Ball, George Wildman

b. 21 December 1909 in Des Moines, Iowa; d. 26May 1994 in New York City), lawyer, government official, and writer who urged the importance of a united Europe.

The son of Amos Ball, Jr., a Standard Oil of Indiana vice president and director, and the former Edna Wildman, a teacher, George Ball grew up in Des Moines and in Evanston, Illinois. Ball was born into a family that included two older brothers, and he graduated from Northwestern University in 1930 and its law school in 1933. He joined the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration in Washington as a member of the Farm Credit administration, about which subject he knew nothing, he later wrote, having never spent a night on a farm. When his superior, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., transferred to the treasury department, Ball accompanied him, and upon Morgenthau’s becoming secretary in 1934 the young lawyer found himself in the midst of major New Deal events. It was an exciting time. But in 1935, having discovered that handling a kaleidoscope of projects was doing little for his training as a lawyer, he resigned and moved to Chicago to learn the details of practice.

In 1942, another landmark year, Ball went back to Washington during a second time of national emergency, initially working with the Lend-Lease Administration and in 1944 with what became the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. The survey’s sponsor, the U.S. Army Air Forces, sought to defend the bombing of the European continent as crucial to the defeat of Germany. Ball’s report concluded that bombing failed to play a decisive role.

In the war’s last months Ball became a close friend and disciple of the French economist Jean Monnet, who advocated European integration in a common market and a coal and steel community. During Ball’s tenure as undersecretary of state from 1961 to 1966, he supported a “Europe first” agenda, expressing little interest in that decade’s consuming subject of American foreign relations, Vietnam.

In the latter 1940s and in the 1950s, Ball engaged in legal work, in large part concerning international economics. In the administration of President John F. Kennedy (1961–1963), he was appointed undersecretary of economic affairs and then, upon the resignation of Chester Bowles, of political affairs, both positions under Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The first two political issues that the lawyerturned-diplomatist addressed were Laos and Cuba. To the former he brought skepticism, believing American interests in the Southeast Asian nation’s civil strife to be minuscule. Cuba, close at hand, was something else. As U.S. involvement deepened after the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), developing into the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Ball became one of the key figures in the administration’s decision to prevent Soviet ships from bringing war materiel into Cuba and to insist that the Soviets withdraw their missiles from Cuban soil.

As Ball was not a part of “the Harvard crowd,” his relations with President Kennedy were close but not intimate. Moreover, for one involved in government during the Depression and World War II, 1961 represented a less momentous experience. His relations with Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, were far more complicated, he wrote years later. Continuing as undersecretary of state, Ball privately sought to balance Johnson’s patriotism and mastery of congressional arm-twisting with the weaknesses and insecurities that he felt derived from the president’s sensitivity over having graduated from a Texas teachers’ college.

Vietnam was the central foreign policy issue of the Johnson years, and from the beginning Ball opposed escalation. He did not hesitate to present his views to the president. Although Johnson thanked him for them, he went in the opposite direction by following the advice of Ball’s chief, Secretary Rusk, and Secretary of Defense Robert S. Mc-Namara.

In 1966 Ball resigned and chose not to go public with his Vietnam dissent until the beginning of the Richard M. Nixon administration in 1969. After leaving the Department of State, he was associated with the New York investment banking firm of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb and maintained a residence in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife, the former Ruth Murdoch, whom he had married on 16 September 1932 and with whom he had two sons.

Ball was a tall, powerfully built man who was well read and closely connected to a number of important people. He believed himself the champion of lost causes. Among these causes were Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, with which he was closely associated; Vietnam; and also efforts to lessen U.S. involvement with the shah Reza Pahlavi’s regime in Iran. In another area of foreign policy, he favored reduced support of Israel. Monnet once told him that his basic fault was having an interest in too many things. The advice may have been unfair, considering the complexity of American foreign relations during his time of government service. His policy positions on the major issues have sparked debate, both over the issues themselves and his approaches to them. He died of abdominal cancer at the age of eighty-four.

Ball was the author of a half-dozen books, the most important of which is The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs (1982). Other significant books by Ball include The Discipline of Power (1968), Diplomacy for a Crowded World (1976), and Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement with Israel (1992). See also David L. DiLeo, George Ball, Vietnam, and the Rethinking of Containment (1991). An obituary is in the New York Times (28 May 1994).

Robert H. Ferrell