Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, dated August 7, 1988 in the CIA reading room copy, names Mallon, head of Dresser Industries, as the man who gave Bush his first job out of Yale, and as a member of the society in the Bush family tradition.³⁴

George H.W. Bush at Dresser, 1948 to 1951

In the volume of his letters published as All the Best, George Bush describes Mallon in a biographical note as a "Yale classmate of my Dad's" and "an intimate family friend," and writes: "I accepted the job from Neil Mallon and drove our 1947 Studebaker (a graduation gift from my parents) to Odessa, Texas."³⁵ In Looking Forward (1987, written with Victor Gold), Bush described Mallon as "a friend and a mentor second only to my father." Bush wrote that he became "a full-fledged Ideco salesman, selling drilling bits," that Dresser headquarters later sent word transferring him to Midland, and that when he traveled to Dresser headquarters in Dallas to give Mallon news of his decision to leave, "at age twenty-six, I didn't just respect Neil, I was awed by him."³⁶

A 1989 biography states that in 1948 Mallon offered to take on Bush as the company's only trainee that year and arranged a trainee's spot in Ideco.¹² A 2007 biography quotes Mallon as having told Bush: "What you need to do is head out to Texas."³⁷ A CIA biographical sheet on Bush lists him as an "Oil field supply salesman, Dresser Industries, Midland, Texas, 1948-51," and records that he formed Bush-Overbey Oil Development, Inc., in 1951.⁵ In a 1988 profile preserved in the same CIA file, Randall Rothenberg reported that "A family friend, Neil Mallon, a man who 'could charm the fangs off a snake,' according to Bucky Bush, offered George a bottom-of-the-ladder job in Midland, Tex., at Dresser Industries, his large oil company."³⁸

Bush's letters in All the Best include one to "Mr. H.N. Mallon, Dresser Industries, Dallas, Texas," dated April 12, 1951, which begins "Dear Neil, This will let you know that we are in business," and a letter in which Bush wrote that he had decided to remain with Dresser Industries and had "a great feeling of loyalty to Dresser and to Mr. Mallon." Bush also recalled that leaving was difficult "especially because of my great respect for Neil Mallon," and that Mallon was "supportive and even encouraged" him to start out on his own.³⁵

Bush wrote of the birth of the couple's third son in All the Best that the baby's name was changed "from Henry to Neil" and that "We wanted to name him for Neil Mallon, whose name was really Henry."³⁵ The son, Neil Bush, was born in Midland on January 22, 1955.³⁹

Wills wrote that Prescott Bush, while serving on the Dresser board, "made his old Yale friend, Neil Mallon, the chief executive," and quoted Prescott Bush: "I was Neil Mallon's chief adviser and consultant in connection with every move that he made with that business during that period of twenty years."¹⁸ Wills also wrote that when George H.W. Bush went from Yale to Texas in 1948, he was hired by Mallon to work for a Dresser subsidiary.¹⁸ Bill Minutaglio wrote that Prescott Bush called Mallon "a very able fellow" and hand-selected him to head Dresser, and that Mallon "really was almost a member of the Bush-Walker family."⁴⁰ Richard Ben Cramer wrote that Mallon had been "unofficial godfather" to the Bush children.⁴¹