23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Five Stars for a Four Star American Hero, April 18, 2001
Lucius D. Clay has the distinction-and it is not one in which he took any pride-of being the first four star general in the history of the U.S. Army never to have seen any combat. One might think that the career of a uniformed bureaucrat might have little interest, but such is hardly the case. Clay was a key figure in getting the U.S. Army mobilized during the Second World War. As military governor of Germany during the immediate postwar period, he was in the front lines of the early Cold War. In later years, he was a major force in the Eisenhower campaign of 1952 and a foreign policy advisor to several presidents on matters involving Germany and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Biographer Jean Edward Smith certainly has the expertise to tell the story of Clay's life. He edited Clay's papers, wrote an important history of Berlin during the Cold War, and had a series of long interviews with the general and his family.
The man that emerges is a paragon of virtue. Clay came from an influential family; he was a distant relative of the nineteenth century statesman Henry Clay and his father was a U.S. Senator from Georgia, but finances were tight. He attended West Point because it was free. Clay saw no combat in World War I and progress in his career during the interwar period was slow and frustrating like so many others who went on to have large commands during the war. During the conflict Clay's administrative and logistical talents earned him general's stars, but also kept him in Washington. He was willing to take a demotion to get a combat command, but the War Department would not let him go.
The bulk of the book focuses on the last four of his military career; the time he served as military governor of Germany. Clay recognized that the occupation and decisions about its future were political issues, he treated them as such, and insisted that his administration not be part of the normal Army command structure. He wanted, and got, direct access to Eisenhower, the supreme commander of allied forces, and the Secretary of War back in Washington. Clay was serious about establishing democracy in Germany and denazification efforts. He, however, maintained a distance from most German officials, not wanting anyone to be tagged as a collaborator. He also wanted to avoid a punitive peace settlement and made sure that Germany had a solid fiscal foundation upon which to base its economic recovery. Smith shows that the French, rather than the Soviets, were the biggest obstacles to him in these efforts. Clay ultimately ended reparations in Germany because of the amount of plunder headed west, not east. Although Clay was one of the last to give up on cooperation with the Soviets, he was one of the first to defend German liberties. He oversaw the Berlin airlift that preserved the freedom of the western half of the city.
After retiring from the Army, Clay became a corporate CEO, but refused to take a position with any company that did defense work. He was a foreign policy troubleshooter in the 1950s and 1960s, when the status of Berlin threatened to turn the Cold War into a real war. His trips to Berlin helped reassure the nervous population of American protection and support. Smith adopts Clay's position that President John F. Kennedy handled the German issue poorly and allowed the Soviets to divide Berlin, dooming thousands to life in a Communist state.
Smith has done an impressive job of letting Clay's personality and views comes through the text. Clay made this difficult, he left no collection of papers or letters for a biographer to use. Smith's solution to this problem was extensive research in the collections of many other individuals and interviews with the general and his family. At the end of each chapter, Smith includes excerpts from his interviews with Clay. These sections make Clay's views clear, but it also makes for redundant reading. Smith also has a tendency to exaggerate his subject's influence. He soft peddles his criticisms, and usually faults Clay for minor, trivial matters. Still, it is clear that Lucius D. Clay was a man of integrity and the type that Americans can be proud to have had serve in their government.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Clay: American Proconsul, March 6, 2008
This review is from: Lucius D. Clay: An American Life (Hardcover)
The strength of Smith's book is his personal interviews with Clay. I purchased the book because I enjoyed Smith's book on Marshall and wanted more information on post-war US administration of Germany. I was a little disappointed on that score, but learned a lot else, such as Clay's important relationship with Eisenhower. At a few points Smith leaves you with important ideas unexplained; he also takes a pretty strong view that US-Soviet post-war relations soured because of "right-wing" ideologues in the State Department. That part isn't convincing.
You will come away with a tremendous admiration for Lucius Clay and his important role at mid-20th century.
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