Joseph Clark Grew (May 27, 1880 – May 25, 1965) was an American career diplomat and Foreign Service officer. He is best known for his long tenure as United States Ambassador to Japan (1932–1941) in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor and for his two stints as the second-in-command at the State Department (1924–1927 & 1944–45). 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 (including the retention of the Japanese monarchy), 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 (1920–1921) and Switzerland (1921–1924). 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 (1927–1932).
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 [foreign] 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.
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 (1906), St. Petersburg (1907), Berlin (1908), Vienna (1911), Berlin (1912–1914), and Vienna (1914–1917). 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 (1917–1919).
Post-World War I negotiator
Grew served as the secretary of the American peace commission in Paris (1919–1920). 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. To stabilize U.S.-Turkey relations, Grew negotiated a side treaty with İsmet İnönü (then referred to as İsmet Pasha). The treaty would have abolished extraterritoriality and tax exemptions for American citizens (see Capitulations of the Ottoman Empire), in exchange for equal rights for American charities and nonprofits. (A side deal to the side deal, the Chester concession, would have authorized new U.S. oil and railroad investments in Turkey; Standard Oil of New York already had substantial interests in Turkey.) 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's position was complicated by American interests in Turkey, as the Turks feared being geographically dismembered after the war (cf. Hungary) 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. Grew attributed the opposition to the Armenian American lobby, which refused to compromise on an independent Armenian state.
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 (the pre-1972 equivalent of Deputy 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. From 1914 to 1922, three-quarters of incoming embassy secretaries had attended eastern prep schools, "mainly [Grew's alma mater] Groton and St. Paul's." In 1921, Grew wrote that under the current system, “the first quality demanded of [aspiring diplomats] 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." 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.
Ambassador to Turkey
In 1927, President Coolidge indicated his desire to revive the Turkey question. Grew's 1923 treaty was resubmitted to the Senate, which ultimately rejected the treaty by a 50-34 vote, six votes short of the required two-thirds majority.
Coolidge appointed Grew as the first American ambassador to the Republic. Grew served in Istanbul, as the new capital Ankara was "little more than an undeveloped provincial town" at the time. Even so, the Grews soon became popular in Japanese society, joining clubs and societies there, and adapting to the culture, even as relations between the two countries deteriorated. During his long tenure in Japan he became well known to the American public, making regular appearances in newspapers, newsreels and magazines, including an appearance on Time magazine's cover in 1934, and a long 1940 feature story in Life in which writer John Hersey, later famous for Hiroshima, called Grew "unquestionably the most important U.S. ambassador" and Tokyo the "most important embassy ever given a U.S. career diplomat."
One of Grew's closest and most influential Japanese friends and allies was Prince Tokugawa Iesato (1863–1940), the president of Japan's upper house, the House of Peers. During most of the 1930s, both men worked together in various creative diplomatic ways to promote goodwill between their nations. The adjoining photograph showed them having tea together in 1937 after attending a goodwill event to commemorate the 25th anniversary Japanese gift of cherry blossom trees to the US in 1912. The Garden Club of America reciprocated by giving flowering trees to Japan.
The historian Jonathan Utley argues in Before Pearl Harbor that Grew took the position that Japan had legitimate economic and security interests in Greater East Asia and that he hoped that President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Hull would accommodate them by high-level negotiations. However, Roosevelt, Hull, and other top American officials strongly opposed the massive Japanese intervention in China, and they negotiated with China to send American warplanes and with Britain and the Netherlands to cut off sales of steel and oil, which Japan needed for aggressive warfare. Other historians argue that Grew put far too much trust in the power of his moderate friends in the Japanese government. After Japan attacked the United States, Grew speculated that hardliners in the Japanese government had doctored the Hull Note to persuade civilian leadership that war was inevitable. Shigeru Yoshida's 1955 memoirs corroborated this theory.
Grew wrote in 1942 that he expected Nazi Germany to collapse, like the German Empire in 1918, but not the Japanese Empire:
Attack on Pearl Harbor, internment, and repatriation
According to Dean Acheson, Grew questioned "the prevailing opinion" that Japan would not start a war by attacking Pearl Harbor. On January 27, 1941, Grew secretly cabled the State Department with rumors passed on by the Peruvian Minister to Japan: "Japan military forces planned a surprise mass attack at Pearl Harbor in case of 'trouble' with the United States." Grew's own published account of 1944 stated, "There is a lot of talk around town [Tokyo] to the effect that the Japanese in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor." Grew's report was provided to Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, and Admiral Husband Kimmel, Commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, but it was discounted by everyone involved in Washington, D.C., and Hawaii. Grew warned of an impending attack again in a November 3, 1941 telegram, one month before the war began.
Re-appointment as Under Secretary of State (1944–1945)
Grew returned to Washington in 1942 and served as a special assistant to Secretary Hull. In 1944, he was promoted to director of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs. On December 20, 1944, Grew was once again appointed as Under Secretary of State. He served as the Acting Secretary of State for most of the period from January to August 1945, while Secretaries of State Edward Stettinius and James F. Byrnes were away at conferences.
The start of the Cold War
Grew distrusted the Soviet Union and advocated an anti-communist stance in the final days of the war. In April 1945, he and Chip Bohlen organized a meeting for State Department leadership, where Averell Harriman informed his colleagues that America and the USSR had a "basic and irreconcilable difference of objective" and that appeasement was not feasible.
However, Dean Acheson complained that Grew and Leo Crowley had prematurely undermined America's allies by urging President Truman to terminate Lend-Lease, one of Acheson's favored projects, at the end of the war.
One exception to Grew's anti-Soviet policy was his decision to repatriate Soviet nationals who had been captured by the Nazis as prisoners-of-war (POWs), and had entered American custody. During the war, the Nazis had put these individuals to work (voluntarily or involuntarily