Robert A. Lovett

Robert Abercrombie Lovett (September 14, 1895 to May 7, 1986) was a partner of Brown Brothers Harriman who served as Assistant Secretary of War for Air from 1941 to 1945, Under Secretary of State from 1947 to 1949, and Secretary of Defense from 1951 to 1953.¹ He was a Yale student who became a naval pilot in 1916 and was among the men that F. Trubee Davison recruited into the group that became the First Yale Unit.² Lovett sat on the Truman and Eisenhower intelligence advisory bodies, was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, was the first public witness before the Senate Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery in 1960, and appears in the records of the Kennedy transition and the Cuban missile crisis.

Yale and the First Yale Unit

Lovett was born in Huntsville, Texas.¹ He was in his junior year at Yale University when the First World War began. He left school, enlisted in the United States Navy, and became a pilot in 1916. The Defense Department biography says he flew briefly with the British Naval Air Service on patrol and in combat missions and received a Navy Cross for setting up the first naval bombardment squadron. His Yale bachelor's degree was conferred in absentia in 1918.¹ The biography printed in the Senate subcommittee record of 1960 gives his schooling as the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, from 1909 to 1914, Yale from 1914 to 1917 ("entered service First World War 3/24/17"), Harvard Law School from 1919 to 1920 and a Harvard business administration course in 1920 and 1921, and his naval rank as Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Naval Reserve, from 1917 to 1919.³

The First Yale Unit grew out of a group of students that Davison assembled in 1916. The Yale University news service's history of the unit lists Lovett, class of 1918, among the men Davison recruited into the coastal patrol unit, along with Allan Ames, John Farwell, Artemus Gates, Earl Gould, Albert Sturtevant and John Vorys.² A photograph captioned in the same article places Lovett among the members of the Aerial Coastal Patrol at Port Washington, Long Island, in 1916.² In a 1971 oral history with the Harry S. Truman Library, Lovett described Vorys as a Yale classmate and club mate and said the two had been "in the same flying unit abroad."⁴

Antony C. Sutton's membership index places Robert Abercrombie Lovett in the class of 1918 of Skull and Bones.⁵ The 1960 subcommittee biography records that Lovett entered naval service on March 24, 1917.³ Kris Millegan wrote in 2003 that Lovett, whom he called "Harriman's childhood friend," had been "tapped into Skull & Bones by Prescott Bush's cell of '17," and he attributed the account to the biography George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography.⁶ Prescott Bush and E. Roland Harriman were members of the class of 1917, and that class's published history records each of them as a member of the society.⁷

Brown Brothers Harriman and Union Pacific

Lovett married Adele Quartley Brown, daughter of the senior partner James Brown, in 1919.⁸ The firm's history by John A. Kouwenhoven records that he joined Brown Brothers & Co. in 1921, was granted a power of attorney in January 1925, and was admitted to partnership on January 1, 1926.⁸ The Defense Department biography places his 1921 start at the National Bank of Commerce in New York, where he was a clerk, and dates his full partnership to 1926.¹ The biography printed in the 1960 subcommittee record gives the sequence as clerk at the National Bank of Commerce from 1921 to 1923, clerk at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. from 1923, and partner in 1926.³ The partner table in the firm's history records his departure for Washington on December 16, 1940, and his rejoining the partnership for the periods June 1, 1946 to May 15, 1947, April 1, 1949 to October 3, 1950, and from March 1, 1953.⁹ The 1960 subcommittee biography gives the same resignation and readmission dates (resigned December 16, 1940; readmitted June 1, 1946; resigned May 15, 1947; readmitted April 1, 1949; resigned October 1950; readmitted March 1953) and records that he became chairman of the executive committee of the Union Pacific on May 28, 1953.³

In 1926 Lovett was also elected a director of the Union Pacific Railroad and a member of its executive committee.⁸ The firm's history records that he and E. Roland Harriman met as eight-year-old boys in 1903.⁸ His father, Robert Scott Lovett, was described in a 1930 article in Time as the "longtime personal attorney and close friend of the late Edward Henry Harriman and now chairman of his Union Pacific."¹⁰ The 1955 annual report of the railroad lists Lovett among its directors and names him chairman of the executive committee as of January 1, 1956.¹¹

Assistant Secretary of War for Air

Lovett's first government post was with Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War. Stimson's memoir records that Lovett "arrived in November, 1940, to be Stimson's air assistant."¹² The memoir describes him as "a naval pilot of distinguished skill in World War I" and says that "Lovett possessed incisive judgment and a pertinent wit."¹² Stimson wrote that Lovett "served Stimson in all matters affecting the Air Forces as Patterson served in procurement and supply."¹² The firm's history gives a different sequence, dating a call to Washington in June 1940 as special assistant to the Secretary of War, while the partner table dates the post from December 1940 to April 1941.⁹

In the memoir's account of the Department's division of labor, aircraft "was Lovett's field," and Stimson "confined his labors mainly to the vigorous support of the Air Forces' theory of strategic bombing."¹³ After seeing a new radar set in action, Stimson put Lovett to work to make sure that radar production was at its maximum speed.¹⁴ Stimson wrote the citation for the Distinguished Service Medal awarded to Patterson, John J. McCloy, Lovett and Bundy.¹⁵ The firm's history quotes the citation calling Lovett "the eyes, ears, and hands of the Secretary of War in respect to the growth of that enormous American air power."⁸

Millegan wrote that on October 22, 1945, Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson created a committee chaired by Lovett to advise the government on the postwar organization of American intelligence, and that Lovett pressed for "a virtual resumption of the wartime Office of Strategic Services."⁶

Under Secretary of State

In his 1971 oral history, Lovett described being called by Harry S. Truman to become Under Secretary of State under George C. Marshall. Truman told him, "I've got to get a new Secretary of State and I've signed up General Marshall on the condition which he made that you'd come down and be his Under Secretary."¹⁶ Lovett answered that he had to check with his partners and that "the New York State Bank Department has to approve."¹⁶ He said the State Department then had, "really, two Under Secretaries," and that Marshall's instructions made him responsible for economic matters.¹⁷

Lovett recalled the bipartisan period in which "we had Greek-Turkish aid, we had the Berlin airlift, we had the Marshall plan, and we had the NATO organization."¹⁸ He credited the President's leadership and, "very largely," Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg's chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "with whom I was always completely frank."¹⁹ An April 1948 telegram from the ambassador in London, Lewis W. Douglas, marked for Lovett's eyes only, refers to Lovett's conversations with Vandenberg. The editors of the Foreign Relations of the United States volume note a Lovett memorandum of conversation of April 11, 1948 that opens with a reference to European union, and no other record of substantive discussion of the subject between Lovett and Vandenberg before the reported meeting.²⁰

The State Department's list of officials gives Lovett's service as Under Secretary of State from July 1, 1947 to January 20, 1949.²¹ The Defense Department biography describes Lovett and Marshall as running the State Department as Secretary and Under Secretary "from January 1947 to January 1949."¹

Deputy Secretary and Secretary of Defense

Marshall became Secretary of Defense in September 1950 and insisted that Lovett be appointed as his deputy. Lovett became the second Deputy Secretary of Defense on October 4, 1950.¹ The Defense Department biography says that Lovett was the first Deputy Secretary to debate with the services over materiel and to testify before the House and Senate appropriations committees on budgetary issues.¹ When Marshall stepped down in September 1951, Lovett succeeded him, serving from September 17, 1951 to January 20, 1953. He was the first of five Deputy Secretaries in history to become Secretary.¹

The Senate Committee on Armed Services reported the nomination, and on September 14, 1951 the Senate took it up. William Langer of North Dakota objected to considering it and then asked whether the nominee was "Dr. Robert Morss Lovett, who was formerly Governor of the Virgin Islands." The majority leader, Ernest McFarland, answered that the nominee had been Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Senator Lyndon B. Johnson added that Robert A. Lovett "was born in Huntsville, Tex." Everett Dirksen said that "we have had a very considerable experience with Robert Morss Lovett in the past, when he was investigated by the Appropriations Committee of the House of Representatives." Langer withdrew his objection, and the nomination was confirmed without objection.²²

The Department's role in the national security review that produced NSC 68 is recorded in the volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States covering 1950. At a State-Defense Policy Review Group meeting on March 16, 1950, Lovett, listed as a consultant, spent the morning studying the group's working drafts. His overall comment was that the paper was "very good" and its logic sound, and he suggested that its conclusions be written in what he called "Hemingway sentences."²³ The final text of the report is dated April 7, 1950.²³ A memorandum of March 22, 1950 by Paul Nitze lists Lovett among the persons the working group consulted.²⁴ On October 10, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson recorded that he had discussed with Lovett "work which he is doing on NSC 68/1."²⁵

The Korean War Build-Up

Lovett told the Jackson subcommittee in 1960 that when he returned to the Department in the autumn of 1950, "the Korean war having broken out," the first full budget the three military departments submitted asked for "something over $100 billion," that the screening reduced it to about $62 or $63 billion, and that Congress provided "something over $60 billion for fiscal 1952," from a level "in that order of magnitude" of $14 billion.²⁶ On December 28, 1951 Truman met in the Cabinet Room with the Secretaries of State, the Treasury and Defense, the military chiefs, the Director for Mutual Security, the Director of Defense Mobilization and the Director of the Bureau of the Budget, and directed Lovett to work with the Budget Director to stretch out the defense build-up "because of material and fiscal considerations." Lovett's letter to Truman of January 4, 1952 proposed new obligational authority for fiscal 1953 of $49,002,758,000 (Army $14.3 billion, Navy $13,314,155,000, Air Force $20,922,338,000, Office of the Secretary of Defense $466,265,000) and an expenditure limit of $86.5 billion for the eighteen months from January 1, 1952 to June 30, 1953.²⁷

At the 122nd meeting of the National Security Council on September 3, 1952, which took up the status report NSC 135 and the reappraisal NSC 135/1, Acheson said that he was "scared to death to have so many copies of so vital a document around." The minutes record that Lovett "strongly supported the anxieties of the Secretary of State," said his security people "were very worried about certain portions of the report," and wanted all copies turned back to the Executive Secretary. The Council directed that all outstanding copies of NSC 135 be recalled.²⁸ Lovett's letter of resignation is dated November 25, 1952. Truman accepted it on January 8, 1953, effective January 20, 1953, and wrote of Lovett's "vision and deep understanding of international as well as domestic affairs."²⁹

The Office of Policy Coordination

A memorandum of March 30, 1950 from George F. Kennan records that National Security Council directive NSC 10/2 of June 1948 established an Office of Special Projects, later the Office of Policy Coordination, in the Central Intelligence Agency to plan and conduct covert operations. Kennan's designation as the State Department's representative for that purpose was made known to the National Security Council "by a letter signed August 13, 1948 by Mr. Lovett."³⁰ A State Department memorandum of October 15, 1952 states that "it was the concept of General Marshall, Mr. Forrestal, Mr. Lovett and Mr. Kennan, when OPC was set up in the spring of 1948," that political warfare activities of covert means "was of primary interest to the Department of State." The same memorandum says the operation was placed, "faute de mieux, within the framework of the CIA."³¹

Psychological Strategy Board and Communications Intelligence

The first meeting of the Psychological Strategy Board, held on July 2, 1951, was attended by Walter Bedell Smith, Lovett as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon Gray, Allen Dulles and Edward Barrett for the Under Secretary of State.³²

On October 24, 1952 President Truman addressed a memorandum on communications intelligence to Secretary of State Acheson and Secretary of Defense Lovett.³³ The volume's editorial note records that in October 1952 the President and the National Security Council adopted most of the recommendations of the Brownell Committee, issued a revised version of NSCID No. 9 on October 24, 1952, and created the National Security Agency in place of the Armed Forces Security Agency. The Secretary of Defense became executive agent for communications intelligence for the government as a whole, subordinate to a special committee of the National Security Council consisting of himself and the Secretary of State. The Brownell Committee report is held at the National Archives and Records Administration (RG 457, SRH-123), and a declassified version appears in George A. Brownell's account of the agency's origins.³⁴

Teapot Committee and the 1956 Board

The State Department's list of persons records that Lovett served as a member of the Strategic Missile Evaluation Committee, known as the Teapot Committee, from June 16, 1953 to February 8, 1954, and as a member of the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities from January 13, 1956.²¹

A December 22, 1955 memorandum from the Secretary of State's special assistant for intelligence and research, Armstrong, to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles listed the expected members of the new board as General John E. Hull, Admiral Richard Connolly, General James Doolittle, James Killian, David Bruce, Benjamin Fairless and Morris Hadley. Lovett is not on that list.³⁵ The board was established by Executive Order 10656 of February 6, 1956.³⁶

The Bruce-Lovett Report

According to Grose, two elder statesmen, David Bruce and Lovett, "prepared a report for President Dwight Eisenhower in the fall of 1956" that criticized the CIA's "kingmaking" in the Third World.³⁷ The Center for the Study of Intelligence newsletter of Spring 1995 says that Bruce and Lovett "had been charter members" of the board, and reports that the CIA History Staff checked the board's CIA files and the Eisenhower Library and found "no reference to such a report."³⁸

Schlesinger quoted the report and wrote that it found that "no one, other than those in the CIA immediately concerned with their day to day operation, has any detailed knowledge of what is going on." In his account, a "horde of CIA representatives" was exerting "significant, almost unilateral influences" on the formulation of foreign policy, and the report asked whether anyone in an authoritative position was weighing "the long-range wisdom of activities which have entailed our virtual abandonment of the international 'golden rule.'"³⁹ Schlesinger wrote that in December 1956 the full board passed on to Eisenhower its concern about "the extremely informal and somewhat exclusive methods" used for clandestine projects, and that in January 1961 the board said, "We have been unable to conclude that, on balance, all of the covert action programs undertaken by CIA up to this time have been worth the risk or the great expenditure of manpower, money and other resources involved."³⁹

Schlesinger also wrote that when Richard Bissell and others briefed the board on the Cuban project in late 1960, "its members, Lovett particularly, registered dismay."³⁹ Lovett told the Taylor board of inquiry on the Bay of Pigs in 1961, as Grose reported, that Bruce "was very much disturbed" and that "instead of completing the report in thirty days we took two months or more."³⁷

The Jackson Subcommittee, 1960

On February 23, 1960 Lovett was the first public witness in the hearings of the Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, chaired by Henry M. Jackson. Jackson introduced him as "Mr. National Security" and said: "I believe at the present time he is serving in an advisory capacity in connection with our intelligence organization." The witness was listed as a partner of Brown Brothers, Harriman & Co. and chairman of the executive committee of the Union Pacific Railroad Company.⁴⁰

Lovett's prepared statement said that his comments rested "for the most part on notes made some 8 years ago" in connection with "a report submitted in November 1952." He described the "foulup factor" in the "clashes of group needs" built into the executive departments, and warned that the doctrine of "concurrences," unless policed, could "blanket the whole executive branch with an embalmed atmosphere." For the Department of Defense he listed conditions that included that the military professionals "should be contributors to and not makers of national political policies," that committees had become "positive menaces to the prompt and orderly conduct of business," and that "the only thing more dangerous than an external enemy is a group of home-grown military sycophants." He tied turnover of civilian executives to the "conflict of interest" laws and to the pension rights of men who left business, and defended "split papers" from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For the State Department he said the Secretary's workload was "already at the dangerous level," answered "an emphatic 'yes'" to lightening the Secretary's negotiating duties, and proposed a new Cabinet-rank "Minister of Foreign Affairs" under the Secretary.⁴¹

In questioning, Lovett said he was "personally confident" that whatever was needed for security could be done without "materially downgrading the position of this country," and told Jackson that Soviet statements in the material field had "a high order of reliability."²⁶ Responding to Senator Mike Mansfield on the conflict-of-interest laws, he said they needed to be "modernized" and cited General Motors, with 283,090,000 shares outstanding, and Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), with more than 214 million, to illustrate what "substantial" meant. He told Senator Karl Mundt that on an inspection trip to Germany he had been given the information collected from the questioning of leading German industrialists and war production leaders, that "one of these was Dr. Albert Speer," and that Speer's opinion, as Lovett related it, was that the German economy collapsed in part because under a dictatorship a department head who "got the nod from Hitler" went ahead "as a little dictator" with no performance audit.²⁶

Senator Prescott Bush, a guest of the subcommittee as a member of the Armed Services Committee, told Lovett that "since your leaving the Government in 1953, in January, you have been connected in an advisory capacity with our Central Intelligence Agency from time to time," and asked for comment. Jackson answered that the subject belonged in executive session, because the agreement he had reached with the President put matters touching the National Security Council there, and invited a general remark. Lovett said: "I have observed the operation through the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities now for, I think it is, 3 years, and in my opinion its improvement over the time when I formerly knew it more intimately has been remarkable. I would consider it today a very reliable, high-grade arm of Government."²⁶

The executive session opened at 12:05 p.m., with Charles A. Haskins, a senior staff member of the National Security Council, among those present. Lovett described the Council as designed to serve as "a kind of 'Court of Domestic and Foreign Relations' before which, with the President presiding, both Departments could present their views," doubted that it could operate "in a mass atmosphere," and said that James Forrestal "was one of the leading spirits" in that design and in the hope of "staff continuity." He said that he had taken part in "the discussions which preceded" the National Security Act, that a President "in his own protection must insist on being informed and not merely protected by his aides," and that George C. Marshall "simply would not tolerate" the opposite. Jackson closed by stating that the transcript "will be treated as confidential at this time."⁴²

Press accounts of the testimony, among them a column by Walter Lippmann on March 1 and a Senate speech by J. William Fulbright, were read as describing Dwight D. Eisenhower. Mundt wrote to Lovett on March 30, 1960 asking what he had meant by "the President." Lovett replied on April 4 that the expression meant "a President," or "any President," that he had given the same answer by telephone to Gordon Gray, the President's special assistant, that the paragraphs on the National Security Council "were excised from my public statement and were given in executive session in accordance, I am informed, with the terms of an understanding reached at the request of the White House," and that "I know of no way to keep them from trying it on for size." Jacob Javits placed the exchange, with a column by Arthur Krock, in the Congressional Record on May 17, 1960.⁴³

The Kennedy Transition

President-elect John F. Kennedy first offered the post of Secretary of Defense to Lovett. The Defense Department biography of Robert S. McNamara states that "When Lovett declined, Kennedy chose Robert S. McNamara on Lovett's recommendation."⁴⁴

Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett wrote in Thy Will Be Done that Lovett, then a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, declined State, Defense and Treasury in December 1960 and recommended Dean Rusk, then the Foundation's president, for Secretary of State.⁴⁵

The Cuban Missile Crisis

The minutes of the 506th meeting of the National Security Council, held in the Oval Room on October 21, 1962, list among those present "Others: Mr. Robert Lovett."⁴⁶ On October 24, 1962, a memorandum by Walt Whitman Rostow, chairman of the planning subcommittee of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, records that "Representatives of State and Defense, the Attorney General, and Mr. Lovett, met to consider the course of action to be followed" with respect to Soviet vessels that had altered course and those still proceeding toward Cuba. The memorandum recommends that the vessels that had altered course be intercepted, trailed and photographed without interference, and that the vessels still bound for Cuba be stopped and searched in accordance with the Presidential proclamation.⁴⁷

Later Life, Foundation and Honors

The Rockefeller Foundation's trustee list for April 1954 to April 1955 includes Lovett and Dean Rusk. Lovett also served on the foundation's executive committee and was chairman of its finance committee.⁴⁸ The Defense Department biography says that after 1953 Lovett "participated on several presidential commissions and continued to work for Brown Brothers Harriman."¹

James Forrestal, the former Secretary of Defense, was at Lovett's house at Hobe Sound, Florida in the days before his committal to the naval hospital in April 1949. Captain George N. Raines, Forrestal's attending psychiatrist, testified to the board that inquired into Forrestal's death that he attended a meeting at Lovett's house on March 31, 1949 with Lovett and Artemus Gates.⁴⁹

The Congressional Research Service tally of the Presidential Medal of Freedom lists Lovett among the 1963 recipients.⁵⁰ The tally cites the remarks of Lyndon B. Johnson at the presentation of the Medal of Freedom awards on December 6, 1963, in the Public Papers of the Presidents.⁵⁰ Lovett died in Locust Valley, New York on May 7, 1986.¹

Papers

The Harry S. Truman Library holds a Lovett collection of five scrapbooks of newspaper clippings and photographs from his service as Assistant Secretary of War for Air, dated 1940 to 1943. The library notes that the collection contains no information on his career after 1949.⁵¹ Yale University's Manuscripts and Archives catalogues a Robert Abercrombie Lovett Papers collection, MS 1617, covering 1919 to 1986, which it describes as correspondence, speeches, photographs and memorabilia from periods outside government service.⁵²