1940s: At the cabinet level, the air force was under the control of Secretary of War Stimpson. The Skull and Bones member was one of leaders for an easy peace with Germany at the end of the war. Roosevelt allowed Stimpson to choose his own staff. He chose John McCloy to act as assistant Secretary in charge of intelligence, civilian affairs and general troubleshooter. Stimpson placed Robert Lovett as assistant secretary of war for air. Both McCloy and Lovett had backgrounds from Wall Street. McCloy had been a former Wall Street lawyer and Lovett a partner and close friend of Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers and Harriman. It was Prescott that selected Lovett for membership in the Skull and Bones. Lovett was a wide-ranging advocate of terror bombing of population centers all of his life including during the Vietnam War.
In December 1940 Lovett accepted appointment as special assistant for air affairs to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, in April 1941 Lovett became assistant secretary for air, John J. McCloy became general assistant secretary, and Harvey H. Bundy became special assistant to the Secretary of War.
Lovett was Prescott Bush's partner at Brown Brothers Harriman [1], and was married to one of the daughters of the Brown Brothers, a company with which his father, Robert Scott Lovett, was also associated.
Robert A. Lovett was the chair of the 1946 'Lovett Committee', out of which the Cold War and CIA were born:
On Oct. 22, 1945, Secretary of War Robert Patterson created the Lovett Committee, chaired by Robert A. Lovett, to advise the government on the post-World War II organization of U.S. intelligence activities. The existence of this committee was unknown to the public until an official CIA history was released from secrecy in 1989. But the author (who was President Bush's prep school history teacher; see chapter 5) gives no real details of the Lovett Committee's functioning, claiming: 'The record of the testimony of the Lovett Committee, unfortunately, was not in the archives of the agency whenthis account was written'.
[But] the CIA's self-history does inform us of the advice that Lovett provided to the Truman cabinet, as the official War Department intelligence proposal. Lovett decided that there should be a separate Central Intelligence Agency. The new agency would 'consult' with the armed forces, but it must be the sole collecting agency in the field of foreign espionage and counterespionage. The new agency should have an independent budget, and its appropriations should be granted by Congress without public hearings. [3]
