Adolf A. Berle
Adolf Augustus Berle, Jr (1895-1971) was a US lawyer, academic and government official.[1]
Contents
Education
Berle earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Harvard College before graduating from Harvard Law School in 1916.[1]
Career
Berle practiced law in Boston for a year before joining the US Commission negotiating a peace with Germany. In 1919, he moved to New York to join the law firm Berle, Berle and Brunner of which he remained a member during his subsequent career. He was a professor of Corporate Law at Columbia Law School from 1927 to 1964.[1]
The Modern Corporation and Private Property
In 1932, Berle and Gardner Means co-authored The Modern Corporation and Private Property, which argued that the concentration of ownership within the largest corporations was creating a divorce between ownership and control in the US economy. [1]
Government Service
From 1933 onwards, Berle spent much of his career in public service:
- He was a member of the original "brain trust" in the early years of President Franklin Roosevelt's first administration. He served as special counsel to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1933-1938), assistant secretary of state (1938-1944), United States ambassador to Brazil (1945-1946), chairman of the Task Force on Latin America (1961), and consultant to the secretary of state (1961-1962). At intervals throughout this period he also served as United States delegate to the Inter-American Conference for Maintenance of Peace (Buenos Aires, 1936-1937); and two Pan American conferences (Lima, Peru, 1938; Havana, Cuba, 1940). He was president of the International Conference on Civil Aviation and chairman of the American delegation (Chicago, 1944).[1]
Assistant Secretary of State
Berle was a key intelligence and security confidant of President Roosevelt.[2] As Assistant Secretary of State, his duties included coordinating US and foreign intelligence activities and negotiating with Allied governments in exile as well as postwar planning.[3]
In the wake of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the anti-communist journalist Isaac Don Levine arranged a meeting between Berle and Whittaker Chambers. Chambers told Berle there was a network of communist informers in Washington, naming individuals including Alger Hiss, Charles Kramer and Marion Bachrach.[4]
When Dorothy Thompson gave evidence about Soviet agent Otto Katz to the FBI, the intelligence was passed to Berle, who brushed off the material in a memo of 8 May 1940.[5]
Following its formation in 1940, the Emergency Rescue Committee's president Frank Kingdon kept in close touch with Berle. He urged the committee to withdraw Varian Fry from France and replace him, after Fry came under suspicion from the Vichy authorities. After Fry's expulsion in July 1942, he advised the ERC not to send another representative and to allow its role to be taken over by the US Consulate in Marseilles.[6]
MI6 historian Keith Jeffery describes Berle as an "Anglophobe" who was suspicious of British Security Coordination. In March 1941, he noted that William Stephenson was developing "a full size secret police and intelligence service" with "regularly employed secret agents and a much larger number of informers, etc."[7]
On 18 September 1941, Berle wrote to Sumner Welles about the Office of the Coordinator of Information: "For your confidential information, the really active head of the intelligence section in Donovan's group is Mr Elliot, who is assistant to Mr Stevenson [sic]. In other words, Stevenson's assistant in The British intelligence is running Donovan's intelligence service." "Elliot" was in fact a covername for Dick Ellis.[8]
In an April 1942 memorandum, Berle called for an allout political campaign to upset the Nazi Government in Germany.[9]
During his tenure as Assistant Secretary of State, Berle sought a tougher policy towards the Soviet Union. He was forced out of his post in a dispute with other major players in the State Department.[2]
Post-war activism
Following the formation of the European League for Economic Cooperation in October 1946, and the United Europe Movement the following month, Joseph Retinger travelled to the US, where he met Berle who agreed to lead an American section.[10]
Berle was a member of the board of Common Cause Inc., formed in January 1947 to expose communists and fellow travellers. According to Stephen Dorril, he was well-known as "a conduit for CIA funds throughout this period.". Berle was also a founder member of the Free Europe Committee formed in 1948.[11]
International Rescue Committee
When David Martin suggested in 1951 that the International Rescue Committee set up "frontier stations" to aid refugees from communism, Berle sounded out the State Department, the Army and the CIA's Allen Dulles, who responded favourably to the idea.[12]
In the winter of 1951, Martin turned to Berle to deal with the crisis caused by Vadim Makaroff's denunciation of the IRC. Martin regarded Berle's support as essential because of his credentials as a liberal anticommunist.[2] Berle was however unsuccessful in persuading Vincent Astor to endorse the IRC.[13]
David Dubinsky
In an undated anecdote, David Dubinsky claimed that Berle was hired as an attorney by a garment manufacturer who was trying to break away from Mafia extortion, and who also brought in the ILGWU to unionise his company.[14]
Affiliations
- National Committee for a Free Europe - board member.
- International Rescue Committee - board member.
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Encyclopedia of World Biography on Adolf Augustus Berle, Jr., bookrags.com, accessed 4 April 2012.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Eric Thomas Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee and the CIA, M.E. Sharpe, 1995, p.106.
- ↑ Jürgen Heideking, Christof Mauch, American Intelligence and the German Resistance to Hitler: A Documentary History, Westview Press, 1998, p.20.
- ↑ Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism, Yale University Press, 1996, p.318.
- ↑ Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenburg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals, Harper Collins, 1995, p.211.
- ↑ Eric Thomas Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee and the CIA, M.E. Sharpe, 1995, pp.15-16.
- ↑ Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949, Bloomsbury, 2010, p.448.
- ↑ Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States 1939-41, Brassey's, 1999, p.19.
- ↑ Jürgen Heideking, Christof Mauch, American Intelligence and the German Resistance to Hitler: A Documentary History, Westview Press, 1998, p.20.
- ↑ Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Service, Touchstone, 2000, p.461.
- ↑ Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Service, Touchstone, 2000, p.436.
- ↑ Eric Thomas Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee and the CIA, M.E. Sharpe, 1995, p.69.
- ↑ Eric Thomas Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee and the CIA, M.E. Sharpe, 1995, p.107.
- ↑ David Dubinsky and A.H. Raskin, David Dubinsky: A Life With Labor, Simon & Schuster, 1977, p.155.
