Joseph Clark Grew

Grew, Joseph Clark (27 May 1880-25 May 1965), diplomat, U.S. ambassador to Japan, and undersecretary of state, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Edward Sturgis Grew, a wool merchant, and Annie Crawford Clark. Grew's family was among the more well-off Bostonians, and he was a distant cousin of the financier J. P. Morgan (1837-1913).

Grew attended Groton School (1892-1898) and Harvard (1898-1902), where he received a B.A. degree. At these institutions the sense of noblesse oblige was instilled in him, and it played a role in his later choice of a career in government service. After college he took a world tour, which included a visit to the Far East, where, in Amoy, China, lying on his back in a cave, he shot a tiger as it leaped over him. This deed recommended Grew to Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) as a proper candidate for the foreign service.

Grew's father wanted him to secure a position in banking. After a failed attempt to gain employment in a publishing house, Grew thought the foreign service would sate his desire for travel to exotic places, and he announced that he wanted to go into government service, pleasing neither his father nor his mother. His first effort at appointment failed when a hearing loss caused by a childhood illness was mistaken for total deafness. He subsequently received an appointment to Cairo, Egypt, in 1904 and was among the last people to be transferred from the consular service to the foreign service before President Theodore Roosevelt instituted the system of competitive examinations for appointments in 1906.

In 1905 Grew married Alice de Vermandois Perry; they had four daughters, three of whom married foreign service officers. Grew's marriage proved of enormous benefit when he was later appointed ambassador to Japan. Alice Perry was the descendant of Commodore Matthew Perry, who opened Japan to the West in 1853, and she also had spent her youth in that island nation, developing many contacts there. Thus Grew had access to important people whom it took others years to cultivate, if ever.

After his marriage, Grew returned to Egypt briefly, was assigned to Mexico City as third secretary of the embassy in 1906, and was sent to Russia in 1907. He was promoted to second secretary at Berlin in 1908, first secretary at Vienna in 1911-1912, and was sent back to Berlin in the latter year. He returned to the United States in 1912. Because of his Republican family, Grew feared the new Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson might replace him with a political appointee. He solicited the aid of Franklin Roosevelt and other Democratic friends and classmates from Groton and Harvard, probably saving his diplomatic career. It was only the first of several times that such contacts served him well. He spent 1913-1914 in Washington, and was in Berlin in 1915-1917, after which he returned again to Washington.

Grew gained a very prestigious post with the coveted equivalent rank of minister at the Paris Peace Conference in 1918, where he was put in charge of arrangements for the president's peace commission. Finding himself in the midst of the struggle for control of the mission, through tactful finesse he earned a reputation for evenhandedness and avoided antagonizing the various hostile elements. However, to ensure his position, Grew needed an appointment as chief of a legation, and he received this assignment as minister to Denmark in April 1920.

Representing U.S. interests at the Lausanne Conference on Near Eastern Affairs (1922-1923), Grew outmaneuvered British and French schemes to control oil concessions in Turkey. Although the separate treaty he negotiated with Turkey was rejected by the U.S. Senate, his negotiating skills and advice were warmly remembered by the Turks when he was appointed U.S. ambassador to Turkey in 1927. In the interim Grew returned to Washington to accept an assignment as undersecretary of state in Calvin Coolidge's administration.

These were not among Grew's happiest years. His diaries tell of conflicts with Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, who often called on him to give information to an inside group of advisers. They fired questions at him in a jumble of voices, which did not allow him to turn his good ear to each speaker, and the secretary became angry when Grew failed to give instant answers. The situation worsened when Grew became acting secretary of state in Kellogg's absence. Grew authorized the U.S. minister to China to join in a naval demonstration near Tientsin, and Kellogg accused him of nearly declaring war on China. Grew stayed on in this difficult arrangement in part because he wanted to see through the implementation of the Rogers Act of 1924, which authorized the reorganization and professionalization of the foreign service. By making it possible for career foreign service officers to be separated from consular appointments and not have to deal with such mundane items as issuing visas and reporting on business affairs of Americans in the various nations, the legislation distinctly separated the consular service from that category of foreign service officers who comprised the elite of the Department of State's overseas representatives. When this task was completed, he fled to the Turkish post with alacrity and relief.

In 1932 Grew was appointed and confirmed as the U.S. ambassador to Japan, the first career diplomat so honored, breaking the historic chain of political appointments to such posts. While Tokyo was a major capital, it was probably the least expensive place to be an ambassador, and thus Grew, whose fortune was adequate but not on a par with what would be required in London, Paris, or Berlin, could afford to accept the post.

Tokyo was the last overseas post for Grew and one where he intended to leave his mark in the annals of U.S. foreign policy. He spent the next ten years trying to explain the United States to the Japanese and vice versa in the hope that he could achieve success as a peacemaker between his suspicious employers and the aggressive leadership in that important island nation. That he failed in this ambition is partly attributable to conditions beyond his control, particularly the national ambitions and predilections of both governments. However, Grew bears some of the responsibility for the failure himself. With every new Japanese cabinet he advised the State Department to expect a better relationship because the premiers or foreign secretaries wanted to improve relations and the climate was better for a downgrading of the power of the military in Japan's government. As each Japanese cabinet fell, he retreated to gloomy predictions that relations could do nothing but get worse. These swings of mood and reporting caused reactions in Washington that were the opposite of what the ambassador sought, a greater appreciation for Japan's economic problems and greater leeway for the embassy to deal with policy decisions concerning Japan. He especially came into conflict with Stanley K. Hornbeck, who headed the Far East Division of the department until becoming special adviser to Secretary of State Cordell Hull on Far Eastern affairs in the late 1930s. Hornbeck accused Grew of being an appeaser.

Grew decided that the only way to avoid conflict was to illustrate to the Japanese that the result of failure to reach accommodation with the United States would be disaster. His famous "Straight from the Horse's Mouth" address to the America-Japan Society on 19 October 1939 warned that a change of course was requisite if the Japanese expected to avoid bringing the combination of U.S. economic and military power down on them. Despite attacks on him in the Japanese press, he thought that wiser heads in the government heeded his warning. He was, of course, mistaken.

Subsequently, Grew thought the only hope for peace was a direct meeting between President Franklin Roosevelt and Premier Prince Konoye Fumimaro. This failed to materialize, and Ambassador Grew contended thereafter that thus passed an excellent opportunity to save the peace. In fact there was little likelihood that such a meeting would have achieved anything save a stall for more time at best or a clearer case for rationalizing Japan's attack at Pearl Harbor on the basis of American intransigence at worst.

Grew returned to Washington in 1942 to become a special assistant to Secretary Hull and, in 1944, director of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs. From December 1944 to August 1945 he served once again as undersecretary of state. In this last post he opposed cooperation with the Soviets, based on long-held anticommunist views. He tried to prevent the use of the atomic bomb against Japan and played a role in preserving the emperor's position as titular head of the Japanese nation after the war. Grew retired from the State Department to serve on many private boards and commissions until his death at Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts.

Bibliography

Grew's papers are in the Houghton Library at Harvard; the most important and informative information in this collection are the voluminous Grew diaries chronicling his long career and his views of U.S. policy. Much information about him is in the Department of State records in the National Archives, including all of his dispatches, and a large body of material, including correspondence, is in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. Important material on Grew and his diplomacy is in the Columbia University Oral History Project. Grew's writings include Sport and Travel in the Far East (1910), Ten Years in Japan (1944), and Turbulent Era, ed. Walter Johnson assisted by Nancy Harvison Hooker (2 vols., 1952). Interested readers should also consult Waldo H. Heinrichs, Jr., American Ambassador: Joseph C. Grew . . . (1966), and Edward M. Bennett, "Joseph C. Grew: The Diplomacy of Pacification," in Diplomats in Crisis, ed. Richard Dean Burns and Edward M. Bennett (1974). Obituaries are in the New York Times and the Washington Post, both 27 May 1965.

Edward M. Bennett

Back to the top

Citation:

Edward M. Bennett. "Grew, Joseph Clark";

http://www.anb.org/articles/06/06-00234.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 15:11:15 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)

Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.