Joseph Grew
Joseph Clark Grew was an American career diplomat and Foreign Service officer. He is best known for his long tenure as United States Ambassador to Japan in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor and for his two stints as the second-in-command at the State Department. He opposed American hardliners and sought to avoid war. When the war ended, he helped draft the U.S. Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan, which offered relatively generous terms to the defeated Japanese, which facilitated America's peaceful post-war occupation of Japan.
After graduating from Harvard College, Grew worked his way up the diplomatic hierarchy. After World War I, he served on the American negotiating team at the Paris Peace Conference and received his first top-level posts, serving as Envoy to Denmark and Switzerland. During his time in Switzerland, he was America's senior representative at the Lausanne peace talks. He was generally unable to implement his realist agenda in the face of broad idealist opposition. He focused on securing American interests in postwar Turkey, and failed to protect Armenian independence, although there were practical barriers to the idea. In 1924, he was promoted to Under Secretary of State, where he served as second-in-command to Charles Evans Hughes and Frank B. Kellogg and oversaw the establishment of the Foreign Service, with merit-based hiring, promotion, and salaries for white bureaucrats. After falling out with Kellogg, he was reassigned to Turkey, where he became America's first ambassador to the post-Ottoman state.
Grew became Ambassador to Japan at a time when tensions between the two Pacific powers were rising dramatically. He recommended negotiating with Tokyo to avoid war. However, he was unable to prevent the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He returned to Washington to advise on Asian affairs. In the final months of World War II, he was reappointed Under Secretary of State under Edward Stettinius Jr., making him a high-level veteran of both Republican and Democratic administrations. Grew conciliated the defeated Japan and distrusted the victorious Soviet Union, presaging the diplomatic shift of the Cold War. However, he retired from the State Department on V-J Day in 1945, leaving the Cold War to a new generation of diplomats, including Dean Acheson, who frequently disagreed with him but eventually implemented his Japan policy.
In his retirement, Grew remained active in the foreign policy field. He chaired the National Committee for a Free Europe, the driving force behind Radio Free Europe, and the Committee of One Million, a pressure group to support Chiang Kai-shek's government in exile. Due to Grew's hawkish China policy and rivalry with Acheson, Joseph McCarthy cited Grew as an example of an anti-communist martyr. However, Grew resisted the label and publicly defended several McCarthy targets, including the diplomatic corps. When he died, The New York Times remembered him as "the father of the career service."
Early life
Grew was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in May 1880 to a wealthy Yankee family. During his youth, Grew enjoyed the outdoors, sailing, camping, and hunting during his summers away from school.Grew attended Groton School, where one of his classmates was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He went on to Harvard College and graduated in 1902. At Harvard, Grew and Roosevelt worked together at The Harvard Crimson. Although Grew's future rival Dean Acheson also attended Groton, the two did not overlap, as Grew was thirteen years older than Acheson.
Career
After his graduation, Grew set out on a Grand Tour, during which he nearly died of malaria. While recovering in India, he became friends with an American consul there. That inspired him to abandon his plan of following in his father's career as a banker, and he decided to go into diplomatic service. In the days before merit-based hiring, diplomatic jobs could be won through personal connections. After hearing news that Grew had shot a tiger in China, Theodore Roosevelt insisted that Grew receive a diplomatic post.Grew obtained his first State Department job in 1904, as a consulate clerk in Khedivate-era Cairo. He then rotated through diplomatic missions in Mexico City, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna, Berlin, and Vienna. In a strange coincidence, he was the First Secretary at the Berlin Embassy when World War I broke out, and the chargé d'affaires in Vienna when the United States entered the war. During the war, he served as acting chief of the Division of Western European Affairs.
Post-World War I negotiator
Grew served as the secretary of the American peace commission in Paris. A committed and "thoroughly indiscreet" diarist, Grew published his account of the post-war negotiations in 1952. He outlined what was later described as a "paralyzing lack of initiative" from the American negotiators, who failed to restrain President Wilson and the rest of the Big Four.After Grew's promotion to ambassador, he was seconded as an American observer at the Conference of Lausanne, with Richard Child. America did not participate directly at Lausanne because the Ottoman Empire and the United States had not declared war on each other. To stabilize U.S.-Turkey relations, Grew negotiated a side treaty with İsmet İnönü. The treaty would have abolished extraterritoriality and tax exemptions for American citizens, in exchange for equal rights for American charities and nonprofits. He recalled that İsmet felt no need to compromise because he knew that following the Turkish War of Independence, the Allies had no appetite to impose terms by force.
Grew also attended the main Lausanne negotiations. Unlike Harold Nicolson's traditional narrative, Grew—who was broadly sympathetic to the new Turkish republic—harshly criticized British negotiator Lord Curzon. He recalled that Curzon ridiculed the Turkish and Soviet negotiators to their faces, and that while he was "always courteous, always entertaining" in private, his impatience and highhandedness as a negotiator intensified Turkish resistance to the Allied demands. Grew's position was complicated by American interests in Turkey, as the Turks feared being geographically dismembered after the war and looked to America for support. At one point the Turks attempted to forestall a European takeover of Turkey by offering to make Anatolia an American protectorate under a League of Nations mandate. After the Chester concession became public in April 1923, the European powers suspected that Turkey had paid off the Americans to take Turkey's side at Lausanne. Curzon asked the Americans to leave, and Grew's assistants were sent back home, although Grew was eventually called on to mediate a dispute between Turkey and Greece on war reparations.
The U.S.-Turkey treaty was submitted to the United States Senate in 1924, where it was met with intense opposition, including from the opposition Democratic Party, which promised to reject the treaty during the 1924 presidential election. Although the Democrats lost the election, the Senate ultimately delayed consideration of the U.S.-Turkey treaty until 1927. Grew attributed the opposition to the Armenian American lobby, which refused to compromise on an independent Armenian state. The Armenian genocide had just taken place, and the Bolsheviks had already conquered the formerly Russian-controlled areas of the Armenian Highlands. The European powers had indicated an interest in carving out an independent Armenia from Turkish territory under an American League of Nations mandate. President Wilson was open to the idea, but General James G. Harbord, an American military investigator, did not think America could properly defend remote Armenia without a presence in Anatolia, and Admiral Mark Lambert Bristol, the American representative in Turkey, felt there were too few Armenians left in the area to populate an independent nation. Ultimately, no Armenian state was carved out of Turkish territory. Armenia did not gain independence until 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Envoy to Denmark and Switzerland
From April 7, 1920 to October 14, 1921, Grew served as the U.S. Envoy to Denmark after his appointment by President Woodrow Wilson. He was preceded by Norman Hapgood and succeeded by John Dyneley Prince.From September 24, 1921 to March 22, 1924, he served as the U.S. Envoy to Switzerland after his appointment by President Warren Harding. He was preceded by Hampson Gary and succeeded by Hugh S. Gibson.
First stint as Under Secretary of State (1924–1927)
From April 16, 1924 to June 30, 1927, Grew served as the Under Secretary of State under President Calvin Coolidge. During this period, Grew also served as chairman of the Foreign Service Personnel Board.Grew generally supported the professionalization and depoliticization of the State Department civil service. He was a Republican who spent much of his early career worried that Democrats would fire him for political reasons, and relied heavily on his personal friendships with high-ranking Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt. He also recognized that the State Department's low salaries meant that only the sons of rich men wanted to work there. From 1914 to 1922, three-quarters of incoming embassy secretaries had attended eastern prep schools, "mainly Groton and St. Paul's." In 1921, Grew wrote that under the current system, “the first quality demanded of is a wealthy father, or a personal income,” and that many sons of rich men were joining the diplomatic corps for social cachet. He urged the State Department to draw in more talented public servants by raising salaries.
One month after Grew became Under Secretary, the Rogers Act created a merit-based hiring process. Grew implemented the Act at the State Department; The New York Times later called him "the father of the career service." Grew would joke to incoming Foreign Service candidates that "All you have to do to get into the Foreign Service is to answer a few questions. I had to shoot a tiger." Even so, he sought to make sure that the State Department kept its reputation for gentility. He wanted "the new recruits, whatever their background, ... adopt the values of the old club," prompting Felix Frankfurter to quip that the new crop of Foreign Service officers were "more Grotty than the men who actually went to Groton."
Grew's tenure as Under Secretary was met with controversy both during and after his time in office. He was forced out after three years amidst accusations that the Personnel Board was favoring a “Harvard clique.” In addition, scholars later called attention to his racially exclusionary hiring practices. In 1924, the turn to merit-based hiring had allowed Clifton Reginald Wharton Sr. to become the first Black member of the Foreign Service. Grew used his position to manipulate the oral part of the exam specifically to prevent further hiring of Black candidates. Grew left after three years, but his successors continued the policy. After Wharton, no other Black person was hired to join the Foreign Service for more than 20 years.