Harvard U. Jewish Students Appeal to Jewish Community to Have the University Remove John Mccloy’s Na

A spokesman for the Jewish Student Association of the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government appealed today to the American Jewish community to “impress” upon the university to remove the name of John McCloy from a new German-American scholarship program.

The spokesman, Joseph Cislowski, who is a student at the School of Government, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that his organization, along with other university Jewish groups and Asian-American student groups had hoped to persuade the school’s administration to remove McCloy’s name from the new program which will be financed by a $2 million initial grant by the Volkswagen Foundation of Hanover, West Germany.

McCloy, 88 years old, is a partner in the New York City law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy and was Assistant Secretary of War during World War II and American Military Governor of Occupied Germany from 1949 to 1952. The February edition of Harpers magazine described McCloy as “the most influential private citizen in America.”

CHARGES AGAINST MCCLOY

Jewish student groups at Harvard have charged that McCloy was instrumental in persuading President Roosevelt in the Allied decision to not bomb Nazi

Cislowski, as well as Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor, are among those who have charged McCloy with having pardoned a number of Nazi war criminals immediately after World War II in his capacity as high commissioner of occupied Germany. Furthermore, Dershowitz has charged that while acting in the capacity of a private citizen, McCloy lobbied the Nixon Administration against sending U.S. defensive weaponry to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Asian-American student organizations at Harvard object to the scholarship named for McCloy because they charge that he was instrumental in the government’s decision to place thousands of Japanese-Americans in internment camps, a decision that McCloy recently defended as necessary and justified in wartime because of the perceived threat of an imminent Japanese attack on the U.S. A national commission has asserted that the internment of Japanese-Americans at that time was rooted in “race, prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership.”

SCHOOL’S DEAN DEFENDS MCCLOY

The scholarship program, announced last March, will bring 10 German students each year beginning this September to Harvard to foster “strong German-American understanding” and to study American methods of public management and policy analysis at the School of Government.

In a statement released last Thursday, Graham Allison Jr., dean of the School of Government, said that McCloy “was not responsible for the evils” charged by the student groups and described him as an American who “more than any other, helped transform U.S.-German relations from the depth of a world war that claimed 51 million victims to a special relationship between closely allied democracies.”