Communists' Capitalist by E. J. Kahn, Dec 10, 1997 -- New Yorker Magazine
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COMMUNISTS' CAPITALIST
By E. J. Kahn, Jr.
(Copyright the New Yorker Magazine,
October 10 and October 17, 1977 issues)
THEY are all gone now—Bertrand Russell, Samuel Insull, John L.
Lewis, the Duke of Windsor, Nikita Khrushchev, and Frank Lindsay.
Frank Lindsay was, in 1968, at the age of a hundred, the oldest living
trustee of the University of Chicago. That he—let alone five fellow
board members of eighty-five or older—was still around nine years ago
was somewhat vexing to another venerable trustee, Cyrus Stephen
Eaton, who was then eighty-four, and who remarked in a letter at the
time, “My great ambition to be the oldest member of the Chicago board
appears hopeless.” Now, at nearly ninety-four, Eaton has achieved that
goal, which might have pleased another of his assorted old
acquaintances—John D. Rockefeller, Sr., who founded the University of
Chicago in 1890, and who, hack in 1901, introduced Eaton to the world
of high finance. Eaton came to occupy a position of eminence in that
world, and among those who have suffered more than he has from its
inequities he has often been called a capitalistic robber baron, or worse.
For the last couple of decades, he has also often been called a
Communistic traitor, or worse. Eaton, who thinks that the senior
Rockefeller was just about the finest American of his era, was for forty
years further vexed because, following his designation, in 1936, as one
of the hundred-odd electors of the Hall of Fame, it took him that long to
get yet another of his heroes, Andrew Carnegie, admitted there.
(Carnegie hasn't yet been enshrined; the Hall has run out of money.) On
the pedestals of Eaton's own private pantheon are also to be found such
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other members of his wide-ranging social set as Fidel Castro, Leonid
Brezhnev, Pham Van Dong, and whoever has happened in recent years
to be in charge of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Rumania,
Yugoslavia, and East Germany. One of the few Western holders of the
Lenin (ne Stalin) Peace Prize, and a never-say-die aspirant to the Nobel,
Eaton, who was born in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, and graduated in 1905
from McMaster University, then in Toronto and now in Hamilton, Ontario,
has nine honorary degrees—from McMaster; from Dalhousie and
Acadia Universities, in Nova Scotia; from Mount Allison University, in
New Brunswick; from Bard and Bowling Green, in the United States;
from the University of Sofia, in Bulgaria; from Eotvos Lorand
University, in Budapest; and from Charles University, in Prague. When
he attended the 1973 enthronement of his old mentor's great-grandson
John D. Rockefeller IV as president of West Virginia Wesleyan College,
the official program listed him as representing Charles University. That
institution refers to him honorifically as “Cyrusovi Stephenovi
Eatonovi.”
Eaton, who expects to live to be at least a hundred (the elder
Rockefeller departed several weeks short of ninety-nine), has said that
his father, who died at eighty-four, missed some of the most satisfying
and stimulating years of man's span. Eaton, who has chaired enough
boards in his career to build a corporate raft, was seventy when he
started in as chairman of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway in 1954,
replacing his friend and ally Robert R. Young on Young's departure to
engage in a bloody and successful battle for control of the New York
Central. On the eve of Eaton's ninetieth birthday, instead of being
ceremonially invested with some kind of honorary C. & O. degree on his
retirement, he was summarily booted upstairs to chairman emeritus by
his own board of directors at a rump meeting. When his son Cyrus, Jr.,
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who was also a C. & O. director, bridled it the indelicate treatment his
father had received, he was booted off the board altogether. Eaton pere
was stripped of all but one of his twelve assistants but was allowed to
keep his office, on the thirty-sixth floor of the Terminal Tower in
Cleveland, from which for twenty years he had almost literally loomed
over that town The office, to which Eaton has repaired with diminishing
frequency since he turned ninety-two, is a large, emphatically capitalistic
sanctum, with the exception that The New Republic and Soviet Union are
just as prominently on display as Forbes and Fortune. The chair Eaton
sits in is unabashedly red—though of a high-quality leather. When he is
not scrutinizing the latest Dow-Jones figures on the companies in which
he owns stock, or gazing out of a window at the iron-ore freighters
inching their way up the Cuyahoga River from Lake Erie toward one of
a number of steel mills in which he has at one time or another had a
proprietary interest (“There's the strength of America,” he tells visitors),
he can glance at one of six paintings that grace his oak-paneled walls.
(The paneling was imported from Sherwood Forest by the notorious Van
Sweringen brothers, who jointly occupied the chamber when they were
presiding over their railroad empire.) All the paintings are gifts from
Communist dignitaries. Over Eaton's fireplace hangs a landscape that
was presented to him by Nikita Khrushchev. There are canvases from
Czechoslovakia, Hungary (a reader of the Cleveland Plain Dealer
complained because the paper chanced to run a photograph of Eaton
receiving this one on George Washington's birthday), Rumania, Poland,
and Bulgaria. The Bulgarian work shows two young boys transporting a
water barrel in a wagon. Spotting it while lunching in Sofia with the
head of the local Communist Party, Eaton said that it reminded him of
his boyhood in Canada. He was at once offered it as a keepsake. “I still
have wall space for China and Cuba,” he likes to say.
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From the Terminal Tower it is a short walk to the Union Club,
Cleveland's upper-crust and conservative social oasis. (One president of
the club was reportedly dropped from its rolls in the early nine teenhundreds
when it became known that he had voted for a Democrat.)
Eaton has been a member since 1913, and over the last twenty years he
has invited so many Communist leaders to the club that some of its flock
have groused that it might better be called the Soviet Union Club. One
of his more memorable gatherings there was a lunch he gave in January,
1959, for Anastas I. Mikoyan, First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union,
who was visiting the United States to feel out public reaction in
anticipation of the tour contemplated later that year by Premier
Khrushchev. Most of Eaton's other guests were Midwestern
industrialists, in steel or railroads or utilities or the like. Outside the club,
a few anti-Communist pickets were arrayed, armed with rocks, eggs, and
spittle, but inside Mikoyan got a standing ovation when Eaton
introduced him. The Russian said, “The problem of peace now is more
important than ever before in the history of mankind. And that is why
we highly value the contributions being made by Mr. Cyrus Eaton in
trying to bring together on a platform of peace and cooperation the
scientists and also the businessmen of our countries.” Eaton, Mikoyan
went on, “has become more popular in our country than any capitalist
has ever been before.” He said that the speeches Eaton made following
visits to Russia were regularly “published in full in our papers, and
they said, ‘This is not a normal capitalist.'” Mikoyan also told the
assemblage that while in America he hoped to purchase, on behalf of his
country, huge amounts of steel to be used in constructing pipelines for
natural gas and oil. “I remember well the Deputy Premier's saying that
he wanted to place the biggest order for steel in the history of the
world,” Eaton recalled recently. “He said that none of it would be used
for military purposes, and that he wasn't going to ask for credit, either.
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'There will be cash in a New York bank before a single shipment leaves,'
Mikoyan promised. The businessmen were naturally enchanted with the
prospect, and after lunch they clustered around the Deputy Premier to
discuss quantities and specifications. Mikoyan himself, when he and I
adjourned to my home afterward, said it had been the happiest day of his
life. Then he went to Washington to obtain the necessary export permits,
and he was brushed off by Lewis Strauss at Commerce and by Douglas
Dillon at State. So Mikoyan shrugged and went to Europe and placed
his orders with French and Dutch and British and Belgian and German
firms, and the orders were so big they kept the mills there running full
tilt for three years. Strauss had not yet been confirmed as Secretary of
Commerce by the Senate, and I was pleased to be able to help block him
when he did come up. He told Mikoyan, 'We won't do business with
you, because you don't believe in God,' and gave him a copy of George
Washington's farewell address to his officers—the one in which, you
will recall, Washington said, 'Reason and experience both forbid us to
expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious
principle.’ Hardly tactful, to say the least. Mikoyan gave Strauss some
vodka and caviar, unaccompanied by any land of homily.”
ALTHOUGH Eaton has twice been dropped from the Social
Register for various alleged sins of commission or omission, there has
never been any formal attempt to revoke his membership in the Union
Club, a fate from which he may have helped save himself by also
entertaining there such acceptable types as the Duke of Windsor, who
was more of a novelty in Cleveland that he would have been in, say.
Palm Beach or Newport. “The Duke had a beautiful voice and charming
manners, and he got along famously with the business people I
invited to meet him,” Eaton says. “I had some fine letters from him
afterward, and once I showed some of them to his niece Princess
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Margaret, and she said that she and her sister considered that their uncle
had had an unhappy time of it, and that they were very grateful to
anyone, like me, who had befriended him. I never knew the Duke's
great-grandmother personally, but I well recall Queen Victoria's
Diamond Jubilee, in the spring of 1897, at Halifax. In Her Majesty's
honor, there were some splendid reenactments of the Crimean War—I
particularly enjoyed the charge of the Light Brigade—and rowing races
among the crews of ships in port from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and
Holland, and a baseball game between a local team and some visiting
railroad men. I was only thirteen in 1897, unfortunately, and thus too
young to play. Not long after that, of course, came the Boer War, and
had I been a little bit older I'd have enlisted, like some of my relatives.
Lord Strathcona, then the Canadian High Commissioner in London,
organized and equipped his own cavalry, and when the Strathcona Horse
came through from the west en route to embarkation from Halifax, our
school went down to the railroad station to salute them, and I wore a
shoulder sash with the unit's colors on it. I have always felt that if the
United States had studied the lessons of the Boer War more closely it
might have avoided its mistakes in Vietnam.”
Cleveland has long had, and to a degree still has, mixed feelings
about Eaton. He set up shop there to show the big-money boys in bigcity
New York that there could be other seats of power. Wall Street
managed to cope with him fairly well, but along Cleveland's Euclid
Avenue during the Cold War he was viewed with consternation and,
more often than not, disapprobation. When, in 1962, the magazine
Pageant ranked him eighth in a list of the ten most controversial Americans,
the Plain Dealer deplored this as a grave miscarriage of justice,
arguing that Eaton, rather than Jimmy Hoffa, should have been placed
first. Because of Eaton's practically non-stop controversiality, so much
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garbage kept being dumped on the lawns of his suburban estate, Acadia
Farms—an eight-hundred-acre retreat in Northfield, twenty miles
southeast of Cleveland— that sanitation trucks had to make extra runs to
haul the stuff away, and his grandchildren were taunted by their
schoolmates as “Reds” and “Commies.”
Eaton's second wife, Anne, whom he married in 1957, when he
was seventy-three and she thirty-five, was— like his first wife, three of
his daughters, a daughter-in-law, and his principal office assistant—an
alumna of Hathaway Brown, the Cleveland school for young ladies of
fashion. The more outspokenly Eaton carried on about Communists and
the desirability— nay, necessity—of getting along with them, the less
other H.B. alumnae would speak to his wife. Mrs. Eaton was unfazed at
no longer being asked to certain teas; anyway, she was usually too busy
being a political hostess to accept invitations of a purely social nature. “I
suppose I've had more Communists to dinner than any other woman in
the Western Hemisphere,” she said not long ago, and, indeed, she once
did feed the entire Bolshoi Ballet. By 1970, though, she was sufficiently
back in the good graces of Hathaway Brown to be asked to give the
commencement address. Her husband thereupon favored that academy
with an Eaton Seminar Room, where healthy debate has presumably
since flourished.
The Plain Dealer used to run anti-Eaton editorials about as
regularly as it denounced organized crime and inveighed against
drought. The editorials could be quickly skimmed, because their titles
conveyed their gist: “Apostle of Appeasement,” or “Now See Here, Mr.
Eaton.” Musing editorially in 1960 upon whether or not it should applaud
Eaton's receiving the Lenin Peace Prize—the only other American
recipients of which were Paul Robeson, Howard Fast, William E. B. Du
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Bois, and Andrew W. Moulton, the left-wing Protestant Episcopal
bishop of Utah— the Plain Dealer concluded, “We hope he will
understand why we find it necessary to wait and see,” and one Eaton-
Khrushchev tete-a-tete inspired the tart observation “Eaton's fellow-
Clevelanders can only wonder, with shame, why their fellow-townsman
should be so intimate with his country's most dangerous enemy.” Over
the years, furthermore, the paper has carried dozens of letters suggesting
that if Eaton likes Russia so much, why doesn't he move there? Eaton
says that he once had a business associate interview the writers of a
dozen such letters, and that the investigation revealed that “without
exception” the missives had been composed not by their alleged senders
but by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (The F.B.I, has not
acknowledged authorship.) Lately, though, Cleveland has begun to
mellow toward the person who could be called its enfant terrible were
he not so terribly old. However the Plain Dealer may have viewed him
in the past, the Cleveland Press Club named him its Man of the Year in
1967, asserting as it did so (alas! poor Bob Feller) that “history may
judge Cyrus Eaton the most noted figure of all time in Cleveland.” When
the man who had by then been judged far and wide to be the father of
detente celebrated his ninetieth birthday, on December 27, 1973, the
mayor threw a reception for him at City Hall. The Rumanian Ambassador
to the United States flew in from Washington, and a cablegram
was read from Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin, and Nikolai V.
Podgorny, stating, without qualification, “Everyone in the Soviet Union
loves you.” Cleveland's mayor, for his part, presented Eaton with a key
to the city, which the proud recipient has exhibited ever since in his
library, along with similar municipal gate-openers from San Francisco,
Moscow, and Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. The Russian key is the fanciest:
it has a built-in clock.
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In still another editorial, the Plain Dealer said, “It would be very
pleasant to live in the world of Cyrus Eaton, with caviar in every pot and
two troikas in every garage, but we fear this world exists only in Cyrus
Eaton's imagination.” Not exactly. Eaton has long been able to afford all
the caviar he desires, though it does not fit in with the bland diet he has
adopted, and since 1959 he has had in his garage—his stable, more
precisely—at Acadia Farms the only authentic Russian troika in the
United States. His troika—three stallions, a carriage, and a sleigh— was
also a gift from Premier Khrushchev, who shipped it to Ohio,
accompanied by a trainer and a veterinarian, in 1958. The troika was
formally conveyed to Eaton by First Deputy Premier Mikoyan during his
1959 winter visit Eaton and his wife climbed into their new two-seater
sleigh, with the Russian trainer at the reins Mikoyan hopped onto a
narrow running board, clung gamely to one side of the vehicle as the big
horses—stalwart Orloffsky-Rissaky stallions—careered along at their
customary twenty-mile-an-hour speed, and managed not to fall off. “Mr.
Mikoyan is the bravest man I ever heard of,” Mrs. Eaton said
afterward. In the ensuing years, as the original three horses have aged
and died, successive Soviet governments have sent over replacements.
Lately, Eaton has been breeding his Russian stallions, noted for
endurance as well as speed, to American quarter-horse mares, and he
hopes to end up with a fine new breed of his own invention. The troika
has also been put through its paces at agricultural shows and stock
shows and other gatherings around the country. At Acadia Farms, the
Eaton troika has jounced and jostled such eminent guests as the Nobel
laureates Lord John Boyd Orr and Sir Norman Angell and the
photographer Karsh, who stopped by one day in 1963 to snap some
visiting luminaries and presently was snapped himself in spirited transit.
Physically, Eaton is the epitome of a capitalist—almost a caricature of
one. He is tall, robust, silver-haired, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, and
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always impeccably dressed. His day-in-and-day-out costume, even
when down on the farm, consists of a well-cut (Wetzel) doublebreasted
dark-blue serge suit, with a white shirt, a gray silk four-in-hand,
and highly polished black shoes. On weekends, until he gave it up, at
ninety-two, he was fond of riding, and he was partial to the full regalia
worn when riding to hounds. (He quit skiing at eighty-seven and ice
hockey at seventy.) However he may be dressed, this prince of paradox
does not see himself as a freak, or even as an anomaly. Bertrand Russell
once said that Eaton was living proof that business and philosophy could
mix, and this characterization struck its beneficiary as quite apposite.
Asked once in a courtroom—there has been much litigation in his
career— what he did for a living, Eaton replied, “Generally speaking,
rubber, steel, electricity, and finance.” On other occasions, he has
described himself as a simple farmer. Such modesty is unusual for him.
When he is travelling, he sometimes has an assistant phone the local
papers to reveal that he is in town and available for interviews, “No
comment” is a phrase he hardly ever uses. Eaton's remarks to the press
since he has become somebody quotable have been voluminous, and that
doesn't include the thousand or so letters to the editor that he has dashed
off, on topics ranging from the condition of Washington, D.C., in 1942
(“a megalosaurian city, its body all out of proportion to its brain”) to the
fiscal plight of New York City in 1975 (“I have been personally
involved in every American panic since 1893”). More often than not, his
letters have revealed him as the foremost living champion of coexistence,
a role his wife likes to complement; her favorite winter costume is
an American mink coat topped by a sable hat from Russia. Whenever
Eaton is accused, as he has been in so many letters to editors, of being
partial to Communism, he retorts, in no uncertain terms, that he is not
and never has been anything but an outright capitalist. “With my record,
I find the notion that I might be a Communist rather astonishing,” he
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declared in 1961. The only American Communist he is aware of ever
having met is Gus Hall, the general secretary of the indigenous Party, to
whom he was introduced at an official Czechoslovakian reception in
New York some years back. But then Eaton docs not believe he could
have met many others. “There are no Communists in America to speak
of except in the minds of those on the payroll of the F.B.I.,” he said in
the spring of 1958. It delights him to be able to bring persons he
unquestioningly identifies as Communists into his familiar capitalistic
orbit. The parent company of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway owns the
elegant Greenbrier Hotel, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia-
“The Greenbrier makes a favorable impression on Communists, because
it's probably the most capitalistic spot in America” Eaton says. He and
his wife once took Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov and his wife
to the hotel for a posh weekend. At dinner, hearty coexistential toasts
were exchanged, first to capitalism and then to Communism, Mrs. Eaton
thereupon impishly proposed a further toast—to all the people on earth
who believed in neither. After a moment's hesitation, everybody present
joined in that one, too.
WHEN Eaton was sixteen and attending Amherst Academy, in
Nova Scotia, he was awarded for scholastic achievement sets of the
complete works of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. Darwin,
Huxley, and other rationalists have been his heroes ever since, and he
tends to identify his own triumphs and travails with theirs. Eaton, though
never ordained, was briefly, in his youth, the pastor of a Baptist church;
like other lapsed preachers, he has been attracted to philosophers— Karl
Marx among them—who had little use for organized religion. Along
with Wall Street financiers, the popularizers of myths and superstitions
have long been his foes. A contemporary whom he greatly admired was
the late A. Eustace Haydon, himself a lapsed Baptist and for many years
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a professor of comparative religion at Chicago, whose 1941 book,
“Biography of the Gods,” was dedicated to Eaton. The dedicatee likes to
avow his concurrence with the author's conclusion:
More important than faith in God is devotion to the human ideals
of which he has become the symbol. Too long the strong; gods have
been made to bear the burden- Wistfully man has watched for the day of
divine action to dawn and ever healed the hurt of disappointment with
more passionate faith. Hopes hung in the heavens are of no avail. What
the gods have been expected to do, and have failed to do through the
ages, man must find the courage and intelligence to do for himself. More
needful than faith in God is faith that man can give love, justice, peace,
and all his beloved moral values embodiment in human relations. Denial
of this faith is the only real atheism. Without it, belief in all the galaxies
of gods is mere futility. With it, and the practice that flows from it, man
need not mourn the passing of the gods.
In sharp contrast to many of his associates in the financial world,
Eaton has habitually elected to spend his leisure time far removed from
his business cronies. “On my vacations, for my companions I used to
invite the presidents of universities and other scholars to visit me in
Nova Scotia,” he says. (He has a three-thousand-acre summer estate
there, near Halifax.) “I found pleasure in talking to thinkers, for a
change. I would sometimes take them on salmon-fishing expeditions,
maybe half a dozen college presidents at a clip, casting in the daytime
and in the evening discussing the best way of getting people interested
in great books. Most of them were pretty good fishermen; it's not too
strenuous a sport. Many of my industrialist friends believed I was doing
a wise thing in seeking to find recreation in contemplating intellectual
matters. But I also encouraged reading of great books—in some
instances successfully, I like to think—by people in the business world.
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I kept urging my friends there not to accept as the truth something that
was merely popular but, rather, to question the finality and truth of all
our dogmas, whether in religion or politics or economics.”
In the nineteen-fifties, Eaton began to formalize his penchant by
inviting— in collaboration with the Association of American Colleges--
academics to a series of what were called Intellectual Life conferences,
during which they would alternately play tennis or golf and explore
Plato's “Crito” or “Gullivers Travels.” At the end of 1954, on the
occasion of his seventy-first birthday, Eaton announced that he was
turning his family's hundred-and-fifty-year-old home in Pugwash into a
permanent site for meetings of thinkers. The following year, Bertrand
Russell and Albert Einstein, increasingly perturbed about the
proliferation of nuclear weapons, resolved to call a conference of
scientists who, acting as individuals rather than representing nations or
governments, could attempt to save the world from nuclear holocaust.
One idea at the start was to hold a meeting at Monte Carlo, with
Aristotle Onassis footing the bill. When that didn't work out, Eaton
stepped in as patron and, because he sensed that the State Department
was not of a mind to admit some Soviet and Chinese scholars who were
on the guest list, proposed holding it on the more tolerant soil of
Canada, and specifically in Pugwash.
The Pugwash conferences with which Eaton's name has been
linked worldwide are the science conferences, and the first of these took
place in July 1957. Einstein was dead by then; one of his last
memorable statements had been “We must never relax our efforts to
arouse m the peoples of the world, and especially in their governments,
an awareness of the unprecedented disaster which they are absolutely
certain to bring on themselves unless there is a fundamental change in
their attitudes toward one another as well as in their concept of the
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future. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except
our way of thinking.” Lord Russell was ailing and couldn't make the
meeting but he sent a recorded message with the British physicist C. F.
Powell, one of three Nobel laureates (the others were Hideki Yukawa,
of Japan, and H. J. Muller, of the United States) who did attend. In all,
there were twenty-two distinguished scientists, from ten nations--
among them, significantly, A. V. Topchiev, the general secretary of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences, and Chou Pei-Yuan, vice-rector of Peking
University. Greeting his guests, Eaton declared, “A man's first moral
obligation is to earn his living and his second is to be intelligent.” After
three days of non-income-producing but highly intellectual colloquy,
interspersed with croquet and other undemanding diversions, the
participants agreed, with one or two reservations, that man's misuse of
nuclear energy could well result in his annihilation; furthermore, they
resolved to hold more get-togethers to foster more joint thinking.
Over the ensuing years, in England and Ethiopia, in Italy and
Quebec, in Sweden and Yugoslavia, there have been a couple of dozen
assemblies of Pugwash scientists. In his autobiography, Lord Russell,
who served for a while as chairman of the Continuing Committee of the
Pugwash Movement, wrote, “Perhaps the unique characteristic of the
1957 and subsequent Pugwash Conferences was the fact that the
members consorted with each other in their spare time as well as during
the scheduled meetings, and grew to know each other as human beings
rather than merely as scientists of this or that potentially inimical belief
or nation. This most important characteristic was in large part made
possible by the astute understanding by Cyrus Eaton of the situation and
what we wished to accomplish and by his tactful hospitality.” Without
the prior deliberations of the Pugwash scientists, the nuclear-test-ban
treaty of 1963— unsatisfactory as many deemed it to be, because it
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permitted underground explosions to be continued—might not have
come into being. The Pugwashites’ lengthy palavers have also produced
the phrase “hogwash from Pugwash.” However history may ultimately
assess these gatherings, the fact that they occurred at all was in large
measure attributable—as Gerard Piel, the publisher of Scientific
American, put it in 1972—to the circumstance that Eaton “recognized
years ago that the fate and hope of mankind hangs upon the international
community of science, the international community of rational human
understanding.” (Piel's statement was made at the kind of part)' that
Eaton likes to give: He invited a hunch of scientists to Pugwash to watch
a solar eclipse, and proclaimed the occasion a tribute to Simon
Newcomb, the Nova Scotian astronomer who is the only Canadian in the
Hall of Fame.) Eaton is no less fond of an encomium uttered at the 1957
conclave by Professor A. M. B. Lacassagne, of L'Institut du Radium, in
Paris, who, Eaton recalls, “eloquently predicted that Pugwash, though
only a village, would live in history with Austerlitz and Waterloo, two
other villages that marked a drastic change in the course of human
events.”
Cleveland's steel mills and other industries have attracted to the city
many ethnic groups of Eastern European origin. Many of the
Czechoslovakians, Poles, Lithuanians, and others who have settled in
Cleveland have been vociferously opposed to peaceful coexistence with
the Communist rulers of their forebears' soil. What has especially
provoked groups like the United Hungarian Societies of Cleveland and
the Coordinating Committee of Nations Under the Communist Yoke is
that while Eaton has seemed ever ready and willing to say derogatory
things about the United States (i.e., in 1958, “Hitler, in his prime,
through the Gestapo, never had any such extensive spy organizations as
we have in this country today”), he has rarely had anything comparable
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to say about the Soviet Union. The most critical comment he had on the
Russian takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was “I haven't found any
nation where reason is paramount.”
Eaton's interest in the Soviet Union—to which he has made eight redcarpet
journeys since 1958—was indirectly whetted by John D.
Rockefeller, Sr. The first Russian whom Eaton ever met was Baron
Oxgall, a Moscow Baptist, who came to Cleveland at the turn of the
century to solicit support from Rockefeller for the Moscow branch of the
Y.M.C.A. More important, Rockefeller's choice for the first president of
the University of Chicago was his old friend and golfing companion
William Rainey Harper, a celebrated prodigy of his time—college
graduate at fourteen, Ph.D. at eighteen, teen-age professor of Hebrew.
Though not fluent in Russian, Harper was much taken with Russia; his
son Samuel—who used to play golf with Eaton on the Rockefeller
course when the two older men had finished their daily round--
eventually became head of the Russian-language department at his
father's university, and between 1904 and his death, at thirty-nine, in
1941, spent half of every year in Russia. Just before Samuel Harper died,
he defended the Nazi-Soviet pact so strenuously that he suffered a
nervous breakdown. A book of his that was posthumously published in
1945, “The Russia I Believe In,” was not widely acclaimed, but Eaton
believed in it so strongly that in 1969— long after the original edition
had been remaindered—he had it reissued, at his expense. “Sam's
enthusiasm for Russian culture and Russian children had a great impact
on my life,” Eaton says.
Eaton had brushed against some Russians during the First World War,
when he helped a purchasing mission from Moscow buy artillery shells
and field tents from Cleveland manufacturers, but it was not until 1955
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that he had solid contact with any. That year, the State Department was
showing a group of Soviet journalists (among them Alexei Adzhubei,
Khrushchev's son-in-law and the editor of Izvestia) around the United
States. Cleveland was on the itinerary, and the principal scheduled event
for the visitors' delectation there was a professional-football game. The
Russians said they didn't much care about the Browns, and wouldn't it be
possible for them to spend a few hours instead with a typical American
businessman'1 Their escort from State phoned Eaton, who had not long
before entertained some Russian farmers, and conveyed the request.
Eaton retorted—and no one who knew him would have disagreed—that
if there was anything he was not, it was a typical American
businessman. The escort hung up, but he called back soon afterward to
repeat his plea; it seemed that there wasn't any other businessman of any
sort in Cleveland who wanted anything to do with the Russians. Eaton
said that in that case he'd be delighted to play host, and he drove into the
city to fetch the foreigners. To his consternation, he found them being
hectored by a crowd that had gathered—at, he was and still is convinced,
the instigation of the F.B.I.—outside their hotel.
Eaton got on splendidly with his guests the rest of that day, and then
came interchanges with other Russians at Pugwash meetings. His new
friends kept urging him to visit their country. So in the late summer of
1958, on the eve of a Pugwash scientists' meeting in Austria, he decided
to go to Moscow. Some people are under the impression that Eaton has
spent much of his adult life commuting to Moscow, and are surprised to
learn that at the time of his initial visit to the Soviet Union he was nearly
seventy-five. (He had never yet set foot in any other Communist
territory, either.) He travelled to Moscow by way of New York and
Copenhagen, where, with a characteristic bow to both the idealistic and
the pragmatic side of his personality, he had arranged to spend a few
18
hours with two influential natives: the nuclear physicist Niels Bohr and
the shipping magnate A. P. M0llcr. On the flight from New York to
Copenhagen, Eaton and his wife found Andrei Gromyko sitting just
behind them. The capitalist and the Soviet Foreign Minister got to
chatting, and Gromyko, who also knew about Pugwash, asked the
American to point out the spot as they flew over it. By the time the
Eatons reached Moscow, the Foreign Minister had sent word ahead for
them to be elaborately received, and he had also asked Eaton if he would
like to have a private audience with Premier Khrushchev, who was
vacationing at the Black Sea. Eaton said he'd be happy to fly down there.
No, said Gromvko, the Premier would be pleased to meet Eaton more
than halfway—in fact, would come back to Moscow and see him at the
Kremlin. A couple of days later, Eaton and Khrushchev spent ninety
minutes together in the Troitskaia Tower. “We had an absolutely
hilarious time,” Eaton says. “I was feeling relaxed and full of fun and
jokes. While we were talking, a bottle of mineral water exploded, its
cork hitting the ceiling. Khrushchev said 'What was that?' and I said
'That was John Foster Dulles firing at us from under the table,' and
Khrushchev roared with laughter. He was also amused by my remarking
that our State Department reminded me of the little man in the Artemus
Ward story who said that he had outmaneuvered a big guy he was
fighting until he got his eye right on the other guy's fist.” Khrushchev,
for his part, asked Eaton to let President Eisenhower know that he
thought his passion for golf was very sensible “From that first meeting
on, Khrushchev was always completely frank with me,” Eaton says,
“and his successors have treated me in the same way.” Pravda carried a
photograph of Khrushchev and Eaton on its first page the next day, and
the Moscow radio hailed the American's professed interest in “the
establishment and development of friendship between the peoples” and
“the preservation and strengthening of peace throughout the world.”
19
Pravda also ran an article by Eaton, in which he wrote that he hoped
Khrushchev would soon visit the United States. “The people of the
U.S.A. would respond to his directness, his sense of humor, and his
sincere desire for world peace,” Eaton said.
On Eaton's return from his quasi-summit conference with Khrushchev,
he was invited to make a number of speeches. Before the City Club in
Cleveland, he took occasion to refer to “inflammatory editorials,
reeking of bravado with their dire threats of slaughter to the Soviets.”
He also told that audience that in his view Secretary of State Dulles was
“an insane fanatic.” At the National Press Club, in Washington, he went
a step further, proposing that Dulles be supplanted in the Cabinet by
John L. Lewis. He treated the Economic Club of Detroit to an address
(“Is the World Big Enough for Both Capitalism and Communism?”) in
which he said, “I would not know where to look for the American who
would want to trade our system for the Russian way,” and “When I
commented on Mr. Khrushchev's ability to speak decisively for his
country, he replied, 'Any policy I announce must first be discussed with
the Cabinet and backed by it. We make no decision unless we are sure it
will have the support of the people.'“ Eaton and Khrushchev kept in
touch thereafter, on terms that were about as intimate as possible
between the head of a great state and a private citizen of another state,
far removed. On Eaton's seventy-sixth birthday, the Russian sent him a
cablegram blending felicitations with a plea for total disarmament--
“the most urgent task of our time.” On Eaton's eightieth birthday, Khrushchev
referred to him affectionately as, a “coexisting capitalist.” The
two men (periodically exchanged gifts. A Scotch 'Shorthorn bull that
Eaton shipped to Khrushchev afforded the Premier an opportunity to
demonstrate that Russians were every bit as capable as Americans of
inventing one special kind of witticism, “After the animal arrived in
20
Russia, I suddenly remembered that its name was Napoleon, and I
apologized to Mr. Khrushchev for this apparent tactlessness,” Eaton
says, “He replied, “If he's a good bull and produces good offspring, I
wouldn't care if his name were John Foster Dulles.'
Khrushchev did visit the United States, in the fall of 1959, and Eaton
saw him at various receptions. During one of these, at the Soviet
Embassy in Washington, with Vice-President Nixon also in attendance,
the coexisting capitalist proposed a toast to eternal friendship between
nations, from which the Russian held aloof until somebody fetched him
some vodka to fortify the soda water that had been set before him. The
following spring, on May 16th, the Soviet Premier and President
Eisenhower met in Paris for l summit conference. It was a time of
drama. On May 1st, Francis Gary Powers had been shot down in his U-2
spy plane over Russian soil. Two days later, the U.S.S.R. had revealed
that Eaton would be getting the Lenin Peace Prize. The honoree, as it
happened, was about to take off on a trip to Eastern Europe, and
Khrushchev, in Paris, asked him to stop over en route and say hello.
Eaton said that he'd be glad to. When the summit conference broke up
over the U-2 incident, Khrushchev sent a radio message to the plane
Eaton was on, saying he wondered whether, in view of what had just
occurred (the Chairman had, among other things, told the President of
the United States to go dip his head in milk), Eaton still wanted to be
seen with him. Eaton could think of no reason not to be. His plane
landed at Orly Airport a few minutes before Khrushchev, his arms full
of red roses from some French admirers, was to take off for Berlin.
With a considerable segment of the world's press looking on,
Khrushchev gave the flowers to Mrs. Eaton. Khrushchev, sensing that
Eaton would be criticized for fraternizing with him at this juncture in
history, told the American jocularly, “When Communism has triumphed
in the whole world, I shall put in a good word for you.” (Eaton, for his
21
part, told the Soviet leader the story about George Washington and the
cherry tree, as a prelude to the suggestion that the United States had
dissembled to Russia about the U-2 plane.) Khrushchev had guessed
right: one letter in the Plain Dealer called Eaton's airport rendezvous
“brazenly unpatriotic”
Eaton moved on to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and East
Germany, reemerging from behind the Iron Curtain in London. There,
before a lunch at Claridge's with his old non-Communist friend Lord
Beaverbrook, he told reporters, who were always glad to quote his
provocative pronouncements, that the United States was more of a police
state than any of the nations he'd just inspected. Then, on his return to
Cleveland, he favored the Plain Dealer with the remark “We are the
warlike nation of the world, and every nation outside the United States
recognizes that.” It was all too much for some Eaton-watchers to take. A
convention of Ohio veterans passed a resolution condemning him, and
Senator Thomas J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, proposed that he be
prosecuted under the so-called Logan Act—a 1799 statute, never before
invoked, under the terms of which persons can be fined five thousand
dollars and imprisoned for three years for attempting “to influence the
measures or conduct of any foreign government or any officer or agent
thereof” unless authorized to do so by the American government.
(Following a break in diplomatic relations between France and the
United States, Dr. George Logan, a Quaker, had gone to Paris on his
own to talk to Talleyrand.) Senator Dodd said that Eaton was a
“materialistic, meddlesome, evil old man.” That was too much even for
the Plain Dealer, which rallied to Eaton's support, after a fashion: it slated
editorially that while he was un-arguably materialistic and
meddlesome, he wasn't evil but, rather, both foolish and brave.
22
THE twenty-seventh meeting of the Pugwash scientists was held in
Munich this past August. Eaton did not attend it. In fact, he has had very
little to do with any of these gatherings since 1960, although he
continued to organize nonscientific conferences under the Pugwash
banner (One, at McGill University in 1969, to which he invited a halfdozen
Sinologists, almost certainly expedited Canada's resumption of
diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China) But since 1960
he has not been officially connected with what became known as the
Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. That year, he
became too controversial for the movement he had helped to spawn. On
July 1, I960, he was formally invested with the Lenin Peace Prize.
Twenty-five hundred people turned out at Eaton Park, in Pugwash, for
the ceremony. In his acceptance speech, Eaton said the occasion was “a
proud and happy moment in my life.” He went on, “For the U.S.S.R.,
leader of the Socialist nations, to pay such respect to an acknowledged
apostle of capitalism from the U.S.A., leader of the capitalist countries,
offers a hopeful omen for brighter days ahead. I have said before, and I
repeat, that I sincerely believe Premier Khrushchev's United Nations
address of September 1959, with its clearly outlined disarmament
program, will go down as one of the historic utterances of modern
years.... It is a matter for regret that the Soviet proposals for general
and complete disarmament have not met with the sympathetic response
to which they are entitled.” Such remarks by Eaton were beginning to
dismay some of the Pugwash scientists, who were getting ready for
another symposium in late November, this one to take place in Moscow,
and who feared that his close identification with their cause, combined
with his outspokenness, might impair whatever effectiveness they could
have. Chief among the disenchanted was Professor Eugene Rabinowitch,
of the University of Illinois, who was a co-founder and the editor of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the highly respected journal whose
23
board of sponsors, over the years, had included many of the scientists
Eaton most revered—Einstein, Leo Szilard, J. Robert Oppenheimer, I. I.
Rabi, and their like In the Bulletin of October, Eaton was dismayed to
see— appended to a reprint of a September newspaper headline about
the forthcoming Pugwash scientists' gathering which read, “EATON TO
SPONSOR MOSCOW SESSION”—a demurrer, signed by Rabinowitch
and two other scholars, to the effect that while they were grateful to
Eaton for prodigious past beneficences, “as Mr. Eaton has come to play
an increasingly active and controversial role in political affairs, the
scientists felt that his exclusive support of their conferences may place
them in the wrong light.” Further collaboration with him would be
impossible, they went on, because of his “reluctance to keep his support
of the scientists' conferences clearly separated from his increasing
involvement.” Accordingly, the statement said, though he would be
welcome at the Moscow gathering as a guest, it would be solely as that,
and neither as a participant nor as a sponsor. The patron of Pugwash had
been summarily depatronized.
That Bulletin appeared concurrently with the annual meeting of the
United Nations General Assembly, in New York. Chairman
Khrushchev had put himself on the agenda again. The Soviet Premier
had been in low American repute ever since the collapse of the Paris
talks, and when he arrived, by ship, the United States government
contrived for it to dock at an obscure pier, with marginal facilities to
shelter welcoming dignitaries from the rain. Khrushchev was
greeted—in, as it happened, rain—by a handful of acolytes who had
also come for the Assembly meeting; Wladyslaw Gomulka, of Poland;
Antonin Novotny, of Czechoslovakia; Janos Kadar, of Hungary. Just
about the only Americans on hand, aside from a few offshore who
were shouting obscenities from small boats, were the Eatons. The
24
State Department had refused to let the Soviet Premier travel to Ohio
to visit the Eatons’ farm, and, indeed, had restricted his movements so
stringently that he couldn't even go from Manhattan to the Bronx,
where the New York Yankees were about to play in the World Series.
Eaton took bridling notice of this during a lunch he gave for
Khrushchev at the Hotel Biltmore, where the Ohioan often occupied a
suite, his myriad directorships having once included a seat on the
board of the Biltmore-Bowman Hotels Corporation. (There was
another lunch for Kadar, and dinners for Gomulka and Novotny.) At
the Khrushchev lunch, Eaton pressed the Chairman “to urge the
athletes of the Soviet Union to take up baseball, so that someday there
could be a true World Series.” Khrushchev, referring to Eaton as “my
good old friend,” said in a toast to his host, “Just as I have no intention
of converting Mr. Eaton to the Communist faith, so, I hope, Mr. Eaton
would not waste his time trying to turn me into a supporter of the
capitalistic point of view.” Outside the hotel, pickets marched back and
forth carrying placards inscribed “Cyrus Eaton Is a Traitor.” Eaton
was, as usual, unfazed. “These hostile demonstrations were organized
and paid for by our own government,” he said later. “It's humiliating
that this great country has to stoop to that kind of conduct That lunch
also resulted in one of his deposals from the Social Register, though he
was not thrown off anybody s fund-raising list, and there were no
discernible objections when, soon afterward, he contributed the prizes
for a Junior League fashion show back in Cleveland.
Late that October, Eaton travelled to Ottawa to give a speech on
the occasion of the granting of the Bowater Awards—high honors in
Canadian journalism. He had often been courted by reporters seeking
insight into Soviet acts and aspirations, and he courted reporters, too-,
when Gay Talese passed through Cleveland a few years afterward on a
25
promotional tour for “The Power and the Glory,” his book about the
New York Times, Eaton tendered him the kind of lunch he would
normally put on for a Deputy Minister of Trade from Bulgaria. It always
made Eaton feel good to read headlines like “FINANCIER PUTS U.S.
ON PAN FOR KEEPING COLD WAR HOT” (Chicago Daily News)
and “EATON PRAISES RED CHINA; URGES IT GET SEAT IN
U.N.” (Cleveland Press), and he was no less pleased by the journalistic
attention he attracted abroad. He did sometimes complain that most A
men- ' can journalists had a built-in anti-Soviet bias, and he buttressed
that argument by citing an experience he had in Moscow immediately
after his get-together with Chairman Khrushchev in the fall of 1958.
“Khrushchev suggested that he and I issue a joint statement about our
meeting, and I said, 'Fine, you prepare it,' Eaton says. “It was sent over
the next morning, and I approved it. Then the Moscow correspondents of
two American newspapers came around to interview me, and after a bit
they came back and said, 'we want you to know what kind of country
you're in. Here's what we filed and here's what the censors cut out.’ I
read the uncensored version with astonishment. I had been drastically
misquoted. It had been reported that I had attacked my hosts. I said to
them, 'If what you wrote had been published, it would have made the
Russians think I'm unreliable. Why in the world would I have said what
you wrote I said?' 'But you're an American capitalist, and we assumed
you'd denounce Communism,' they said. 'I'd never have the bad taste to
say anything like that about the head of a country while in his country.’
I said.” Now, in Ottawa, surrounded by the elite of the Canadian press,
Eaton seized the opportunity to further chide their colleagues across the
border. “Journalism in the United States, I fear, has fallen to a
comparatively low estate in its foreign coverage,” he said in his speech.
“Blind and unreasoning fear and hatred of Communism, on the part of
press, public, and politician alike, have led to inadequate reporting of
26
conditions and events in the Socialist countries, and to slanted editorial
comment as well.'“ As an example, he cited recent press coverage in
New York. On October 2nd, Eaton said, there had been two Polishoriented
events in that city—a Pulaski Day parade, in which the
participants were mainly anti-Communist Poles, and an address by
Premier Gomulka. “The Gomulka speech was completely ignored by the
American press, although the Polish- American parade and other
festivities were featured in articles and pictures,” he said. “An idea I am
inclined to favor is the formation of volunteer local committees to serve
as firm but friendly critics of the press.” Had a firm but friendly
committee been formed on the spot, it could have pointed out to Eaton
that Gomulka's speech was made not on Pulaski Day but the day
afterward, and that the Times had covered it, though perhaps not at the
length Eaton might have deemed appropriate.
Chairman Khrushchev was toppled on October 15, 1964.
“Although his successors were perhaps a bit rough with him, I was not
surprised,” Eaton said later. “He had once told me, 'your people call me
a dictator. Why, my Cabinet could turn me out of office tomorrow.' And
that's of course what happened. I kept in touch with him after his
retirement, though I was a little careful while in Russia not to make a
point of trying to visit him, because I wanted to keep my position with
the men in power. But he was not at all unhappy at the end. He had
merely made the mistake of trying to raise corn too far north in the
U.S.S.R., which was his undoing. After his death, his widow told me
that one of the great satisfactions of his life was that I remained
friendly with him even when he was only a private citizen.”
NOT long after Bertrand Russell's death, in 1970, at ninety-seven,
the then eighty-six-year-old Eaton told ' an acquaintance, “Russell was a
27
very capable man, but he had a capacity for arousing the criticism of a
lot of people.” The remark could have been autobiographical. Even
before he attained comradeship with Khrushchev, Eaton's capacity for
unpopular assertions had aroused criticism right and left, though mostly
right. The September, 1958, issue of the conservative American
Mercury, for instance, carried a near-apoplectic reaction to a Tass
release of the previous June to the effect that Khrushchev had thanked
Eaton for his “efforts to end the menace of a nuclear war.” Eaton had
earlier poured fuel on the fire when he appeared on a Mike Wallace
television show on May 4, 1958, and delivered a no-holds-barred attack
on both the F.B.I, and the C.I.A., agencies then thought to be more or
less above reproach. “I always worry when I see a nation feel that it is
coming to greatness through the activities of its policemen,” Eaton said
then. “And the F.B.I, is just one of the scores of agencies in the United
States engaged in investigating, in snooping, in informing, in creeping
up on people. This has gone to an extent that is very alarming.... I am
just as sure as I am alive that one of these days there will be an
enormous reaction against this in the United States….We can't destroy
Communism. It's there to stay….And to imagine that they could convert
us to Communism is just silly….No one in the world would be more
unhappy under Communism than I, because I am dedicated to the other
principle….The Russians have never had freedom, and it would take
them some time to know what to do with it.” Despite this last remark,
the then much-feared House Un-American Activities Committee
considered Eaton's views to be within its province, demanded and got
equal time, and a staff operative announced that the committee was
going to subpoena Eaton. The New York Daily News, which had long
ascribed to Eaton a degree of villainy ordinarily achieved only by Dick
Tracy's worst enemies, thought that the idea of a subpoena was first-rate,
and expressed the editorial hope that the committee would ask him
28
which side he'd be on in the event of a war between the Soviet Union
and the United States. No subpoena was ever served, though ample
opportunities arose; one came up soon in Washington, when Eaton— in
town to dine at the Soviet Embassy—had a heated confrontation with the
chairman of the committee in the office of one of its other members.
Shortly after Eaton's lambasting of the F.B.I, on television, former Attorney
General Herbert E Brownell spoke before the Cleveland Bar
Association and called the hometown man's allegations—the hometown
papers naturally had their pencils poised—”wild and reckless.” The
Press observed that proof that the United States was not, as Eaton had
seemed to suggest, a police state lay in the fact that the suggester was
still at liberty. The Cleveland chapter of the anti-Communist Lithuanian
American Council mailed Eaton a copy of J. Edgar Hoover's “Masters of
Deceit,” presumably hoping he would read it and get straightened out.
Hoover himself would say for the record merely that Eaton was running
true to character. The Director of the F.B.I., though not normally
closemouthed himself, rarely took overt cognizance of Eaton's existence;
one of the few times he appeared to do so was when he told a
subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee that the Students
for a Democratic Society and other campus troublemakers were getting
money from “a Cleveland industrialist who has long been a Soviet
apologist.” If Hoover meant Eaton, his investigators had served him
poorly. Eaton had very little use for American student radicals. “I
haven't given any of them anything,” he told a friend. “When they come
around, I tell them, 'You've got to change your outlandish garb, cut your
hair and whiskers, and stop looking like baboons. Otherwise, people are
just going to make fun of you and think you're not very profound.' In
Nova Scotia once, a young lady brought her fiancé around to meet me so
I could advise him on his future, and I said the first thing he ought to do
was shave off his beard. He was awfully embarrassed, and I learned why
29
later, when the girl came by again and said she had made him grow it to
prove he was a radical. The whole thing was ridiculous.”
Eaton met Hoover only once—at the Laurel, Maryland, racetrack
one Saturday, when the Eaton troika was part of the between-races
entertainment. The two men chatted briefly— and, in both instances,
knowledge-ably—about horses. Eaton knew Herbert Hoover much
better than he did his namesake. When President Hoover was in the
White House, the Cleve-lander was several times an overnight guest,
and he would join the Chief Executive and some members of his
Cabinet in the pre-breakfast medicine-ball tossing that was, trout fishing
excepted, the athletic hallmark of that Administration. Eaton likes to
credit President Hoover with having taught him to read newspapers fast.
(Eaton has nearly a dozen of them delivered to him daily—from
Cleveland, Akron, Chicago, New York, Washington, London, and
Toronto.) After the medicine-ball sessions, Hoover and his guest would
ride upstairs in a White House elevator to shower and change. The
President would be handed half a dozen morning papers as he stepped
into the elevator, and, in Eaton's recollection, would deftly skim the
front pages of all of them before reaching his destination two flights up.
It surprises no one who has followed Eaton's iconoclastic career that he
rates Herbert Hoover, along with the senior Rockefeller and
Khrushchev, as one of the finest people he has ever known. “Hoover
was an extremely able and honorable man.” Eaton says, “and if he
hadn't been hit by a panic—through no particular fault of his own—he'd
be remembered as one of the greatest Presidents the United States ever
had.
LIKE most nonagenarians, Cyrus S. Eaton, who has probably
been more often accused of Communistic leanings than anyone else on
30
earth with such an unbreakable addiction to both the theory and the
practice of capitalism, remembers his boyhood best. Eaton, who will
turn ninety-four two days after Christmas, was the fifth of nine children
born in the coastal village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, to Joseph Howe
Eaton, a farmer, lumberman, and general-store proprietor of English
ancestry. The first Eaton crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth century.
A later Eaton, who may or may not have contributed to the feisty genes
that sifted down to Cyrus, was Daniel Isaac, a London printer, who was
twice hauled into court in 1793 for publishing works by Thomas Paine,
and who the following year was accused of libeling King George III by
comparing him—in a pamphlet entitled “Politics for the People, or
Hog's Wash”—to a gamecock. (Cyrus has often been in the courts
himself, but never for anything as gaudy as libel; his once comparing
Richard Nixon, when he was President, to Adolf Hitler and John Foster
Dulles, when Secretary of State, to any old madman, have gone
jurisprudentially unchallenged.) David Eaton, Cyrus’s great-great-greatgrandfather,
founded the Nova Scotia branch of the clan in 1761, after
moving there from Connecticut, but it was only in the early nineteenth
century that the Eatons settled in Pugwash—a Micmac Indian word
meaning “deep water.” By then, many British Loyalists had moved to
Canada from the American Colonies, among them the MacPhersons,
who were originally from the Scottish Highlands. Cyrus Eaton's mother
was born Mary Adelle MacPherson. (A cousin of Eaton's maternal
grandfather was Donald McKay, who left Nova Scotia for this country
at seventeen and became the builder of many of the swiftest clipper
ships ever launched, among them the celebrated Flying Cloud.) But no
one far removed from the village had ever paid much attention to it until
Eaton, in the nineteen-fifties, began inviting intellectuals there to share
their thoughts with him. Today, he is the town's most famous native son
A new grade school has just been named after him; the local
31
government has put up road signs that read “Pugwash—Home of the
Thinkers” and prominent among the souvenirs available to transients
are replicas of Rodin's sedentary brooding figure.
According to Eaton's recollections of his early childhood, his father
had him riding horses at four, milking cows at five, and working for the
railroad at six. “We were quite well-to-do, relatively speaking,” Eaton
says, “We had a hired man and a hired girl, as people permitted
themselves to be called in those days. When the railroad decided to put
tracks through our place, though, and somebody had to carry water
from a spring to where the men were working with their picks and
shovels, I wanted the job, and I got it. I was paid fifty cents for a tenhour
day. By the tune I was ten, I was pretty well experienced in
business and in world affairs—my father was also postmaster, and I used
to read all the newspapers that came in to subscribers—and by the time I
was twelve my father would send me out to measure the logs his
lumbermen were felling. That was important, because they got paid by
the foot.”
Eaton attended elementary school in Pugwash and high school at
Amherst Academy, thirty miles away. At the turn of the century, he
matriculated at McMaster University, then a small Baptist institution in
Toronto. (At Eaton's much later urging, a larger and less sectarian
McMaster became the repository of most of the papers of Bertrand
Russell.) Eaton chose McMaster mainly because his father's younger
brother, Charles Aubrey) Eaton, then a Baptist minister, was on its board
of governors. Originally, Cyrus planned to follow his uncle's vocation.
When Charles Eaton was assigned to the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church,
in Cleveland, in 1901, he invited his nephew down during his summer
vacation. Among the uncle's parishioners was John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
32
who had founded his empire in Cleveland and customarily spent five
months a year at Forest Hill, a seven-hundred-acre local enclave he had
built, with a private nine-hole golf course. Rockefeller was
superintendent of the Reverend Mr. Eaton's Sunday school. The two
also shared many non-devotional moments, for the minister lived next
door to Forest Hill, and was John D’s frequent guest and golfing
companion—often in a foursome that included not merely the cautious
older man's spiritual mentor but also his doctor and his dentist.
Charles Eaton moved far beyond the pulpit. He coupled journalism
with preaching, and after a ten-year stint in New York City as pastor of
the Madison Avenue Baptist Church he went into industrial relations for
General Electric* In 1924, at the age of fifty-six, he was elected to
Congress, on the Republican ticket, from New Jersey, He served in the
House for twenty-eight years, ultimately becoming chairman of the
Foreign Affairs Committee. In 1945, he was one of eight American
signers, in San Francisco, of the United Nations Charter. Around
Washington, where he was affectionately called Doc, he also became
known as “the conscience of the House,” Like his nephew after him.
Representative Eaton was an enthusiastic advocate of unity among the
divers peoples of the globe, hut he never shared his nephew's
acceptance of most words and deeds emanating from the Soviet Union.
In fact, he was once denounced as a nefarious capitalist before the U.N,
General Assembly by Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinskv, who
coupled him, not without historical justification, with the Rockefeller
family. The Congressman's sometimes bristling comments about Russia
never particularly affected his nephew. “I remained a devoted friend of
Uncle Charles right up to his death, in 1953, even though he wasn't
inclined to trust the Russians,” Cyrus Eaton says. “He was quite sincere
in his dislike of Communism in all its forms. He thought I was being too
33
good-natured and trusting, but our conflicting attitudes never interfered
with our devotion to each other.”
Cyrus Eaton's apprenticeship to the Baptist Church was brief.
Having even as a teen-ager developed a strong bent for rationalism, he
found the church's orthodoxy oppressive. He did get as far, though, as
being listed in the Cleveland city directory of 1906 as pastor of the Lake
wood Baptist Church. His decision not to be ordained was in part
influenced by some advice he had received from Mr. Rockefeller: “Be
sure to have some ownership or participate in the development of natural
resources.” Soon after Cyrus’s arrival in Cleveland, his uncle took him
to dinner at Forest Hill, and when Mrs. Rockefeller learned that the
Canadian lad was about to take a job as night clerk at the Euclid Hotel
she urged her husband to offer him something more suitable to his social
status. So Eaton went to work for Rockefeller. He ran errands, carried
golf bags, and acted as a bodyguard. “Because I was a sturdy youth who
had demonstrated physical courage in Mr. Rockefeller's presence a time
or two, I was delegated to sit near him in church, on the alert for intruders,”
Eaton has recalled. For his services as all-around factotum,
Rockefeller paid him two dollars a day.
Eaton continued to work for Rockefeller during subsequent vacations,
and his employer would now and then suggest that he quit
college and join him on a full-time basis, presumably with some increase
in remuneration One summer, the philanthropist sought to broaden the
young man's experience by lending him out to the East Ohio Gas
Company, on whose behalf Eaton traipsed around Cleveland trying to
placate property owners whose lawns were being ravaged by the laying
of gas mains. To this day, Eaton's respect for his early patron is
unabated. “There's never been any man in finance or industry who came
34
close to matching John D. Rockefeller in imagination or in application,”
he said recently. “And he was, fortunately, well represented in his
descendants. The Rockefellers are America's greatest family.” Through
Rockefeller, Eaton met a lawyer who was looking for somebody to
represent a syndicate formed to buy utilities franchises in western
Canada. Eaton knew the area and was hired, but by the time he arrived
on the scene the panic of 1907 was in full swing and the syndicate had
disintegrated. Eaton wangled a loan from a neighbor and bought the
franchises himself, later combining them into the Canada Gas & Electric
Corporation. While he was at it, he acquired additional utilities
franchises in Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. By 1912, he had set up the
first of innumerable holding companies with which he would at one time
or another be affiliated. This one was called Continental Gas & Electric,
and when someone offered to buy it two years later, he realized that at
the age of thirty, though hardly in a class with Rockefeller, he was an
authentic millionaire.
Before the First World War, Eaton bought a substantial interest in
Otis & Company, the Cleveland investment bankers and stockbrokers.
Through Otis, which in its heyday was one of the largest securities firms
outside New York (its partners had assets of more than two hundred
million dollars before the 1929 crash), he set up an investment trust
called Continental Shares, Inc., which speculated chiefly in utilities and
industrial stocks. By 1929, its assets were more than a hundred and fifty
million dollars, though when the company foundered into liquidation
four years later there remained only a tenth of that for distribution
among its aggrieved shareholders. En route from glory to gloom, Eaton
had had a memorable encounter with Samuel Insult, the utilities king of
Chicago, who later went bankrupt. Between 1926 and 1930, Continental
Shares gobbled up all the stock it could get in Insull's principal
35
companies—Commonwealth Edison, People’s Gas, Light & Coke, and
Public Service Company of Northern Illinois. The Eaton crowd owned
more of Insull than Insult did himself. Insull got the impression that
Eaton was trying to take him over, so he asked to buy back his own
stock. After lengthy negotiations, Eaton agreed, in the spring of 1930, to
sell it, with the proviso that he be paid not in shares of still other
corporations, which was how Insull liked to pay for things, but in cash.
Fearing that Eaton might dump the stock on the open market at a time
when the market was, to put it mildly, shaky, Insull agreed. He gave
Eaton forty-eight million dollars in cash, much of it borrowed from New
York banks, plus eight million dollars in securities. This added up to
four million dollars more than the market value of the shares in question,
nineteen million more than Continental had paid for them initially.
Eaton, whom one Insull biographer later called “a creative capitalist in
spite of his reputation as a financial buccaneer,” was gracious in victory.
In 1934, when Insull was put on trial for various financial peccadilloes,
Eaton went to federal court in Chicago and testified in his defense.
Throughout the roaring twenties, Eaton had been practically a one-man
sonic boom. He was into everything—buying, selling, swapping,
maneuvering, manipulating His touch was of the purest gold. An oil
company in which he invested ten million dollars dug a lot of dry holes,
but he was able to sell his stock in it for twenty-five million dollars
notwithstanding, because it had options on real estate that turned out to
be ideal sites for the service stations of rival companies. Just after the
First World War, Ohio had two telephone services— the Ohio Bell
system and small independent companies in all communities of any
consequence; in order to enjoy any land of useful service, people needed
two phones. Eaton thought this was nonsensical. He contrived to put all
the independents together under a single corporate umbrella—Ohio State
Telephone—and then he got that consolidated with Ohio Bell. Next, to
36
his own handsome profit, he persuaded the state's Public Utilities
Commission to grant the merged company a substantial increase in rates,
on the ground that life was simpler for Ohioans now that they had to pay
only one phone bill a month instead of two. In 1923, he formed a
utilities holding company called United Light & Power, which
eventually con-trolled gas and electric service in a dozen states, and
which by 1929 had assets of more than half a billion dollars. Meanwhile,
he had cast his acquisitive eye on rubber, and by 1928 he had a
substantial interest in Goodyear Tire & Rubber. He was big in steel, too.
He saw no reason for Pittsburgh's financial monopoly of that industry,
and he wanted steel production to be a mighty factor in the economic
blossoming of the Midwest. Cleveland, with its access to the Great
Lakes and its proximity to the automobile manufacturers in Detroit,
seemed to him the logical hub of this new industrial universe. In 1925,
the Trumbull Steel Company, in Warren, Ohio, was in desperate financial
straits, and needed a new and robust infusion of capital. Eaton,
who still lagged behind Rockefeller but was doing his darnedest to catch
up, unblinkingly wrote out a check for eighteen million dollars for
control of Trumbull Steel. In 1927, he drew Republic Iron & Steel into
his expanding metallurgical orbit, and in practically no time at all
converted that into Republic Steel by fusing it with Trumbull, Central
Alloy Steel, Steel & Tubes, Donner Steel, Union Drawn Steel, and
Bourne-Fuller—this last a Cleveland company that had supplied the nuts
and bolts that held together both the Union Navy and the Brooklyn
Bridge. Tom M. Girdler, the flinty industrialist whom Eaton recruited to
preside over Republic Steel, said in his memoirs that Eaton's
“mysterious buying of stock in steel companies had excited the interest
of everybody in the industry.” Girdler, who went to work for Eaton on
October 28, 1929, the day before the stock market collapsed, thought his
new boss was “as smart as any man I ever met.” Eaton had also become
37
a major investor in Youngstown Sheet & Tube by 1930, when Eugene
Grace and Charles M. Schwab tried to take it over, merge it with their
Bethlehem Steel Corporation, and thus create an entity that would have
the size and clout of U.S. Steel. Eaton, hoping instead to merge
Youngstown with Republic, fought the proposed merger with assorted
weapons, including a court battle over proxies. He lost that particular
fight but instituted another suit, which he won, thus scoring a solid
victory over the East Coast financial world. “How are we going to have
leadership in this vast country if everything must be directed from Wall
Street?” he asked. “It would make clerks of us all here in the Middle
West.” In the course of that litigation, Eaton became an intractable foe
of the corporation lawyer Newton D Baker, who represented Bethlehem,
and who once likened Eaton to a portrait of Napoleon in the Louvre--
one in which the Emperor was depicted riding to conquest between rows
of corpses. In 1932, when the Democratic Party convened to choose its
Presidential candidate, Eaton got his revenge. Baker was an early
contender for the nomination. In Eaton's version of political history, it
was his success in persuading James A. Farley and William G. McAdoo
to join him in a stop-Baker movement that ultimately swung the
nomination to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
By 1929, still in his mid-forties, Eaton was a director of more than
a dozen corporations, and was widely known, and sometimes feared, as
a shrewd, hard-headed, cold-blooded fiscal wizard whose guiding
philosophy, as one acquaintance summarized it, was “All's fair in love
and war, and business is the war of peace.” According to the perhaps
slightly biased author of “The Eaton Family of Nova Scotia,” which was
published that year, Cyrus had “a future of unlimited possibilities before
him.” Eaton's income in the heady year of 1929 was so substantial that
in later litigation over the federal income tax due on it he argued that the
38
government had made a miscalculation that tilted the bottom line in its
favor by more than four hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars.
Then came the crash, which hit Cleveland especially hard; three of its
big banks closed their doors. By the mid-thirties, when all the tangled
affairs of all of Eaton's corporations had been unraveled as well as they
ever could be, he had little left beyond a stake in Otis & Company. One
of his daughters was glad to land a sixty-dollar-a-month job as a
receptionist in a Cleveland law office; when she got married, not long
afterward, her father, coming around to her place for Christmas dinner,
could bring only a basket of jellies and apples and a ten-dollar bill. He
would eventually prosper again, but for a while he had hard going.
When he was divorced from his first wife, in 1934, it was stipulated in
the settlement that if his net worth ever reached the level of a hundred
and five thousand dollars he would have to buy her a house. At no stage
of his topsy-turvy career has he been a lavish spender. Though he enjoys
the good life—in Paris, he stays at the Ritz; in London, at Claridge's—he
has never emulated his mentor Rockefeller in philanthropy. The Cyrus
Eaton Foundation is too small to warrant inclusion in the Foundation
Directory. One of his children said not long ago, “If I needed a hundred
dollars or a loaf of bread, my father would be the last person I'd turn to.”
In fact, Eaton may not be as affluent as he sometimes lets people think
he is. Recently, an Ohioan who knows him about as intimately as
anyone does told an acquaintance that there were probably a hundred
people in Cleveland alone who were richer than Eaton
Eaton's first wife was Margaret House, the daughter of a Cleveland
physician. He married her in 1907 after they had met at a Baptist Church
social function. Before they separated, in the thirties, they had seven
children. One, Margaret Grace, known as Lee, spent her adult life in a
wheelchair, following botched spinal surgery; after she died, at forty, her
father donated some land in the Cleveland suburb of Northfield for a Lee
39
Eaton Primary School, Eaton's youngest son, MacPherson, became an
ordained Baptist minister, but not until he was in his forties. Not all of
Eaton's children have always applauded their father's public
pronouncements. “My father's views are not mine,” one daughter told a
Cleveland paper in 1959, when his sponsoring of conferences of
intellectuals in Pugwash and his hobnobbing with Nikita Khrushchev
were creating something of an international stir. “I think there are better
ways to spend money than to hold conferences or make speeches.”
Eaton's children were raised chiefly in Northfield, twenty miles from
downtown Cleveland He bought a late-eighteenth-century house on a
couple of dozen acres there in 1912 and, in deference to the early French
name for Nova Scotia, called it Acadia Farms. The house was close to a
road, and Eaton thought at first that he'd have the building razed and a
new but similar residence constructed farther from the traffic. He
engaged an architect, who, having heard of his client's fiscal
achievements, came back with plans for a replacement that would cost,
he estimated, about a million and a half dollars. “I'D stay with the old
house,” Eaton said, and he has stayed with it ever since. Just inside his
front door is an example of the kind of memento that his singular
crusading has won for him— a Stuffed boar's head from his sharpshooting
friend Chairman Khrushchev. When Eaton gave a lunch party
in 1962 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his occupancy of Acadia
Farms (he thriftily used the same caterer's marquee for a
stepdaughter's coming-out dance that evening), among the guests were
the Bulgarian, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, Polish, and Rumanian Ambassadors.
Over the years, he has increased the size of his estate to its
present eight hundred acres. And he has given some of it away: in 1955,
he transferred fifty-eight virgin acres to the city of Cleveland to form
part of what Clevelanders speak of as their Ring of Green, or Emerald
Belt.
40
Living as he does on a place that is called a farm, Eaton prefers to call
himself not a financier or an industrialist—or, as others have called him,
a tycoon—but, rather, a farmer. He believes that one of the reasons he
and Khrushchev were attracted to one another was that both of them had
been raised on farms After a visit to Cuba in 1968, at a time few
Americans were heading that way, Eaton was asked in what capacity he
had gone there, and he said, “I'm just a farmer,” adding that he had
talked with Fidel Castro mostly about the artificial insemination of
cattle. (Eaton was pleased to be introduced by Castro to a hundredthousand-
dollar prize bull, housed in an air-conditioned stall with music
piped in.) As a farmer, Eaton is understandably partial to trees, and his
devotion to them may exceed that of most tillers of the soil It has been
said of him in print without his entering a denial that he can name all the
trees, plus all the birds, native to the entire North American continent,
and an admiring employee at Acadia Farms not long ago remarked of
the proprietor, ' He knows every tree here by its first name.” After Eaton
drifted away from the Baptist Church, when he was asked which was his
preferred religion he -would sometimes choose Druidism, because
Druids worshipped trees. He is as fond of poetry as he is of trees. He
professes to have read some lines of poetry every single day of his adult
life, and it follows that one of his favorite poems (along with
Shakespeare's sonnets, Tennyson's “Ulysses,” Milton's sonnet on his
blindness, and Keats' “On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer”) is
Joyce Kilmer's dendrological chef-d'oeuvre. In 1962, in exchange for a
hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars, Eaton granted the
Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, of which he was a director
from 1955 to 1965, an easement across twenty-four acres of his
farmland to build a power line. The line went in without incident, hut in
April 1970, C.E.I. started work on a second line while Eaton's attention
was elsewhere, and chopped down four hundred and fifty of his trees.
41
The normally pacifistic Eaton all hut declared war. An Eaton truck was
rammed by a C.E.I, bulldozer whose progress it was trying to block.
Eaton filed a seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar lawsuit against
his erstwhile associates and stormed into Summit County Common Pleas
Court toting a slaughtered stump. His anguish was only partly assuaged
when the utilities company, probably suspecting that otherwise its feud
with the then eighty-eight-year-old adversary might go on forever,
settled for an additional hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars.
One portion of Acadia Farms is devoted to the breeding and raising of
Scotch Shorthorn cattle, a specimen of which Eaton had shipped to the
Soviet Union in 1955 in an effort to improve the quality of Russian beef.
Scotch Shorthorns, like Eatons, came to North America early; the
English brought some over in 1783, and they were the first variety of
cattle bred specifically for beef to graze on American grass. Eaton's
animals have won many prizes, and since 1951 he has held a biennial
cattle auction on his premises. Some Russian livestock experts were in
the States at the time of the 1961 sale, but the State Department wouldn't
let them visit Summit County; some East Germans who also hoped to
attend couldn't even get into the country The all-time star of the Eaton
stable was P. S. Troubadour, a steer that in 1956 was proclaimed the
International Grand Champion among all kinds of cattle. The “P.S.” in
its name came from Penn State. The university bought Troubadour's
mother from Eaton while she was in calf. Troubadour himself was later
purchased from Penn State by the Greenbrier Hotel, which belonged to
the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway. That transaction was easy enough to
arrange, because Eaton was by then into railroads and was chairman of
the board of the C. & O. (He had two prize oxen at his farm called C.
and O.) The price was a robust $20,397.50. The Greenbrier serves good
cuts of beef, but it used Troubadour for promotional purposes The
42
animal was featured, along with Eaton, on an Ed Murrow “Person to
Person” television show, and it went on tour for a while— in its own
railway car, attended by a handler. On July 4, 1957, it paid a patriotic
courtesy call on President Eisenhower at his farm, in Gettysburg. Eaton
wanted to send Troubadour to Russia, too, as a hefty symbol of coexistence,
but an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in Europe stymied
that scheme. Troubadour died in 1959; a decade later, Shorthorn World
acclaimed Eaton as “Shorthorndom's most famous breeder,” Eaton also
raises cattle at his other principal residence—Deep Cove Farms, a threethousand-
acre establishment in Upper Blandford, Nova Scotia, a
hundred and fifty miles from Pugwash. Though he became a citizen of
the United States in 1913, he has retained a strong affection for Canada,
and up to the last couple of years used to take both summer and winter
vacations there. At Deep Cove Farms, he has also bred waterfowl,
among them the first European widgeons ever raised in North America-
Eaton's relationship with his grandchildren, who number fourteen, has
been unusual and intense As each of them became old enough to walk,
the grandfather would take the child, sometimes over its parents’
protests, to Upper Blandford for a summer month, in the company of
brothers and sisters and first cousins. No mothers or fathers were
permitted to tag along. It was such a happy experience for the youthful
guests that some of them who are now in their thirties still go back to
Deep Cove Farms whenever they can, and at least two of the male
grandchildren elected to take their brides there for honeymoons. The
grandchildren had to follow a strict regimen Eaton had a theory that a tot
as young as two could do something useful around a house—help make
a bed, say, or clear a table. He would assemble his clan for breakfast
each morning and impart the orders for that day— laundry, or
woodcraft, or bird spotting, or a lecture on local history, or ridding a
road of rocks. When it rained, all hands would be fitted out with foul43
weather gear and marched off to climb the nearest mountain. To manage
the crowd, Eaton would augment his regular household staff with a
couple of patient college students. (His full-time majordomo since
1953 has been a French Canadian who until he joined Eaton was a
Canadian Pacific Railway dining-car superintendent and also a member
of the Nova Scotia legislature.) On the top floor of the Upper Blandford
farmhouse, Eaton set up two dormitories—one for girls, one for boys. If
there were too many children on the scene to fit into them, the overflow
was harbored in tents. There were frequent picnics Eaton loves picnics
almost as much as trees. He used to give an annual picnic at Acadia
Farms for Chesapeake & Ohio employees and their families, but he had
to stop after the C- & O. absorbed the Baltimore & Ohio system; he
could not comfortably accommodate more than a couple of thousand
picnickers at once. During most of the years in which Eaton ran his
summer camp, he was much featured in the press, but the children in his
engaging company were all but unaware of his not always flattering
celebrity. “To me, my grandfather was simply the man I played tennis
with,” one of them said years afterward. To Eaton, the family holidays
were an unalloyed joy, though not without risks: when he was seventyone,
one of his grandchildren gave him the mumps.
A firm believer in physical fitness, Eaton was cool toward one
prospective son-in-law until the young man grabbed a tennis racquet and
beat him at singles. At Acadia Farms on winter weekends, he would
corral whichever grandchildren showed up, shepherd them to a frozen
pond, and play ice hockey with them. He skied every winter until he
turned eighty-seven, but he remained contemptuous of ski lifts. He had
begun skiing before lifts were invented, and he believed that half the
challenge of the pastime was climbing up a hill before sliding down it.
He never could get the hang of rope tows; he kept falling off them, with
44
indignity and indignation. At seventy-five, he stopped riding jumpers.
He had begun riding at four (he started his own children in at one), and
he belonged to two hunt clubs. Since he reached ninety-two, he has
reluctantly given up all sports, but he still walks a couple of miles a day.
Fifty years ago, he suffered from chronic indigestion. A doctor he
consulted urged him to forswear tobacco, alcohol, tea, coffee, and
corned-beef hash. Since then, his staple potables have been orange juice
and hot water. “Sir William Osier once said that a man should eschew
Lady Nicotine, Bacchus, and the younger Aphrodites,” Eaton likes to
say. “A lot of my contemporaries have had shorter lives because they did
not obey Sir William's injunctions.” One of Eaton's physicians attributes
his healthy longevity to a capacity for instant sleep. The doctor once
joined Eaton on an inspection tour of an iron mine. The two men were
assigned to the same room in a bunkhouse. Before his companion even
had both shoes off, Eaton was in bed and snoring.
IN the mid-nine teen-thirties, Eaton began hauling himself back up
the financial ladder, at first principally through the underwriting of
railroad and utilities bonds. These had traditionally and profitably been
marketed through the large Wall Street investment-banking houses, with
little or no prior competitive bidding to determine who would manage an
offering. Fighting Wall Street was for Eaton not merely a means of
making money; it was fun, and it also took on the dimensions of a
crusade. Nothing pleased him more than to learn, in 1947, that he federal
government had indicted seventeen East Coast investment-banking
houses for allegedly having arranged among themselves to handle twothirds
of all the country's underwriting business over the previous nine
years “The nation simply will no longer stand for the continued
concentration of financial control in a few hands and in one place,
because it has been amply demonstrated that such control militates
against the creative and constructive finance that is the keystone of our
45
free-enterprise system,” Eaton said in a prepared statement. “The New
York houses that have been indicted form a colorless fraternity, banded
together to do only the riskless, high-grade business and to divide it up
into tiny participations, according to fixed percentages, with the houses
that should be their competitors.” In his efforts to make the underwriting
business more truly competitive, Eaton found an eager accomplice in
another alien to the Establishment—Robert R. Young, the Texan who,
until his suicide in Palm Beach in 1958, cut quite a swath through the
American railroad industry. “Young was a man of great courage,” Eaton
says, “and we were friends in all areas, although he grew more interested
in the social life of Newport and Palm Beach than I could ever be, and
though he didn't entirely share my interest in seeking answers to the
problems that concern philosophers and scholars.” Young's first big
railroad acquisition was the Chesapeake & Ohio, and his domination of
it was solidified by a thirty-million-dollar refinancing, which the
railroad's directors had planned to confer, as was the routine practice, on
the familiar old Wall Street houses of Morgan Stanley and Kuhn
Loeb. Eaton, through Otis & Company, joined with the Chicago firm of
Halsey, Stuart and, by underbidding the New Yorkers, forced the
railroad's board to throw its business their way. Young put Eaton on the
C. & O. board of directors in 1943, and in 1954, when Young left to
wage his successful battle to control the New York Central, he sold his
C. & O. stock to Eaton, who succeeded him as chairman.
All this skirmishing for control of railroads inevitably involved the
federal government. In threading their way through the bureaucratic
mazes of Washington, Eaton and Young attracted the sympathetic
attention of Senator Harry S. Truman. Eaton had first met Truman in the
nineteen-t wen ties in Kansas City, where Eaton had a stranglehold on
public utilities (and, of course, saw nothing wrong with that). The two
46
men met again in Washington in 1941, when Eaton testified—in
opposition to Wall Street— at some Securities and Exchange Commission
hearings on the intricacies of financing utilities bonds. At about
that time, with the United States at war, Eaton learned from friends of
his in Canada about the discovery of a vast deposit of iron ore beneath
Steep Rock Lake, in northwestern Ontario. He remembered what John
D. Rockefeller, Sr., had told him two score years earlier about natural
resources; by then, moreover, he himself had concluded that “iron ore is
the foundation of American industry.” Eaton went to Ontario and, from
canoe and airplane, scrutinized Steep Rock Lake. There was no question
about the potential value to the Allied war effort of the ore under the
water; the problem was how to get rid of the water. After talking to
some engineers, Eaton concluded that this could be accomplished, at a
cost of no more than seven or eight million dollars, by regiments of
pumps and a three-thousand-foot drainage tunnel. With the backing of
the Canadian government, he went to Washington in the fall of 1942 to
submit his proposal to the War Production Board, which did not think
much of the idea until Senator Truman, chairman of the Senate
Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, gave it his
blessing. Then, with the W.P.B. prodded into his corner, Eaton was able
to go to the Canadian government and the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation for assistance. By 1947, the onetime lake bed was yielding
up iron ore at the rate of a million tons a year, through two corporations
organized by Eaton. One of them, Premium Iron Ores, of whose stock
he controlled seventy-four per cent, acted as Steep Rock's sales agent.
For obtaining contracts to sell ten million tons of the ore over a ten-year
period, Premium received nearly a million and a half shares of the other,
Steep Rock Iron Mines, at a price of a penny a share. In 1955, the
Internal Revenue Service contended that Eaton owed it ten million
dollars in back taxes, on the ground that the Steep Rock shares for
47
which he had paid one cent had actually been worth a dollar sixty-seven
apiece. Eaton was especially put out because the incumbent Secretary of
the Treasury, and thus the boss of the I.R.S., was George M. Humphrey,
a fellow-Clevelander. The case dragged on through the tax courts for a
couple of years before Eaton was adjudged the winner—a verdict that
prompted Fortune to describe him as “a living refutation of that old
American saying 'You can't win 'em all.’ “
Eaton was able to reciprocate for Truman's earlier intercession when
the Missourian campaigned for the Presidency in 1948. Just before
Election Day, Eaton was visited at the Biltmore Hotel—where he
usually puts up while in New York—by the president of a railroad
brotherhood. The caller said that President Truman was planning to
travel by train from New York to St. Louis for his last big voters’ rally,
that the New York Central wouldn't let the train depart unless it got five
thousand dollars, and that the Democrats had run out of cash. Eaton
paid for the train.
During the Second World War, Eaton had embarked on a
collaborative venture with still another non-Establishment man, the
California industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. Along with Joseph W. Frazer,
Kaiser wanted to break into the postwar automobile market, and for that
he would need steel. Through Otis & Company, Eaton underwrote a sale
of stock in the Portsmouth Steel Corporation, whose output was
supposed to go largely into Kaiser-Frazer cars. In 1947, another equity
financing seemed desirable—this one to sell Kaiser-Frazer stock.
Arriving at Kaiser's office to discuss the terms, Eaton folded his hands
together, much in the manner of a Baptist at prayer, and said, “Henry,
we want to be very careful in this matter, because it is a very bitter
experience to lose other people's money.” The Californian seemed
48
somewhat taken aback when it turned out a few minutes later that Eaton
was assigning himself more than the conventional underwriter's
percentage for floating the stock issue. Afterward, Eaton, his hands
again piously folded, said, “Dear me, I'm afraid Henry Kaiser must think
I'm a bit of a bandit.” Kaiser did indeed come to think so. In 1948, when
he expected Otis & Company to sell almost four million dollars' worth
of the new company's stock, Otis suddenly pulled out of the deal,
explaining that the securities market had turned sour and that the issue
could not succeed. Kaiser believed that Eaton had welshed unreasonably
on a firm commitment, and for the next few years their disagreement
occupied the time of numerous judges and lawyers. (Abe Fortas was one
of Eaton's attorneys.) In 1951, a federal court found against Otis and
ordered it to pay Kaiser-Frazer more than three million dollars—this at a
time, embarrassingly, when the Eaton firm's total assets were a million
dollars shy of that figure. But Eaton continued to refute the you-can'twin-'
em-all adage: the following year, a higher court reversed the
judgment.
LONG before the Second World War, Eaton had got himself involved
in domestic American politics. In his business life, he scarcely
ever dealt with anyone who wasn't a Republican, but, in his iconoclastic
fashion, he personally tended to gravitate toward Democrats. He had
first met Franklin Roosevelt in 1920, during Roosevelt's unsuccessful
candidacy as the Vice-Presidential running mate of Ohio's Governor
James M. Cox. After becoming President, Roosevelt hoped to develop,
in conjunction with Canada, a St. Lawrence Seaway. He asked Eaton to
stop by and talk over the project. For Eaton, it was a familiar subject. He
had once hoped to build a seaway privately, but had been forestalled by
Governor Al Smith of New York, who told him that any such
undertaking would have to be carried out by federal, state, and
49
provincial governments, and not by any individuals for their own profit.
Roosevelt told Eaton that he was being hindered by a provincial
government—specifically, that of Mitchell Hepburn, the Premier of
Ontario. “Inasmuch as Mitch Hepburn was a cousin of mine and also a
fanner who raised cattle, Roosevelt asked me to persuade him to go
along with the scheme,” Eaton says. “I said I'd be glad to, but I would
need full and official information on how negotiations stood. The
President said that was easy, and made a date for me to go see Secretary
of State Cordell Hull. I did, and learned what I wanted, but a week
later I received a letter from Hull to the effect that his department, on
reviewing the whole matter, had concluded that all negotiations should
he carried on not by private citizens but exclusively by government
officials. I sent a note to Roosevelt saying that I assumed he didn't want
me to continue. He replied that Hull was, of course, absolutely correct,
that official undertakings had to be handled through official channels,
but—I don't know what, if anything, he told Hull—wouldn't I please
proceed as planned? So I went and spent a weekend with Hepburn on his
farm, and we talked about cattle breeding and various agricultural
matters, and I finally got around to the question of his supporting
Roosevelt on the St. Lawrence. Hepburn said, “I’ll go along. You're the
only man in the world for whom I'd change my stand.” And everything
moved forward from that moment on.”
Eaton tends to consider almost as consequential his participation in
another turn of events, in 1940, shortly after the fall of France. He was in
Nova Scotia, and was invited to lunch, aboard the flagship of a British
battle squadron at Halifax, by Rear Admiral S. S. Bonham-Carter, the
ranking naval officer in the harbor. “The Admiral served a first-rate
lunch, with excellent wines, but he was naturally distressed about what
had happened on the other side of the Atlantic,” Eaton says. “I told him
50
at one point that there appeared to be little chance of success for his
country, and that perhaps the prudent thing for Britain to do would be to
make peace swiftly on the best possible terms. Bonham-Carter
disagreed. “If we could get the use of some of your old destroyers, we
could win this war,” he said. After lunch, we had a confidential chat and
he asked me to help obtain the destroyers. I said that I would, try—that
my Uncle Charles was a man of some influence in Washington, and that
I was sure his heart was with England. I went straight to Washington and
told Uncle Charles what the Admiral had said, and Uncle Charles went
straight to Roosevelt, and the President told him, ‘I’ll provide the ships
if I can get it by you Republicans in Congress.' Uncle Charles said, ‘I
will deliver the Republicans if you will take the lead.' Well, the
destroyer deal went through, (of course, and I suppose my helping to I
bring it about may have been the most (important event of my life.”
Eaton enthusiastically backed President Roosevelt when he ran for a
third term, in 1940—even composing a pamphlet, “The Third Term
‘Tradition’” in which he observed that Walpole had been the Prime
Minister of England for twenty-one years and the younger Pitt for
twenty, and that for forty-nine of the seventy-three years Canada had
had its own government a mere three men had held the reins.
Moreover, Eaton didn't like Wendell Willkie, who had been counsel for
some of his bitterest enemies in some of his bitterest fights in the public
utilities arena. The Republican who most frequently got Eaton's hackles
up, though, was the one often known as “Mr. Republican”—his fellow-
Ohioan Robert A. Taft. In the fall of 1941, when Taft, a redoubtable
noninterventionist, opposed Roosevelt's attempt to have the Neutrality
Act revised, Eaton wrote him a letter saying that his stand was
“distressing to your Ohio constituents,” and continuing, “Republican
senators and congressmen owe it to the nation to desist from demagogic
51
appeals to human weakness and human folly, which give only Hitler
cause to be enchanted.” Eaton and Taft had tangled a couple of years
earlier over the underwriting of a twelve-million-dollar bond issue for
the Cincinnati Union Terminal. Eaton had, as usual, wanted competitive
bidding, and Taft, the chairman of the terminal's finance committee,
resented Eaton's rocking that particular boat. And in 1952, when the Taft
family disclosed its intention of buying the Cincinnati Enquirer, which
the paper's employees had hoped to buy themselves, Eaton delightedly
lent the employees the seven million six hundred thousand dollars they
required.
In 1950, during Taft's senatorial reelection campaign, Eaton
contributed thirty-five thousand dollars to his Democratic opponent,
Joseph Ferguson. Inasmuch as five thousand dollars was supposed to be
the maximum any individual could give, a Senate subcommittee
inquiring into campaign expenditures subsequently asked Eaton for an
explanation. At first, he begged off appearing, on the excuse that he had
bursitis, hut he finally showed up in Washington and said that he hadn't
exactly given all the money himself. Some was his son's, and some came
from Otis & Company employees, whom he had later reimbursed,
though he didn't seem to be able to lay his hand on any of the relevant
cancelled checks. In any event, he told the Senate subcommittee, “I felt
that my place was on the side of the laboring man—in my own interests
as a capitalist.” The committee let the matter rest there. To identify
himself with labor was one of Eaton's favorite pastimes. He more than
once proposed, to the outrage of many of his fellow-capitalists, that it
would he an estimable notion for employees to sit on the boards of
corporations for which they toiled. In 1947, he had written, “The casualness
with which we capitalists seem willing—nay, even eager—to invite
the collapse of our economic system, in almost every industrial dispute,
52
for the sole purpose of thwarting labor, is utterly incomprehensible.”
These sentiments—utterly incomprehensible to many of the men who sat
around boardroom tables with Eaton—were expressed in an article in the
University of Chicago Law Review. When it was republished in Labor, a
journal put out by fifteen railroad unions, its editors stated, “So far as
Labor can recall, nothing quite like it has appeared in print in recent
years.”
The funds that didn't help Ferguson defeat Taft were contributed
by Eaton through Labor's Non-Partisan League, an entity created by
John L. Lewis. It was perhaps natural that the mine worker’s leader,
considered by many of his fellow-unionists the most cantankerous
specimen of their breed, should have been a warm friend of Cyrus
Eaton, who enjoyed much the same reputation on his side of the
industrial fence. When, during the Second World War, there was angry
talk of drafting miners who were dissatisfied with their working
conditions, Eaton rushed to Washington at President Roosevelt's behest
and assisted in achieving peace between Lewis and the mine owners.
“John Lewis has again proved that he is a brilliant leader,” Eaton
declared after that war within a war had ended. “I wish American
industry and government had more men of his courage and
statesmanship.” Eaton says that he and Lewis, who died in 1969, at
eighty-nine, had a lot in common. Lewis's mother-in-law was an Eaton,
for one thing, and, for another, both men were fond of poetry. “John and
I liked to talk about the great authors and philosophers and scientists of
the world,” Eaton says. “I was an admirer of Darwin and Huxley and
Tyndall and their views of the origin of man and of his destiny, and we
discussed these matters a great deal. It didn't bother Lewis to be known
as my friend any more than it bothered me to be known as his.” One
aspect of their friendship was explored in an article in the December,
53
1961, issue of Harper's, which recounted in considerable detail how, a
decade earlier, the United Mine Workers had lent perhaps ten million
dollars to various Eaton companies, thus enabling Eaton to procure
control of the West Kentucky Coal Company, which, theretofore never
organized, soon recognized Lewis's union.
FROM his involvement in American politics it was an easy enough
step for Eaton to move on to the international scene. This he did,
initially, by sponsoring the Pugwash scientific conferences, which since
1957 have been moved from Nova Scotia to many other places. His
objective, as he put it once, was to afford intellectuals a chance to ''relax
together, exchange views, sharpen their own thinking, and design
formulas for us to live by in this brand-new world.” Perhaps the most
rewarding conference, in Eaton's estimation, was an early one, held in
Austria in 1958. It was sponsored by the Austrian government, drew
eighty scientists from twenty-two nations, and met in two venues—first
Kitzbuhel and then Vienna, where a crowd of fifteen thousand, including
the President of Austria, filed into an auditorium to hear the visiting
scientists thumpingly condemn nuclear weapons. During one session,
Eaton, Bertrand Russell, and a distinguished European scientist were on
the agenda for a ten-minute talk apiece. The scientist led off. It is one of
Eaton's favorite footnotes to the annals of Pugwash that after the Herr
Professor Doktor had held the floor for forty minutes and was showing
no signs of relinquishing it Lord Russell turned to the American and
whispered loudly, “It's time to drop the bomb.”
Inasmuch as Russian and Chinese scientists were among those
invited to Pugwash Conferences, these affairs inescapably attracted the
attention of outsiders. Eaton is convinced, for instance, that eventually
the Pugwash movement was infiltrated by the Central Intelligence
54
Agency. A few of the hundred thousand-odd shareholders of the
Chesapeake & Ohio Railway from time to time got interested in their
chairman's hobnobbing with all those erudite foreigners, not to mention
the heads of Communist governments, and expressed some misgivings
about his behavior, but his staff did some checking and was relieved to
find that the writers of the angriest letters generally turned out to own a
trifling number of shares. Nobody ever tried to calculate the possible
effect on C. & O. stock prices of any of the irrepressible chairman's
extra-business pronouncements. In any event, Eaton usually managed to
appease his C. & O, flock at their annual gatherings by exerting his
considerable Old World charm and by, on one occasion, reminding his
auditors that George Washington had been the first president of the
company that became their railroad, and so they were all part of a fine
continuing American capitalistic tradition. In private, he was sometimes
less than totally convinced of the sanctity of American capitalism. He
was all for it, certainly, but no one knew better than he did the
imperfections and inequities of the system. He had in his time exploited
these to his huge profit, and he had also been monumentally undone by
them. Thus, he saw no reason that an alternative system, even a
Communist one, should not coexist with this one. He believed that
American businessmen were foolish to be obsessed with Russia at the
very time when Russians, in their approach to commerce, seemed to be
acting more and more like American businessmen. That there was
ruthlessness inherent in the Communist way of doing things was to him
not particularly significant; as a capitalist, he had, when necessary, been
as ruthless as anybody who ever foreclosed a mortgage. Yet it appeared
that he was denounced as a turncoat every time he tried to aver that
although he was for the one system he did not mind if others were for
the other. It was therefore not surprising that he greatly relished the trips
55
he began making to Eastern Europe and other Communist regions in
1958; in those oases, nobody ever said anything nasty about him.
In his tilts with the conventional, Eaton found, during his early
seventies, an articulate helpmeet. She was Anne Kinder Jones, a
Cleveland divorcee who had helped him entertain his thinkers at the
1957 gathering in Pugwash, and who contributed to the old Eaton family
home there”, which the newspapers had begun calling Thinkers' Lodge,
a welcome sign that read “Retain your hope, all ye who enter here.”
Eaton had not remarried after his 1934 divorce. His ex-wife died in the
spring of 1956, and that December he married Anne Jones. Some
Cleveland eyebrows shot up. The bride had an impeccable social
background—debut at the 1940 Cleveland Assembly Ball, Hathaway
Brown School, Vassar College. Her father, Walter T Kinder, was a much
respected probate judge in Cleveland, and had been a senior partner in
one of the city's most distinguished law firms, Jones, Day, Reavis &
Pogue, with which her first husband was also associated. But she was
ten years younger than Eaton's oldest daughter, and she had been
confined to a wheelchair since being stricken with polio, in 1946. Eaton
did not care what anyone in Cleveland thought about his private life or
any other aspect of his life, and the newlyweds were cheered by
congratulatory messages from farther afield—from Harry S. Truman,
John L. Lewis, Julian Huxley, and a group of scientists whose joint
telegram made them sound like the most splendidly named law firm of
all time: Russell, Powell, Rabinowitch, Rotblat, Skobeltsyn, and Szilard.
Anne Eaton, who had been teaching an adult-education course in
semantics at Cleveland College, had never been known as a political
activist, but she quickly came to share her husband's feelings about the
skewed state of the world. Over the last twenty years, indeed, she has
seemed to some of her friends to have become even more militant than
56
he, and she has vigorously defended him against all comers. One anti-
Eaton comment in the Cleveland Plain Dealer elicited from her the tart
rejoinder “Cyrus Eaton has been the first spokesman for millions who
share his concern. Until more of them are quoted on your editorial page,
I am proud to hold his coat.” On her own, she became a forthright
participant in the deliberations and demonstrations of groups like the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and Women
Strike for Peace. Because of her wheelchair, let alone her husband's
celebrity, whenever she joined a protest rally outside the White House or
the United Nations she was a prime target for photographers. When she
went back to Vassar for her twenty-fifth reunion, in 1969, she took with
her a scolding message about Vietnam for her classmates to send to
President Nixon.
Mrs. Eaton has accompanied her husband on most of his trips to
Moscow, Prague, Sofia, Budapest, Warsaw, East Berlin, Bucharest,
Havana, and Hanoi, in all of which they have received V.I.P. treatment.
More than usual courtesies have also been extended by the Communist
world to other members of Eaton's clan; a stepson-in-law, Alfred Heller,
has conducted symphony orchestras all over the Soviet Union. When
Eaton visited Moscow in December 1960, for two days running Pravda
put his picture on its front page—an unprecedented accolade for a
private citizen from the imperialistic West. He has had such ready access
to top Soviet officials that when Adlai Stevenson was representing the
United States at the U.N. he would invite Eaton to have lunch with him
as soon as Eaton got back from Russia, to ascertain what was on the
Russians' minds at the moment. “Adlai thought the Russians were
franker with me than with any other American,” Eaton says. In June,
1965, shortly before Stevenson's death, Eaton briefed him on the reaction
of the Soviet Union and its allies—not surprisingly, a negative
57
reaction—to the American bombing of North Vietnam. Stevenson
replied that there was little likelihood of the Johnson Administration's
diminishing its military buildup in Indo-China, and a few days later,
addressing the Economic Club of Detroit, Eaton said, “I must tell you
with sadness that my life is a failure.... In my sober judgment, we are on
the brink of catastrophe, and unless some miracle occurs in the next
month, I fear that mankind is doomed.” He had seen Premier Kosygin at
the Kremlin, he said, and he went on, “The deep significance of his
remarks was that the United States had declared war on the Soviet
Union, that the Soviet Union was compelled to meet the challenge and
would do so in cooperation with the armies of Vietnam and China....
There is nothing left for them to do but to go in with everything they
have. I want you to take it from me that I'm certain they will.... Nothing I
could say to him would suggest further patience, waiting and
forbearance.... The people of the Soviet Union and their leaders
earnestly hope that at the last minute the business interests of the United
States will persuade the President to take whatever steps are necessary to
avoid the catastrophe that our present actions in Vietnam threaten.”
When the State Department suggested that perhaps these views were
Eaton's rather than Kosygin's, Eaton defensively made public a transcript
of some notes his wife had scribbled at the Kremlin.
Eaton has sometimes regarded himself as an ambassador between two
opposing worlds—though, as Senator Barry Goldwater once gruffly
noted, one manifestly without portfolio—and whenever he drops in at a
foreign capital he makes a point of calling on the bona-fide American
envoy and, if time permits, on the Canadian, British, French, Soviet,
Vietnamese, and Chinese Ambassadors, too. One of his few frustrations
is that he has never been to China; even from afar, though, he once
declared that Mao Tse-tung “has been able to analyze our financial
58
problems with deeper insight than a long line of American Secretaries of
the Treasury.” The breach between China and Russia has distressed
Eaton. For one thing, it robbed him for a while of his customary niche in
Pravda. “When I was in Moscow in 1965,” he says, “I was told, 'If your
name and picture are displayed on the front page, as in the past, it may
suggest undue devotion to American capitalists, and it could be
misunderstood in China. We hope that you, as an old friend, won't take it
amiss if we leave you off All the conferences that are planned for you
will go on as scheduled, but nothing will be reported in the Soviet
press.'“
It has been Eaton's feeling all along that effective coexistence
between the Communist and capitalist worlds could be attained most
easily by increasing commerce between them. The more trade, the less
tension is his credo. He had been a proponent of doing business with the
Russians years before many Americans could even bring themselves to
contemplate that possibility, and he is fond of citing an encounter he had
with President Nixon in June, 1973, in the course of a White House
reception for Leonid Brezhnev. “With an arm around each of us,” Eaton
says, “Nixon told Mr. Brezhnev, 'For more than twenty years now, Mr.
Eaton has been a leading advocate in this country of trade with yours, a
belief that I have belatedly come around to myself.’ Mr. Brezhnev
laughed and agreed, adding that it made him extremely happy that my
efforts had finally been vindicated.”
Curiously, Eaton—aside from swapping gifts with Khrushchev—has
never traded extensively with Russia himself, although his older son and
namesake helped nave the way for a multibillion-dollar Soviet-American
natural-gas project that Armand Hammer and his Occidental Petroleum
Corporation disclosed in July 1972. Anticipating that announcement,
59
Eaton told a C. & O. shareholders' meeting three months earlier, “It will
be a memorable day in my life when the New York Daily News, our
newspaper of largest circulation and the most vigorous denouncer of
Communism, uses power produced by Soviet natural gas to run its
presses I will also be delighted when the Cold Warriors of Washington
cook their breakfast by natural gas brought in from the Soviet Union.”
Cyrus Eaton, Jr., runs a company called Tower International (his
headquarters, like his father's, are in Cleveland's Terminal Tower),
which since 1960 has specialized in doing business—building hotels,
making movies, random imports and exports—with Eastern Europe.
That the head of Tower International bears a name almost as well known
there as Charlie Chaplin's hasn't hurt.
Cyrus Eaton, Sr., was in his eighties when the Vietnam war began to
escalate, but this did not deter him from expending much of his still
enormous energy in trying to bring that tragedy to an end He liked to tell
people he had a sound capitalistic reason—he had business interests in
Indo-China. That was stretching the point a little, however he was
apparently alluding to the acquisition of rubber by the tire industry, with
which he hadn't been associated for thirty or forty years. He also liked to
cite as special allies in his crusade two illustrious military men of his
acquaintance—General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery.
“Ike and Monty were the greatest soldiers of their time, and they both
told me it was madness to send American troops in Vietnam and
Cambodia, because we couldn't possibly win.” Eaton says. “Eisenhower
explained to me in some detail that while North Vietnam was a small
nation, it had as allies the Chinese, with the largest standing army on
earth, and the Russians, with the most sophisticated military equipment,
Montgomery told me that, to a military man, going into Vietnam was an
absolute absurdity, and that anyone who was an Army officer should
60
resign rather than take part, because there was no chance of success” I
suggested to Monty in June, 1966, after we spent a day together at his
country place in England, that he come over and talk President Johnson
into getting out of Vietnam, but we were never able to work it out.
I also made public a letter Monty wrote me in 1970 in which he said,
'President Nixon is, of course, totally unfit to be Commander-in-Chief of
the armed forces of the U.S.A. His knowledge of the conduct of war is
nil’ There was an avalanche of criticism against Monty for that. Ike,
unfortunately, never came out publicly; there was too much fanaticism
in Washington. But he did tell me privately once, after his retirement,
that one of his problems as President had been to restrain Nixon and
Dulles, who were forever urging the dispatch of American troops to
every continent to destroy Communism by force.”
Unable to get others to stop the war, Eaton characteristically decided
to act himself. He had met emissaries of both the North Vietnamese and
the Vietcong while making his ambassadorial rounds in Paris, Moscow,
and elsewhere. In late November of 1969, he set out for Hanoi, with
interim stops in Paris, Moscow, Teheran, Karachi, Rangoon, Phnom
Penh, and Vientiane, He was eighty-five years old. In Cambodia, Eaton
and his wife were joined by one of his grandchildren. Fox Butterfield.
As a Far East correspondent of the New York Times, Butterfield could
not easily gain admittance to Hanoi; as Cyrus Eaton's grandson, he
found it a cinch. During eight days there, Eaton talked with, among
others, Pham Van Dong and Le Due Tho, the principal North
Vietnamese spokesmen. “President Nixon was saying at that time that
North Vietnam wouldn't negotiate,” Eaton says, “so I asked Pham to
give me the terms upon which it would He said it wouldn't do any good,
because Nixon wouldn't make peace. I pressed him. I said, 'Give me the
61
terms, and let me see what I can do,' and he did. I also asked if he would
be willing to meet Nixon in person. To go anywhere in the world to talk
to him at any time,' he said. The terms I brought back were virtually
identical to those that were accepted four years later. When I returned to
the States, I got in touch with the White House, and was told to report to
Secretary of State William Rogers. He told me that he didn't believe I
could give him any insights into North Vietnamese thinking that he
didn't already have. 'We've decided that the only thing they respond to is
force,' he said, 'and that's what we're going to give them, and plenty of
it.' When I got to see Nixon not long after that, I told him that the head
of the government of North Vietnam would meet him anywhere,
anytime, and he said he'd have to think about it. Then he launched some
new attacks. It was a great deception on the American people.” In
Cleveland, Eaton told a press conference that the North Vietnamese had
assured him they didn't want to take over South Vietnam. He also
mentioned, no doubt enviously, that on his way to Asia he had met a
Soviet shepherd who was a hundred and sixty years old and still rode
horseback.
It pleases Eaton to travel with an entourage, and he has reached an
age when having grandchildren along can be more blessing than burden.
One grandson, David LeFevre, who, before he began practicing law, did
a Peace Corps stint in Uruguay, is fluent in Spanish, so Eaton took him
along as interpreter when he visited Chile, in December, 1970, just after
the election that made Salvador Allende President “I felt that it was
important for the United States to have good relations with all South
American countries, and here was one we certainly ought to be friends
with,” Eaton says. “I was interested, of course, in Chilean agriculture,
and I wanted to be of assistance in the breeding of beef cattle there. I was
received with great courtesy, and Allende and I became great friends.
62
However, the attitude of our government representatives there toward
him was indescribably hostile.” On Christmas Day in Chile, Eaton
decided to do what he does best. He gave a picnic, choosing as the site a
cooperative farm. He expected thirty or so guests, calculating on three or
four children per resident family, but the first family to arrive had eleven
offspring, and the second eight. Fortunately, LeFevre knew South
America and had fore handedly arranged to triple the amount of food
Eaton had ordered. With Allende, as with the Russians, Eaton talked
trade. “I said to him, 'Let's start Selling you things,'” Eaton says, “‘Then
the politicians won’t be able to undo what we’ve put together.” The
Santiago newspaper La Nacton quoted testimonials by Eaton to
Allende's strength and brilliance; the Cleveland Plain Dealer found it
odd that he should have so unstintingly praised the leader of a country
that was so busily engaged in expropriating and nationalizing public
utilities.
David LeFevre also accompanied his grandfather on one of several
journeys the old man has made to Cuba since Castro took over. Eaton
sometimes says that he thinks Cuba is the most beautiful spot on earth,
and he has seen much of it. He began going down there in the nineteentwenties,
but he had no stomach for the Batista government; he
maintains that while trying to float a hundred-million-dollar bond issue
to rehabilitate Cuba's railroads the Batista regime planned to siphon off
ninety-five per cent of the proceeds into its own pockets. When Castro
came to New York for a U.N. meeting in 1960—the time he moved from
the Shelburne Hotel to the Hotel Theresa, in Harlem, because the first
hostelry took a dim view of the live chickens in his retinue—Eaton was
one of the few Americans who called on him to pay their respects.
Castro was touched, and invited him to Havana, at his convenience. It
was May 1968, before Eaton got there, but he was so affably received
63
that he returned seven months later on the occasion of his eighty-fifth
birthday. Castro sent a cake. While talking trade with Cubans, Eaton
offered to take some iron ore of theirs back with him and have it assayed
for commercial potential. (He carried home about fifty pounds' worth,
but it turned out to be of unpromisingly low grade.) Castro gave Eaton
some rum and cigars, neither of which fit in with his austere regimen.
Eaton gave Castro, who rarely wears neckties, some Chesapeake & Ohio
promotional ties, with Chessie kittens cuddling all over them Eaton
also spent his ninety-second birthday in Havana. The war in Angola was
then going on, with Cuban troops importantly involved. Their
participation upset some Americans but left Eaton untroubled; in view of
the long-standing United States practice of sending troops to Asia, he
said, why shouldn't Cuba send some to Africa? On returning home, he
wrote to the Times, “My latest visit to Cuba reinforces mv long-held
conviction that the American giant is making a grievous mistake in
continuing to bully the tiny but enterprising island just ninety miles from
our mainland.” He added that after meeting President Osvaldo Dorticos
and the rest of the thirteen-man Politburo of the country, “contrary to
impressions fostered by our officialdom, there is not a rubber stamp
among them,” An item about Eaton and President Dorticos that ran in
Granma, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of Cuba, had, however, a rubber-stamp look, “Yesterday
morning,” it went, in toto, “Osvaldo Dorticos, President of the Republic
and member of the Politburo of the Party, held a long interview with
Cyrus Eaton, an outstanding personality in economic, industrial, and
financial circles in the United States, whose positions and activities in
favor of peace are known throughout the world During the interview,
which was held in a cordial, friendly, and frank atmosphere, they had a
wide interchange of opinions on different aspects of the present
64
international situation. Mr. Eaton repeated his friendly statements
toward the Cuban people.”
At almost ninety-four, Eaton travels less frequently than he used to.
Indeed, in grudging deference to the increasing fragility of his bones he
spent most of last winter in the Florida Keys. He soil has a good many
plans for the future, though. His son is hoping to build a big new hotel in
Moscow, for the 1980 Olympics, and Cyrus, Sr., who will be going on
ninety-seven when the Games get under way, has already booked a
room.
—E-J. Kahn, Jr.
COMMUNISTS' CAPITALIST
By E. J. Kahn, Jr.
(Copyright the New Yorker Magazine,
October 10 and October 17, 1977 issues)
THEY are all gone now—Bertrand Russell, Samuel Insull, John L.
Lewis, the Duke of Windsor, Nikita Khrushchev, and Frank Lindsay.
Frank Lindsay was, in 1968, at the age of a hundred, the oldest living
trustee of the University of Chicago. That he—let alone five fellow
board members of eighty-five or older—was still around nine years ago
was somewhat vexing to another venerable trustee, Cyrus Stephen
Eaton, who was then eighty-four, and who remarked in a letter at the
time, “My great ambition to be the oldest member of the Chicago board
appears hopeless.” Now, at nearly ninety-four, Eaton has achieved that
goal, which might have pleased another of his assorted old
acquaintances—John D. Rockefeller, Sr., who founded the University of
Chicago in 1890, and who, hack in 1901, introduced Eaton to the world
of high finance. Eaton came to occupy a position of eminence in that
world, and among those who have suffered more than he has from its
inequities he has often been called a capitalistic robber baron, or worse.
For the last couple of decades, he has also often been called a
Communistic traitor, or worse. Eaton, who thinks that the senior
Rockefeller was just about the finest American of his era, was for forty
years further vexed because, following his designation, in 1936, as one
of the hundred-odd electors of the Hall of Fame, it took him that long to
get yet another of his heroes, Andrew Carnegie, admitted there.
(Carnegie hasn't yet been enshrined; the Hall has run out of money.) On
the pedestals of Eaton's own private pantheon are also to be found such
2
other members of his wide-ranging social set as Fidel Castro, Leonid
Brezhnev, Pham Van Dong, and whoever has happened in recent years
to be in charge of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Rumania,
Yugoslavia, and East Germany. One of the few Western holders of the
Lenin (ne Stalin) Peace Prize, and a never-say-die aspirant to the Nobel,
Eaton, who was born in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, and graduated in 1905
from McMaster University, then in Toronto and now in Hamilton, Ontario,
has nine honorary degrees—from McMaster; from Dalhousie and
Acadia Universities, in Nova Scotia; from Mount Allison University, in
New Brunswick; from Bard and Bowling Green, in the United States;
from the University of Sofia, in Bulgaria; from Eotvos Lorand
University, in Budapest; and from Charles University, in Prague. When
he attended the 1973 enthronement of his old mentor's great-grandson
John D. Rockefeller IV as president of West Virginia Wesleyan College,
the official program listed him as representing Charles University. That
institution refers to him honorifically as “Cyrusovi Stephenovi
Eatonovi.”
Eaton, who expects to live to be at least a hundred (the elder
Rockefeller departed several weeks short of ninety-nine), has said that
his father, who died at eighty-four, missed some of the most satisfying
and stimulating years of man's span. Eaton, who has chaired enough
boards in his career to build a corporate raft, was seventy when he
started in as chairman of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway in 1954,
replacing his friend and ally Robert R. Young on Young's departure to
engage in a bloody and successful battle for control of the New York
Central. On the eve of Eaton's ninetieth birthday, instead of being
ceremonially invested with some kind of honorary C. & O. degree on his
retirement, he was summarily booted upstairs to chairman emeritus by
his own board of directors at a rump meeting. When his son Cyrus, Jr.,
3
who was also a C. & O. director, bridled it the indelicate treatment his
father had received, he was booted off the board altogether. Eaton pere
was stripped of all but one of his twelve assistants but was allowed to
keep his office, on the thirty-sixth floor of the Terminal Tower in
Cleveland, from which for twenty years he had almost literally loomed
over that town The office, to which Eaton has repaired with diminishing
frequency since he turned ninety-two, is a large, emphatically capitalistic
sanctum, with the exception that The New Republic and Soviet Union are
just as prominently on display as Forbes and Fortune. The chair Eaton
sits in is unabashedly red—though of a high-quality leather. When he is
not scrutinizing the latest Dow-Jones figures on the companies in which
he owns stock, or gazing out of a window at the iron-ore freighters
inching their way up the Cuyahoga River from Lake Erie toward one of
a number of steel mills in which he has at one time or another had a
proprietary interest (“There's the strength of America,” he tells visitors),
he can glance at one of six paintings that grace his oak-paneled walls.
(The paneling was imported from Sherwood Forest by the notorious Van
Sweringen brothers, who jointly occupied the chamber when they were
presiding over their railroad empire.) All the paintings are gifts from
Communist dignitaries. Over Eaton's fireplace hangs a landscape that
was presented to him by Nikita Khrushchev. There are canvases from
Czechoslovakia, Hungary (a reader of the Cleveland Plain Dealer
complained because the paper chanced to run a photograph of Eaton
receiving this one on George Washington's birthday), Rumania, Poland,
and Bulgaria. The Bulgarian work shows two young boys transporting a
water barrel in a wagon. Spotting it while lunching in Sofia with the
head of the local Communist Party, Eaton said that it reminded him of
his boyhood in Canada. He was at once offered it as a keepsake. “I still
have wall space for China and Cuba,” he likes to say.
4
From the Terminal Tower it is a short walk to the Union Club,
Cleveland's upper-crust and conservative social oasis. (One president of
the club was reportedly dropped from its rolls in the early nine teenhundreds
when it became known that he had voted for a Democrat.)
Eaton has been a member since 1913, and over the last twenty years he
has invited so many Communist leaders to the club that some of its flock
have groused that it might better be called the Soviet Union Club. One
of his more memorable gatherings there was a lunch he gave in January,
1959, for Anastas I. Mikoyan, First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union,
who was visiting the United States to feel out public reaction in
anticipation of the tour contemplated later that year by Premier
Khrushchev. Most of Eaton's other guests were Midwestern
industrialists, in steel or railroads or utilities or the like. Outside the club,
a few anti-Communist pickets were arrayed, armed with rocks, eggs, and
spittle, but inside Mikoyan got a standing ovation when Eaton
introduced him. The Russian said, “The problem of peace now is more
important than ever before in the history of mankind. And that is why
we highly value the contributions being made by Mr. Cyrus Eaton in
trying to bring together on a platform of peace and cooperation the
scientists and also the businessmen of our countries.” Eaton, Mikoyan
went on, “has become more popular in our country than any capitalist
has ever been before.” He said that the speeches Eaton made following
visits to Russia were regularly “published in full in our papers, and
they said, ‘This is not a normal capitalist.'” Mikoyan also told the
assemblage that while in America he hoped to purchase, on behalf of his
country, huge amounts of steel to be used in constructing pipelines for
natural gas and oil. “I remember well the Deputy Premier's saying that
he wanted to place the biggest order for steel in the history of the
world,” Eaton recalled recently. “He said that none of it would be used
for military purposes, and that he wasn't going to ask for credit, either.
5
'There will be cash in a New York bank before a single shipment leaves,'
Mikoyan promised. The businessmen were naturally enchanted with the
prospect, and after lunch they clustered around the Deputy Premier to
discuss quantities and specifications. Mikoyan himself, when he and I
adjourned to my home afterward, said it had been the happiest day of his
life. Then he went to Washington to obtain the necessary export permits,
and he was brushed off by Lewis Strauss at Commerce and by Douglas
Dillon at State. So Mikoyan shrugged and went to Europe and placed
his orders with French and Dutch and British and Belgian and German
firms, and the orders were so big they kept the mills there running full
tilt for three years. Strauss had not yet been confirmed as Secretary of
Commerce by the Senate, and I was pleased to be able to help block him
when he did come up. He told Mikoyan, 'We won't do business with
you, because you don't believe in God,' and gave him a copy of George
Washington's farewell address to his officers—the one in which, you
will recall, Washington said, 'Reason and experience both forbid us to
expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious
principle.’ Hardly tactful, to say the least. Mikoyan gave Strauss some
vodka and caviar, unaccompanied by any land of homily.”
ALTHOUGH Eaton has twice been dropped from the Social
Register for various alleged sins of commission or omission, there has
never been any formal attempt to revoke his membership in the Union
Club, a fate from which he may have helped save himself by also
entertaining there such acceptable types as the Duke of Windsor, who
was more of a novelty in Cleveland that he would have been in, say.
Palm Beach or Newport. “The Duke had a beautiful voice and charming
manners, and he got along famously with the business people I
invited to meet him,” Eaton says. “I had some fine letters from him
afterward, and once I showed some of them to his niece Princess
6
Margaret, and she said that she and her sister considered that their uncle
had had an unhappy time of it, and that they were very grateful to
anyone, like me, who had befriended him. I never knew the Duke's
great-grandmother personally, but I well recall Queen Victoria's
Diamond Jubilee, in the spring of 1897, at Halifax. In Her Majesty's
honor, there were some splendid reenactments of the Crimean War—I
particularly enjoyed the charge of the Light Brigade—and rowing races
among the crews of ships in port from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and
Holland, and a baseball game between a local team and some visiting
railroad men. I was only thirteen in 1897, unfortunately, and thus too
young to play. Not long after that, of course, came the Boer War, and
had I been a little bit older I'd have enlisted, like some of my relatives.
Lord Strathcona, then the Canadian High Commissioner in London,
organized and equipped his own cavalry, and when the Strathcona Horse
came through from the west en route to embarkation from Halifax, our
school went down to the railroad station to salute them, and I wore a
shoulder sash with the unit's colors on it. I have always felt that if the
United States had studied the lessons of the Boer War more closely it
might have avoided its mistakes in Vietnam.”
Cleveland has long had, and to a degree still has, mixed feelings
about Eaton. He set up shop there to show the big-money boys in bigcity
New York that there could be other seats of power. Wall Street
managed to cope with him fairly well, but along Cleveland's Euclid
Avenue during the Cold War he was viewed with consternation and,
more often than not, disapprobation. When, in 1962, the magazine
Pageant ranked him eighth in a list of the ten most controversial Americans,
the Plain Dealer deplored this as a grave miscarriage of justice,
arguing that Eaton, rather than Jimmy Hoffa, should have been placed
first. Because of Eaton's practically non-stop controversiality, so much
7
garbage kept being dumped on the lawns of his suburban estate, Acadia
Farms—an eight-hundred-acre retreat in Northfield, twenty miles
southeast of Cleveland— that sanitation trucks had to make extra runs to
haul the stuff away, and his grandchildren were taunted by their
schoolmates as “Reds” and “Commies.”
Eaton's second wife, Anne, whom he married in 1957, when he
was seventy-three and she thirty-five, was— like his first wife, three of
his daughters, a daughter-in-law, and his principal office assistant—an
alumna of Hathaway Brown, the Cleveland school for young ladies of
fashion. The more outspokenly Eaton carried on about Communists and
the desirability— nay, necessity—of getting along with them, the less
other H.B. alumnae would speak to his wife. Mrs. Eaton was unfazed at
no longer being asked to certain teas; anyway, she was usually too busy
being a political hostess to accept invitations of a purely social nature. “I
suppose I've had more Communists to dinner than any other woman in
the Western Hemisphere,” she said not long ago, and, indeed, she once
did feed the entire Bolshoi Ballet. By 1970, though, she was sufficiently
back in the good graces of Hathaway Brown to be asked to give the
commencement address. Her husband thereupon favored that academy
with an Eaton Seminar Room, where healthy debate has presumably
since flourished.
The Plain Dealer used to run anti-Eaton editorials about as
regularly as it denounced organized crime and inveighed against
drought. The editorials could be quickly skimmed, because their titles
conveyed their gist: “Apostle of Appeasement,” or “Now See Here, Mr.
Eaton.” Musing editorially in 1960 upon whether or not it should applaud
Eaton's receiving the Lenin Peace Prize—the only other American
recipients of which were Paul Robeson, Howard Fast, William E. B. Du
8
Bois, and Andrew W. Moulton, the left-wing Protestant Episcopal
bishop of Utah— the Plain Dealer concluded, “We hope he will
understand why we find it necessary to wait and see,” and one Eaton-
Khrushchev tete-a-tete inspired the tart observation “Eaton's fellow-
Clevelanders can only wonder, with shame, why their fellow-townsman
should be so intimate with his country's most dangerous enemy.” Over
the years, furthermore, the paper has carried dozens of letters suggesting
that if Eaton likes Russia so much, why doesn't he move there? Eaton
says that he once had a business associate interview the writers of a
dozen such letters, and that the investigation revealed that “without
exception” the missives had been composed not by their alleged senders
but by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (The F.B.I, has not
acknowledged authorship.) Lately, though, Cleveland has begun to
mellow toward the person who could be called its enfant terrible were
he not so terribly old. However the Plain Dealer may have viewed him
in the past, the Cleveland Press Club named him its Man of the Year in
1967, asserting as it did so (alas! poor Bob Feller) that “history may
judge Cyrus Eaton the most noted figure of all time in Cleveland.” When
the man who had by then been judged far and wide to be the father of
detente celebrated his ninetieth birthday, on December 27, 1973, the
mayor threw a reception for him at City Hall. The Rumanian Ambassador
to the United States flew in from Washington, and a cablegram
was read from Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin, and Nikolai V.
Podgorny, stating, without qualification, “Everyone in the Soviet Union
loves you.” Cleveland's mayor, for his part, presented Eaton with a key
to the city, which the proud recipient has exhibited ever since in his
library, along with similar municipal gate-openers from San Francisco,
Moscow, and Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. The Russian key is the fanciest:
it has a built-in clock.
9
In still another editorial, the Plain Dealer said, “It would be very
pleasant to live in the world of Cyrus Eaton, with caviar in every pot and
two troikas in every garage, but we fear this world exists only in Cyrus
Eaton's imagination.” Not exactly. Eaton has long been able to afford all
the caviar he desires, though it does not fit in with the bland diet he has
adopted, and since 1959 he has had in his garage—his stable, more
precisely—at Acadia Farms the only authentic Russian troika in the
United States. His troika—three stallions, a carriage, and a sleigh— was
also a gift from Premier Khrushchev, who shipped it to Ohio,
accompanied by a trainer and a veterinarian, in 1958. The troika was
formally conveyed to Eaton by First Deputy Premier Mikoyan during his
1959 winter visit Eaton and his wife climbed into their new two-seater
sleigh, with the Russian trainer at the reins Mikoyan hopped onto a
narrow running board, clung gamely to one side of the vehicle as the big
horses—stalwart Orloffsky-Rissaky stallions—careered along at their
customary twenty-mile-an-hour speed, and managed not to fall off. “Mr.
Mikoyan is the bravest man I ever heard of,” Mrs. Eaton said
afterward. In the ensuing years, as the original three horses have aged
and died, successive Soviet governments have sent over replacements.
Lately, Eaton has been breeding his Russian stallions, noted for
endurance as well as speed, to American quarter-horse mares, and he
hopes to end up with a fine new breed of his own invention. The troika
has also been put through its paces at agricultural shows and stock
shows and other gatherings around the country. At Acadia Farms, the
Eaton troika has jounced and jostled such eminent guests as the Nobel
laureates Lord John Boyd Orr and Sir Norman Angell and the
photographer Karsh, who stopped by one day in 1963 to snap some
visiting luminaries and presently was snapped himself in spirited transit.
Physically, Eaton is the epitome of a capitalist—almost a caricature of
one. He is tall, robust, silver-haired, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, and
10
always impeccably dressed. His day-in-and-day-out costume, even
when down on the farm, consists of a well-cut (Wetzel) doublebreasted
dark-blue serge suit, with a white shirt, a gray silk four-in-hand,
and highly polished black shoes. On weekends, until he gave it up, at
ninety-two, he was fond of riding, and he was partial to the full regalia
worn when riding to hounds. (He quit skiing at eighty-seven and ice
hockey at seventy.) However he may be dressed, this prince of paradox
does not see himself as a freak, or even as an anomaly. Bertrand Russell
once said that Eaton was living proof that business and philosophy could
mix, and this characterization struck its beneficiary as quite apposite.
Asked once in a courtroom—there has been much litigation in his
career— what he did for a living, Eaton replied, “Generally speaking,
rubber, steel, electricity, and finance.” On other occasions, he has
described himself as a simple farmer. Such modesty is unusual for him.
When he is travelling, he sometimes has an assistant phone the local
papers to reveal that he is in town and available for interviews, “No
comment” is a phrase he hardly ever uses. Eaton's remarks to the press
since he has become somebody quotable have been voluminous, and that
doesn't include the thousand or so letters to the editor that he has dashed
off, on topics ranging from the condition of Washington, D.C., in 1942
(“a megalosaurian city, its body all out of proportion to its brain”) to the
fiscal plight of New York City in 1975 (“I have been personally
involved in every American panic since 1893”). More often than not, his
letters have revealed him as the foremost living champion of coexistence,
a role his wife likes to complement; her favorite winter costume is
an American mink coat topped by a sable hat from Russia. Whenever
Eaton is accused, as he has been in so many letters to editors, of being
partial to Communism, he retorts, in no uncertain terms, that he is not
and never has been anything but an outright capitalist. “With my record,
I find the notion that I might be a Communist rather astonishing,” he
11
declared in 1961. The only American Communist he is aware of ever
having met is Gus Hall, the general secretary of the indigenous Party, to
whom he was introduced at an official Czechoslovakian reception in
New York some years back. But then Eaton docs not believe he could
have met many others. “There are no Communists in America to speak
of except in the minds of those on the payroll of the F.B.I.,” he said in
the spring of 1958. It delights him to be able to bring persons he
unquestioningly identifies as Communists into his familiar capitalistic
orbit. The parent company of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway owns the
elegant Greenbrier Hotel, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia-
“The Greenbrier makes a favorable impression on Communists, because
it's probably the most capitalistic spot in America” Eaton says. He and
his wife once took Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov and his wife
to the hotel for a posh weekend. At dinner, hearty coexistential toasts
were exchanged, first to capitalism and then to Communism, Mrs. Eaton
thereupon impishly proposed a further toast—to all the people on earth
who believed in neither. After a moment's hesitation, everybody present
joined in that one, too.
WHEN Eaton was sixteen and attending Amherst Academy, in
Nova Scotia, he was awarded for scholastic achievement sets of the
complete works of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. Darwin,
Huxley, and other rationalists have been his heroes ever since, and he
tends to identify his own triumphs and travails with theirs. Eaton, though
never ordained, was briefly, in his youth, the pastor of a Baptist church;
like other lapsed preachers, he has been attracted to philosophers— Karl
Marx among them—who had little use for organized religion. Along
with Wall Street financiers, the popularizers of myths and superstitions
have long been his foes. A contemporary whom he greatly admired was
the late A. Eustace Haydon, himself a lapsed Baptist and for many years
12
a professor of comparative religion at Chicago, whose 1941 book,
“Biography of the Gods,” was dedicated to Eaton. The dedicatee likes to
avow his concurrence with the author's conclusion:
More important than faith in God is devotion to the human ideals
of which he has become the symbol. Too long the strong; gods have
been made to bear the burden- Wistfully man has watched for the day of
divine action to dawn and ever healed the hurt of disappointment with
more passionate faith. Hopes hung in the heavens are of no avail. What
the gods have been expected to do, and have failed to do through the
ages, man must find the courage and intelligence to do for himself. More
needful than faith in God is faith that man can give love, justice, peace,
and all his beloved moral values embodiment in human relations. Denial
of this faith is the only real atheism. Without it, belief in all the galaxies
of gods is mere futility. With it, and the practice that flows from it, man
need not mourn the passing of the gods.
In sharp contrast to many of his associates in the financial world,
Eaton has habitually elected to spend his leisure time far removed from
his business cronies. “On my vacations, for my companions I used to
invite the presidents of universities and other scholars to visit me in
Nova Scotia,” he says. (He has a three-thousand-acre summer estate
there, near Halifax.) “I found pleasure in talking to thinkers, for a
change. I would sometimes take them on salmon-fishing expeditions,
maybe half a dozen college presidents at a clip, casting in the daytime
and in the evening discussing the best way of getting people interested
in great books. Most of them were pretty good fishermen; it's not too
strenuous a sport. Many of my industrialist friends believed I was doing
a wise thing in seeking to find recreation in contemplating intellectual
matters. But I also encouraged reading of great books—in some
instances successfully, I like to think—by people in the business world.
13
I kept urging my friends there not to accept as the truth something that
was merely popular but, rather, to question the finality and truth of all
our dogmas, whether in religion or politics or economics.”
In the nineteen-fifties, Eaton began to formalize his penchant by
inviting— in collaboration with the Association of American Colleges--
academics to a series of what were called Intellectual Life conferences,
during which they would alternately play tennis or golf and explore
Plato's “Crito” or “Gullivers Travels.” At the end of 1954, on the
occasion of his seventy-first birthday, Eaton announced that he was
turning his family's hundred-and-fifty-year-old home in Pugwash into a
permanent site for meetings of thinkers. The following year, Bertrand
Russell and Albert Einstein, increasingly perturbed about the
proliferation of nuclear weapons, resolved to call a conference of
scientists who, acting as individuals rather than representing nations or
governments, could attempt to save the world from nuclear holocaust.
One idea at the start was to hold a meeting at Monte Carlo, with
Aristotle Onassis footing the bill. When that didn't work out, Eaton
stepped in as patron and, because he sensed that the State Department
was not of a mind to admit some Soviet and Chinese scholars who were
on the guest list, proposed holding it on the more tolerant soil of
Canada, and specifically in Pugwash.
The Pugwash conferences with which Eaton's name has been
linked worldwide are the science conferences, and the first of these took
place in July 1957. Einstein was dead by then; one of his last
memorable statements had been “We must never relax our efforts to
arouse m the peoples of the world, and especially in their governments,
an awareness of the unprecedented disaster which they are absolutely
certain to bring on themselves unless there is a fundamental change in
their attitudes toward one another as well as in their concept of the
14
future. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except
our way of thinking.” Lord Russell was ailing and couldn't make the
meeting but he sent a recorded message with the British physicist C. F.
Powell, one of three Nobel laureates (the others were Hideki Yukawa,
of Japan, and H. J. Muller, of the United States) who did attend. In all,
there were twenty-two distinguished scientists, from ten nations--
among them, significantly, A. V. Topchiev, the general secretary of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences, and Chou Pei-Yuan, vice-rector of Peking
University. Greeting his guests, Eaton declared, “A man's first moral
obligation is to earn his living and his second is to be intelligent.” After
three days of non-income-producing but highly intellectual colloquy,
interspersed with croquet and other undemanding diversions, the
participants agreed, with one or two reservations, that man's misuse of
nuclear energy could well result in his annihilation; furthermore, they
resolved to hold more get-togethers to foster more joint thinking.
Over the ensuing years, in England and Ethiopia, in Italy and
Quebec, in Sweden and Yugoslavia, there have been a couple of dozen
assemblies of Pugwash scientists. In his autobiography, Lord Russell,
who served for a while as chairman of the Continuing Committee of the
Pugwash Movement, wrote, “Perhaps the unique characteristic of the
1957 and subsequent Pugwash Conferences was the fact that the
members consorted with each other in their spare time as well as during
the scheduled meetings, and grew to know each other as human beings
rather than merely as scientists of this or that potentially inimical belief
or nation. This most important characteristic was in large part made
possible by the astute understanding by Cyrus Eaton of the situation and
what we wished to accomplish and by his tactful hospitality.” Without
the prior deliberations of the Pugwash scientists, the nuclear-test-ban
treaty of 1963— unsatisfactory as many deemed it to be, because it
15
permitted underground explosions to be continued—might not have
come into being. The Pugwashites’ lengthy palavers have also produced
the phrase “hogwash from Pugwash.” However history may ultimately
assess these gatherings, the fact that they occurred at all was in large
measure attributable—as Gerard Piel, the publisher of Scientific
American, put it in 1972—to the circumstance that Eaton “recognized
years ago that the fate and hope of mankind hangs upon the international
community of science, the international community of rational human
understanding.” (Piel's statement was made at the kind of part)' that
Eaton likes to give: He invited a hunch of scientists to Pugwash to watch
a solar eclipse, and proclaimed the occasion a tribute to Simon
Newcomb, the Nova Scotian astronomer who is the only Canadian in the
Hall of Fame.) Eaton is no less fond of an encomium uttered at the 1957
conclave by Professor A. M. B. Lacassagne, of L'Institut du Radium, in
Paris, who, Eaton recalls, “eloquently predicted that Pugwash, though
only a village, would live in history with Austerlitz and Waterloo, two
other villages that marked a drastic change in the course of human
events.”
Cleveland's steel mills and other industries have attracted to the city
many ethnic groups of Eastern European origin. Many of the
Czechoslovakians, Poles, Lithuanians, and others who have settled in
Cleveland have been vociferously opposed to peaceful coexistence with
the Communist rulers of their forebears' soil. What has especially
provoked groups like the United Hungarian Societies of Cleveland and
the Coordinating Committee of Nations Under the Communist Yoke is
that while Eaton has seemed ever ready and willing to say derogatory
things about the United States (i.e., in 1958, “Hitler, in his prime,
through the Gestapo, never had any such extensive spy organizations as
we have in this country today”), he has rarely had anything comparable
16
to say about the Soviet Union. The most critical comment he had on the
Russian takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was “I haven't found any
nation where reason is paramount.”
Eaton's interest in the Soviet Union—to which he has made eight redcarpet
journeys since 1958—was indirectly whetted by John D.
Rockefeller, Sr. The first Russian whom Eaton ever met was Baron
Oxgall, a Moscow Baptist, who came to Cleveland at the turn of the
century to solicit support from Rockefeller for the Moscow branch of the
Y.M.C.A. More important, Rockefeller's choice for the first president of
the University of Chicago was his old friend and golfing companion
William Rainey Harper, a celebrated prodigy of his time—college
graduate at fourteen, Ph.D. at eighteen, teen-age professor of Hebrew.
Though not fluent in Russian, Harper was much taken with Russia; his
son Samuel—who used to play golf with Eaton on the Rockefeller
course when the two older men had finished their daily round--
eventually became head of the Russian-language department at his
father's university, and between 1904 and his death, at thirty-nine, in
1941, spent half of every year in Russia. Just before Samuel Harper died,
he defended the Nazi-Soviet pact so strenuously that he suffered a
nervous breakdown. A book of his that was posthumously published in
1945, “The Russia I Believe In,” was not widely acclaimed, but Eaton
believed in it so strongly that in 1969— long after the original edition
had been remaindered—he had it reissued, at his expense. “Sam's
enthusiasm for Russian culture and Russian children had a great impact
on my life,” Eaton says.
Eaton had brushed against some Russians during the First World War,
when he helped a purchasing mission from Moscow buy artillery shells
and field tents from Cleveland manufacturers, but it was not until 1955
17
that he had solid contact with any. That year, the State Department was
showing a group of Soviet journalists (among them Alexei Adzhubei,
Khrushchev's son-in-law and the editor of Izvestia) around the United
States. Cleveland was on the itinerary, and the principal scheduled event
for the visitors' delectation there was a professional-football game. The
Russians said they didn't much care about the Browns, and wouldn't it be
possible for them to spend a few hours instead with a typical American
businessman'1 Their escort from State phoned Eaton, who had not long
before entertained some Russian farmers, and conveyed the request.
Eaton retorted—and no one who knew him would have disagreed—that
if there was anything he was not, it was a typical American
businessman. The escort hung up, but he called back soon afterward to
repeat his plea; it seemed that there wasn't any other businessman of any
sort in Cleveland who wanted anything to do with the Russians. Eaton
said that in that case he'd be delighted to play host, and he drove into the
city to fetch the foreigners. To his consternation, he found them being
hectored by a crowd that had gathered—at, he was and still is convinced,
the instigation of the F.B.I.—outside their hotel.
Eaton got on splendidly with his guests the rest of that day, and then
came interchanges with other Russians at Pugwash meetings. His new
friends kept urging him to visit their country. So in the late summer of
1958, on the eve of a Pugwash scientists' meeting in Austria, he decided
to go to Moscow. Some people are under the impression that Eaton has
spent much of his adult life commuting to Moscow, and are surprised to
learn that at the time of his initial visit to the Soviet Union he was nearly
seventy-five. (He had never yet set foot in any other Communist
territory, either.) He travelled to Moscow by way of New York and
Copenhagen, where, with a characteristic bow to both the idealistic and
the pragmatic side of his personality, he had arranged to spend a few
18
hours with two influential natives: the nuclear physicist Niels Bohr and
the shipping magnate A. P. M0llcr. On the flight from New York to
Copenhagen, Eaton and his wife found Andrei Gromyko sitting just
behind them. The capitalist and the Soviet Foreign Minister got to
chatting, and Gromyko, who also knew about Pugwash, asked the
American to point out the spot as they flew over it. By the time the
Eatons reached Moscow, the Foreign Minister had sent word ahead for
them to be elaborately received, and he had also asked Eaton if he would
like to have a private audience with Premier Khrushchev, who was
vacationing at the Black Sea. Eaton said he'd be happy to fly down there.
No, said Gromvko, the Premier would be pleased to meet Eaton more
than halfway—in fact, would come back to Moscow and see him at the
Kremlin. A couple of days later, Eaton and Khrushchev spent ninety
minutes together in the Troitskaia Tower. “We had an absolutely
hilarious time,” Eaton says. “I was feeling relaxed and full of fun and
jokes. While we were talking, a bottle of mineral water exploded, its
cork hitting the ceiling. Khrushchev said 'What was that?' and I said
'That was John Foster Dulles firing at us from under the table,' and
Khrushchev roared with laughter. He was also amused by my remarking
that our State Department reminded me of the little man in the Artemus
Ward story who said that he had outmaneuvered a big guy he was
fighting until he got his eye right on the other guy's fist.” Khrushchev,
for his part, asked Eaton to let President Eisenhower know that he
thought his passion for golf was very sensible “From that first meeting
on, Khrushchev was always completely frank with me,” Eaton says,
“and his successors have treated me in the same way.” Pravda carried a
photograph of Khrushchev and Eaton on its first page the next day, and
the Moscow radio hailed the American's professed interest in “the
establishment and development of friendship between the peoples” and
“the preservation and strengthening of peace throughout the world.”
19
Pravda also ran an article by Eaton, in which he wrote that he hoped
Khrushchev would soon visit the United States. “The people of the
U.S.A. would respond to his directness, his sense of humor, and his
sincere desire for world peace,” Eaton said.
On Eaton's return from his quasi-summit conference with Khrushchev,
he was invited to make a number of speeches. Before the City Club in
Cleveland, he took occasion to refer to “inflammatory editorials,
reeking of bravado with their dire threats of slaughter to the Soviets.”
He also told that audience that in his view Secretary of State Dulles was
“an insane fanatic.” At the National Press Club, in Washington, he went
a step further, proposing that Dulles be supplanted in the Cabinet by
John L. Lewis. He treated the Economic Club of Detroit to an address
(“Is the World Big Enough for Both Capitalism and Communism?”) in
which he said, “I would not know where to look for the American who
would want to trade our system for the Russian way,” and “When I
commented on Mr. Khrushchev's ability to speak decisively for his
country, he replied, 'Any policy I announce must first be discussed with
the Cabinet and backed by it. We make no decision unless we are sure it
will have the support of the people.'“ Eaton and Khrushchev kept in
touch thereafter, on terms that were about as intimate as possible
between the head of a great state and a private citizen of another state,
far removed. On Eaton's seventy-sixth birthday, the Russian sent him a
cablegram blending felicitations with a plea for total disarmament--
“the most urgent task of our time.” On Eaton's eightieth birthday, Khrushchev
referred to him affectionately as, a “coexisting capitalist.” The
two men (periodically exchanged gifts. A Scotch 'Shorthorn bull that
Eaton shipped to Khrushchev afforded the Premier an opportunity to
demonstrate that Russians were every bit as capable as Americans of
inventing one special kind of witticism, “After the animal arrived in
20
Russia, I suddenly remembered that its name was Napoleon, and I
apologized to Mr. Khrushchev for this apparent tactlessness,” Eaton
says, “He replied, “If he's a good bull and produces good offspring, I
wouldn't care if his name were John Foster Dulles.'
Khrushchev did visit the United States, in the fall of 1959, and Eaton
saw him at various receptions. During one of these, at the Soviet
Embassy in Washington, with Vice-President Nixon also in attendance,
the coexisting capitalist proposed a toast to eternal friendship between
nations, from which the Russian held aloof until somebody fetched him
some vodka to fortify the soda water that had been set before him. The
following spring, on May 16th, the Soviet Premier and President
Eisenhower met in Paris for l summit conference. It was a time of
drama. On May 1st, Francis Gary Powers had been shot down in his U-2
spy plane over Russian soil. Two days later, the U.S.S.R. had revealed
that Eaton would be getting the Lenin Peace Prize. The honoree, as it
happened, was about to take off on a trip to Eastern Europe, and
Khrushchev, in Paris, asked him to stop over en route and say hello.
Eaton said that he'd be glad to. When the summit conference broke up
over the U-2 incident, Khrushchev sent a radio message to the plane
Eaton was on, saying he wondered whether, in view of what had just
occurred (the Chairman had, among other things, told the President of
the United States to go dip his head in milk), Eaton still wanted to be
seen with him. Eaton could think of no reason not to be. His plane
landed at Orly Airport a few minutes before Khrushchev, his arms full
of red roses from some French admirers, was to take off for Berlin.
With a considerable segment of the world's press looking on,
Khrushchev gave the flowers to Mrs. Eaton. Khrushchev, sensing that
Eaton would be criticized for fraternizing with him at this juncture in
history, told the American jocularly, “When Communism has triumphed
in the whole world, I shall put in a good word for you.” (Eaton, for his
21
part, told the Soviet leader the story about George Washington and the
cherry tree, as a prelude to the suggestion that the United States had
dissembled to Russia about the U-2 plane.) Khrushchev had guessed
right: one letter in the Plain Dealer called Eaton's airport rendezvous
“brazenly unpatriotic”
Eaton moved on to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and East
Germany, reemerging from behind the Iron Curtain in London. There,
before a lunch at Claridge's with his old non-Communist friend Lord
Beaverbrook, he told reporters, who were always glad to quote his
provocative pronouncements, that the United States was more of a police
state than any of the nations he'd just inspected. Then, on his return to
Cleveland, he favored the Plain Dealer with the remark “We are the
warlike nation of the world, and every nation outside the United States
recognizes that.” It was all too much for some Eaton-watchers to take. A
convention of Ohio veterans passed a resolution condemning him, and
Senator Thomas J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, proposed that he be
prosecuted under the so-called Logan Act—a 1799 statute, never before
invoked, under the terms of which persons can be fined five thousand
dollars and imprisoned for three years for attempting “to influence the
measures or conduct of any foreign government or any officer or agent
thereof” unless authorized to do so by the American government.
(Following a break in diplomatic relations between France and the
United States, Dr. George Logan, a Quaker, had gone to Paris on his
own to talk to Talleyrand.) Senator Dodd said that Eaton was a
“materialistic, meddlesome, evil old man.” That was too much even for
the Plain Dealer, which rallied to Eaton's support, after a fashion: it slated
editorially that while he was un-arguably materialistic and
meddlesome, he wasn't evil but, rather, both foolish and brave.
22
THE twenty-seventh meeting of the Pugwash scientists was held in
Munich this past August. Eaton did not attend it. In fact, he has had very
little to do with any of these gatherings since 1960, although he
continued to organize nonscientific conferences under the Pugwash
banner (One, at McGill University in 1969, to which he invited a halfdozen
Sinologists, almost certainly expedited Canada's resumption of
diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China) But since 1960
he has not been officially connected with what became known as the
Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. That year, he
became too controversial for the movement he had helped to spawn. On
July 1, I960, he was formally invested with the Lenin Peace Prize.
Twenty-five hundred people turned out at Eaton Park, in Pugwash, for
the ceremony. In his acceptance speech, Eaton said the occasion was “a
proud and happy moment in my life.” He went on, “For the U.S.S.R.,
leader of the Socialist nations, to pay such respect to an acknowledged
apostle of capitalism from the U.S.A., leader of the capitalist countries,
offers a hopeful omen for brighter days ahead. I have said before, and I
repeat, that I sincerely believe Premier Khrushchev's United Nations
address of September 1959, with its clearly outlined disarmament
program, will go down as one of the historic utterances of modern
years.... It is a matter for regret that the Soviet proposals for general
and complete disarmament have not met with the sympathetic response
to which they are entitled.” Such remarks by Eaton were beginning to
dismay some of the Pugwash scientists, who were getting ready for
another symposium in late November, this one to take place in Moscow,
and who feared that his close identification with their cause, combined
with his outspokenness, might impair whatever effectiveness they could
have. Chief among the disenchanted was Professor Eugene Rabinowitch,
of the University of Illinois, who was a co-founder and the editor of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the highly respected journal whose
23
board of sponsors, over the years, had included many of the scientists
Eaton most revered—Einstein, Leo Szilard, J. Robert Oppenheimer, I. I.
Rabi, and their like In the Bulletin of October, Eaton was dismayed to
see— appended to a reprint of a September newspaper headline about
the forthcoming Pugwash scientists' gathering which read, “EATON TO
SPONSOR MOSCOW SESSION”—a demurrer, signed by Rabinowitch
and two other scholars, to the effect that while they were grateful to
Eaton for prodigious past beneficences, “as Mr. Eaton has come to play
an increasingly active and controversial role in political affairs, the
scientists felt that his exclusive support of their conferences may place
them in the wrong light.” Further collaboration with him would be
impossible, they went on, because of his “reluctance to keep his support
of the scientists' conferences clearly separated from his increasing
involvement.” Accordingly, the statement said, though he would be
welcome at the Moscow gathering as a guest, it would be solely as that,
and neither as a participant nor as a sponsor. The patron of Pugwash had
been summarily depatronized.
That Bulletin appeared concurrently with the annual meeting of the
United Nations General Assembly, in New York. Chairman
Khrushchev had put himself on the agenda again. The Soviet Premier
had been in low American repute ever since the collapse of the Paris
talks, and when he arrived, by ship, the United States government
contrived for it to dock at an obscure pier, with marginal facilities to
shelter welcoming dignitaries from the rain. Khrushchev was
greeted—in, as it happened, rain—by a handful of acolytes who had
also come for the Assembly meeting; Wladyslaw Gomulka, of Poland;
Antonin Novotny, of Czechoslovakia; Janos Kadar, of Hungary. Just
about the only Americans on hand, aside from a few offshore who
were shouting obscenities from small boats, were the Eatons. The
24
State Department had refused to let the Soviet Premier travel to Ohio
to visit the Eatons’ farm, and, indeed, had restricted his movements so
stringently that he couldn't even go from Manhattan to the Bronx,
where the New York Yankees were about to play in the World Series.
Eaton took bridling notice of this during a lunch he gave for
Khrushchev at the Hotel Biltmore, where the Ohioan often occupied a
suite, his myriad directorships having once included a seat on the
board of the Biltmore-Bowman Hotels Corporation. (There was
another lunch for Kadar, and dinners for Gomulka and Novotny.) At
the Khrushchev lunch, Eaton pressed the Chairman “to urge the
athletes of the Soviet Union to take up baseball, so that someday there
could be a true World Series.” Khrushchev, referring to Eaton as “my
good old friend,” said in a toast to his host, “Just as I have no intention
of converting Mr. Eaton to the Communist faith, so, I hope, Mr. Eaton
would not waste his time trying to turn me into a supporter of the
capitalistic point of view.” Outside the hotel, pickets marched back and
forth carrying placards inscribed “Cyrus Eaton Is a Traitor.” Eaton
was, as usual, unfazed. “These hostile demonstrations were organized
and paid for by our own government,” he said later. “It's humiliating
that this great country has to stoop to that kind of conduct That lunch
also resulted in one of his deposals from the Social Register, though he
was not thrown off anybody s fund-raising list, and there were no
discernible objections when, soon afterward, he contributed the prizes
for a Junior League fashion show back in Cleveland.
Late that October, Eaton travelled to Ottawa to give a speech on
the occasion of the granting of the Bowater Awards—high honors in
Canadian journalism. He had often been courted by reporters seeking
insight into Soviet acts and aspirations, and he courted reporters, too-,
when Gay Talese passed through Cleveland a few years afterward on a
25
promotional tour for “The Power and the Glory,” his book about the
New York Times, Eaton tendered him the kind of lunch he would
normally put on for a Deputy Minister of Trade from Bulgaria. It always
made Eaton feel good to read headlines like “FINANCIER PUTS U.S.
ON PAN FOR KEEPING COLD WAR HOT” (Chicago Daily News)
and “EATON PRAISES RED CHINA; URGES IT GET SEAT IN
U.N.” (Cleveland Press), and he was no less pleased by the journalistic
attention he attracted abroad. He did sometimes complain that most A
men- ' can journalists had a built-in anti-Soviet bias, and he buttressed
that argument by citing an experience he had in Moscow immediately
after his get-together with Chairman Khrushchev in the fall of 1958.
“Khrushchev suggested that he and I issue a joint statement about our
meeting, and I said, 'Fine, you prepare it,' Eaton says. “It was sent over
the next morning, and I approved it. Then the Moscow correspondents of
two American newspapers came around to interview me, and after a bit
they came back and said, 'we want you to know what kind of country
you're in. Here's what we filed and here's what the censors cut out.’ I
read the uncensored version with astonishment. I had been drastically
misquoted. It had been reported that I had attacked my hosts. I said to
them, 'If what you wrote had been published, it would have made the
Russians think I'm unreliable. Why in the world would I have said what
you wrote I said?' 'But you're an American capitalist, and we assumed
you'd denounce Communism,' they said. 'I'd never have the bad taste to
say anything like that about the head of a country while in his country.’
I said.” Now, in Ottawa, surrounded by the elite of the Canadian press,
Eaton seized the opportunity to further chide their colleagues across the
border. “Journalism in the United States, I fear, has fallen to a
comparatively low estate in its foreign coverage,” he said in his speech.
“Blind and unreasoning fear and hatred of Communism, on the part of
press, public, and politician alike, have led to inadequate reporting of
26
conditions and events in the Socialist countries, and to slanted editorial
comment as well.'“ As an example, he cited recent press coverage in
New York. On October 2nd, Eaton said, there had been two Polishoriented
events in that city—a Pulaski Day parade, in which the
participants were mainly anti-Communist Poles, and an address by
Premier Gomulka. “The Gomulka speech was completely ignored by the
American press, although the Polish- American parade and other
festivities were featured in articles and pictures,” he said. “An idea I am
inclined to favor is the formation of volunteer local committees to serve
as firm but friendly critics of the press.” Had a firm but friendly
committee been formed on the spot, it could have pointed out to Eaton
that Gomulka's speech was made not on Pulaski Day but the day
afterward, and that the Times had covered it, though perhaps not at the
length Eaton might have deemed appropriate.
Chairman Khrushchev was toppled on October 15, 1964.
“Although his successors were perhaps a bit rough with him, I was not
surprised,” Eaton said later. “He had once told me, 'your people call me
a dictator. Why, my Cabinet could turn me out of office tomorrow.' And
that's of course what happened. I kept in touch with him after his
retirement, though I was a little careful while in Russia not to make a
point of trying to visit him, because I wanted to keep my position with
the men in power. But he was not at all unhappy at the end. He had
merely made the mistake of trying to raise corn too far north in the
U.S.S.R., which was his undoing. After his death, his widow told me
that one of the great satisfactions of his life was that I remained
friendly with him even when he was only a private citizen.”
NOT long after Bertrand Russell's death, in 1970, at ninety-seven,
the then eighty-six-year-old Eaton told ' an acquaintance, “Russell was a
27
very capable man, but he had a capacity for arousing the criticism of a
lot of people.” The remark could have been autobiographical. Even
before he attained comradeship with Khrushchev, Eaton's capacity for
unpopular assertions had aroused criticism right and left, though mostly
right. The September, 1958, issue of the conservative American
Mercury, for instance, carried a near-apoplectic reaction to a Tass
release of the previous June to the effect that Khrushchev had thanked
Eaton for his “efforts to end the menace of a nuclear war.” Eaton had
earlier poured fuel on the fire when he appeared on a Mike Wallace
television show on May 4, 1958, and delivered a no-holds-barred attack
on both the F.B.I, and the C.I.A., agencies then thought to be more or
less above reproach. “I always worry when I see a nation feel that it is
coming to greatness through the activities of its policemen,” Eaton said
then. “And the F.B.I, is just one of the scores of agencies in the United
States engaged in investigating, in snooping, in informing, in creeping
up on people. This has gone to an extent that is very alarming.... I am
just as sure as I am alive that one of these days there will be an
enormous reaction against this in the United States….We can't destroy
Communism. It's there to stay….And to imagine that they could convert
us to Communism is just silly….No one in the world would be more
unhappy under Communism than I, because I am dedicated to the other
principle….The Russians have never had freedom, and it would take
them some time to know what to do with it.” Despite this last remark,
the then much-feared House Un-American Activities Committee
considered Eaton's views to be within its province, demanded and got
equal time, and a staff operative announced that the committee was
going to subpoena Eaton. The New York Daily News, which had long
ascribed to Eaton a degree of villainy ordinarily achieved only by Dick
Tracy's worst enemies, thought that the idea of a subpoena was first-rate,
and expressed the editorial hope that the committee would ask him
28
which side he'd be on in the event of a war between the Soviet Union
and the United States. No subpoena was ever served, though ample
opportunities arose; one came up soon in Washington, when Eaton— in
town to dine at the Soviet Embassy—had a heated confrontation with the
chairman of the committee in the office of one of its other members.
Shortly after Eaton's lambasting of the F.B.I, on television, former Attorney
General Herbert E Brownell spoke before the Cleveland Bar
Association and called the hometown man's allegations—the hometown
papers naturally had their pencils poised—”wild and reckless.” The
Press observed that proof that the United States was not, as Eaton had
seemed to suggest, a police state lay in the fact that the suggester was
still at liberty. The Cleveland chapter of the anti-Communist Lithuanian
American Council mailed Eaton a copy of J. Edgar Hoover's “Masters of
Deceit,” presumably hoping he would read it and get straightened out.
Hoover himself would say for the record merely that Eaton was running
true to character. The Director of the F.B.I., though not normally
closemouthed himself, rarely took overt cognizance of Eaton's existence;
one of the few times he appeared to do so was when he told a
subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee that the Students
for a Democratic Society and other campus troublemakers were getting
money from “a Cleveland industrialist who has long been a Soviet
apologist.” If Hoover meant Eaton, his investigators had served him
poorly. Eaton had very little use for American student radicals. “I
haven't given any of them anything,” he told a friend. “When they come
around, I tell them, 'You've got to change your outlandish garb, cut your
hair and whiskers, and stop looking like baboons. Otherwise, people are
just going to make fun of you and think you're not very profound.' In
Nova Scotia once, a young lady brought her fiancé around to meet me so
I could advise him on his future, and I said the first thing he ought to do
was shave off his beard. He was awfully embarrassed, and I learned why
29
later, when the girl came by again and said she had made him grow it to
prove he was a radical. The whole thing was ridiculous.”
Eaton met Hoover only once—at the Laurel, Maryland, racetrack
one Saturday, when the Eaton troika was part of the between-races
entertainment. The two men chatted briefly— and, in both instances,
knowledge-ably—about horses. Eaton knew Herbert Hoover much
better than he did his namesake. When President Hoover was in the
White House, the Cleve-lander was several times an overnight guest,
and he would join the Chief Executive and some members of his
Cabinet in the pre-breakfast medicine-ball tossing that was, trout fishing
excepted, the athletic hallmark of that Administration. Eaton likes to
credit President Hoover with having taught him to read newspapers fast.
(Eaton has nearly a dozen of them delivered to him daily—from
Cleveland, Akron, Chicago, New York, Washington, London, and
Toronto.) After the medicine-ball sessions, Hoover and his guest would
ride upstairs in a White House elevator to shower and change. The
President would be handed half a dozen morning papers as he stepped
into the elevator, and, in Eaton's recollection, would deftly skim the
front pages of all of them before reaching his destination two flights up.
It surprises no one who has followed Eaton's iconoclastic career that he
rates Herbert Hoover, along with the senior Rockefeller and
Khrushchev, as one of the finest people he has ever known. “Hoover
was an extremely able and honorable man.” Eaton says, “and if he
hadn't been hit by a panic—through no particular fault of his own—he'd
be remembered as one of the greatest Presidents the United States ever
had.
LIKE most nonagenarians, Cyrus S. Eaton, who has probably
been more often accused of Communistic leanings than anyone else on
30
earth with such an unbreakable addiction to both the theory and the
practice of capitalism, remembers his boyhood best. Eaton, who will
turn ninety-four two days after Christmas, was the fifth of nine children
born in the coastal village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, to Joseph Howe
Eaton, a farmer, lumberman, and general-store proprietor of English
ancestry. The first Eaton crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth century.
A later Eaton, who may or may not have contributed to the feisty genes
that sifted down to Cyrus, was Daniel Isaac, a London printer, who was
twice hauled into court in 1793 for publishing works by Thomas Paine,
and who the following year was accused of libeling King George III by
comparing him—in a pamphlet entitled “Politics for the People, or
Hog's Wash”—to a gamecock. (Cyrus has often been in the courts
himself, but never for anything as gaudy as libel; his once comparing
Richard Nixon, when he was President, to Adolf Hitler and John Foster
Dulles, when Secretary of State, to any old madman, have gone
jurisprudentially unchallenged.) David Eaton, Cyrus’s great-great-greatgrandfather,
founded the Nova Scotia branch of the clan in 1761, after
moving there from Connecticut, but it was only in the early nineteenth
century that the Eatons settled in Pugwash—a Micmac Indian word
meaning “deep water.” By then, many British Loyalists had moved to
Canada from the American Colonies, among them the MacPhersons,
who were originally from the Scottish Highlands. Cyrus Eaton's mother
was born Mary Adelle MacPherson. (A cousin of Eaton's maternal
grandfather was Donald McKay, who left Nova Scotia for this country
at seventeen and became the builder of many of the swiftest clipper
ships ever launched, among them the celebrated Flying Cloud.) But no
one far removed from the village had ever paid much attention to it until
Eaton, in the nineteen-fifties, began inviting intellectuals there to share
their thoughts with him. Today, he is the town's most famous native son
A new grade school has just been named after him; the local
31
government has put up road signs that read “Pugwash—Home of the
Thinkers” and prominent among the souvenirs available to transients
are replicas of Rodin's sedentary brooding figure.
According to Eaton's recollections of his early childhood, his father
had him riding horses at four, milking cows at five, and working for the
railroad at six. “We were quite well-to-do, relatively speaking,” Eaton
says, “We had a hired man and a hired girl, as people permitted
themselves to be called in those days. When the railroad decided to put
tracks through our place, though, and somebody had to carry water
from a spring to where the men were working with their picks and
shovels, I wanted the job, and I got it. I was paid fifty cents for a tenhour
day. By the tune I was ten, I was pretty well experienced in
business and in world affairs—my father was also postmaster, and I used
to read all the newspapers that came in to subscribers—and by the time I
was twelve my father would send me out to measure the logs his
lumbermen were felling. That was important, because they got paid by
the foot.”
Eaton attended elementary school in Pugwash and high school at
Amherst Academy, thirty miles away. At the turn of the century, he
matriculated at McMaster University, then a small Baptist institution in
Toronto. (At Eaton's much later urging, a larger and less sectarian
McMaster became the repository of most of the papers of Bertrand
Russell.) Eaton chose McMaster mainly because his father's younger
brother, Charles Aubrey) Eaton, then a Baptist minister, was on its board
of governors. Originally, Cyrus planned to follow his uncle's vocation.
When Charles Eaton was assigned to the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church,
in Cleveland, in 1901, he invited his nephew down during his summer
vacation. Among the uncle's parishioners was John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
32
who had founded his empire in Cleveland and customarily spent five
months a year at Forest Hill, a seven-hundred-acre local enclave he had
built, with a private nine-hole golf course. Rockefeller was
superintendent of the Reverend Mr. Eaton's Sunday school. The two
also shared many non-devotional moments, for the minister lived next
door to Forest Hill, and was John D’s frequent guest and golfing
companion—often in a foursome that included not merely the cautious
older man's spiritual mentor but also his doctor and his dentist.
Charles Eaton moved far beyond the pulpit. He coupled journalism
with preaching, and after a ten-year stint in New York City as pastor of
the Madison Avenue Baptist Church he went into industrial relations for
General Electric* In 1924, at the age of fifty-six, he was elected to
Congress, on the Republican ticket, from New Jersey, He served in the
House for twenty-eight years, ultimately becoming chairman of the
Foreign Affairs Committee. In 1945, he was one of eight American
signers, in San Francisco, of the United Nations Charter. Around
Washington, where he was affectionately called Doc, he also became
known as “the conscience of the House,” Like his nephew after him.
Representative Eaton was an enthusiastic advocate of unity among the
divers peoples of the globe, hut he never shared his nephew's
acceptance of most words and deeds emanating from the Soviet Union.
In fact, he was once denounced as a nefarious capitalist before the U.N,
General Assembly by Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinskv, who
coupled him, not without historical justification, with the Rockefeller
family. The Congressman's sometimes bristling comments about Russia
never particularly affected his nephew. “I remained a devoted friend of
Uncle Charles right up to his death, in 1953, even though he wasn't
inclined to trust the Russians,” Cyrus Eaton says. “He was quite sincere
in his dislike of Communism in all its forms. He thought I was being too
33
good-natured and trusting, but our conflicting attitudes never interfered
with our devotion to each other.”
Cyrus Eaton's apprenticeship to the Baptist Church was brief.
Having even as a teen-ager developed a strong bent for rationalism, he
found the church's orthodoxy oppressive. He did get as far, though, as
being listed in the Cleveland city directory of 1906 as pastor of the Lake
wood Baptist Church. His decision not to be ordained was in part
influenced by some advice he had received from Mr. Rockefeller: “Be
sure to have some ownership or participate in the development of natural
resources.” Soon after Cyrus’s arrival in Cleveland, his uncle took him
to dinner at Forest Hill, and when Mrs. Rockefeller learned that the
Canadian lad was about to take a job as night clerk at the Euclid Hotel
she urged her husband to offer him something more suitable to his social
status. So Eaton went to work for Rockefeller. He ran errands, carried
golf bags, and acted as a bodyguard. “Because I was a sturdy youth who
had demonstrated physical courage in Mr. Rockefeller's presence a time
or two, I was delegated to sit near him in church, on the alert for intruders,”
Eaton has recalled. For his services as all-around factotum,
Rockefeller paid him two dollars a day.
Eaton continued to work for Rockefeller during subsequent vacations,
and his employer would now and then suggest that he quit
college and join him on a full-time basis, presumably with some increase
in remuneration One summer, the philanthropist sought to broaden the
young man's experience by lending him out to the East Ohio Gas
Company, on whose behalf Eaton traipsed around Cleveland trying to
placate property owners whose lawns were being ravaged by the laying
of gas mains. To this day, Eaton's respect for his early patron is
unabated. “There's never been any man in finance or industry who came
34
close to matching John D. Rockefeller in imagination or in application,”
he said recently. “And he was, fortunately, well represented in his
descendants. The Rockefellers are America's greatest family.” Through
Rockefeller, Eaton met a lawyer who was looking for somebody to
represent a syndicate formed to buy utilities franchises in western
Canada. Eaton knew the area and was hired, but by the time he arrived
on the scene the panic of 1907 was in full swing and the syndicate had
disintegrated. Eaton wangled a loan from a neighbor and bought the
franchises himself, later combining them into the Canada Gas & Electric
Corporation. While he was at it, he acquired additional utilities
franchises in Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. By 1912, he had set up the
first of innumerable holding companies with which he would at one time
or another be affiliated. This one was called Continental Gas & Electric,
and when someone offered to buy it two years later, he realized that at
the age of thirty, though hardly in a class with Rockefeller, he was an
authentic millionaire.
Before the First World War, Eaton bought a substantial interest in
Otis & Company, the Cleveland investment bankers and stockbrokers.
Through Otis, which in its heyday was one of the largest securities firms
outside New York (its partners had assets of more than two hundred
million dollars before the 1929 crash), he set up an investment trust
called Continental Shares, Inc., which speculated chiefly in utilities and
industrial stocks. By 1929, its assets were more than a hundred and fifty
million dollars, though when the company foundered into liquidation
four years later there remained only a tenth of that for distribution
among its aggrieved shareholders. En route from glory to gloom, Eaton
had had a memorable encounter with Samuel Insult, the utilities king of
Chicago, who later went bankrupt. Between 1926 and 1930, Continental
Shares gobbled up all the stock it could get in Insull's principal
35
companies—Commonwealth Edison, People’s Gas, Light & Coke, and
Public Service Company of Northern Illinois. The Eaton crowd owned
more of Insull than Insult did himself. Insull got the impression that
Eaton was trying to take him over, so he asked to buy back his own
stock. After lengthy negotiations, Eaton agreed, in the spring of 1930, to
sell it, with the proviso that he be paid not in shares of still other
corporations, which was how Insull liked to pay for things, but in cash.
Fearing that Eaton might dump the stock on the open market at a time
when the market was, to put it mildly, shaky, Insull agreed. He gave
Eaton forty-eight million dollars in cash, much of it borrowed from New
York banks, plus eight million dollars in securities. This added up to
four million dollars more than the market value of the shares in question,
nineteen million more than Continental had paid for them initially.
Eaton, whom one Insull biographer later called “a creative capitalist in
spite of his reputation as a financial buccaneer,” was gracious in victory.
In 1934, when Insull was put on trial for various financial peccadilloes,
Eaton went to federal court in Chicago and testified in his defense.
Throughout the roaring twenties, Eaton had been practically a one-man
sonic boom. He was into everything—buying, selling, swapping,
maneuvering, manipulating His touch was of the purest gold. An oil
company in which he invested ten million dollars dug a lot of dry holes,
but he was able to sell his stock in it for twenty-five million dollars
notwithstanding, because it had options on real estate that turned out to
be ideal sites for the service stations of rival companies. Just after the
First World War, Ohio had two telephone services— the Ohio Bell
system and small independent companies in all communities of any
consequence; in order to enjoy any land of useful service, people needed
two phones. Eaton thought this was nonsensical. He contrived to put all
the independents together under a single corporate umbrella—Ohio State
Telephone—and then he got that consolidated with Ohio Bell. Next, to
36
his own handsome profit, he persuaded the state's Public Utilities
Commission to grant the merged company a substantial increase in rates,
on the ground that life was simpler for Ohioans now that they had to pay
only one phone bill a month instead of two. In 1923, he formed a
utilities holding company called United Light & Power, which
eventually con-trolled gas and electric service in a dozen states, and
which by 1929 had assets of more than half a billion dollars. Meanwhile,
he had cast his acquisitive eye on rubber, and by 1928 he had a
substantial interest in Goodyear Tire & Rubber. He was big in steel, too.
He saw no reason for Pittsburgh's financial monopoly of that industry,
and he wanted steel production to be a mighty factor in the economic
blossoming of the Midwest. Cleveland, with its access to the Great
Lakes and its proximity to the automobile manufacturers in Detroit,
seemed to him the logical hub of this new industrial universe. In 1925,
the Trumbull Steel Company, in Warren, Ohio, was in desperate financial
straits, and needed a new and robust infusion of capital. Eaton,
who still lagged behind Rockefeller but was doing his darnedest to catch
up, unblinkingly wrote out a check for eighteen million dollars for
control of Trumbull Steel. In 1927, he drew Republic Iron & Steel into
his expanding metallurgical orbit, and in practically no time at all
converted that into Republic Steel by fusing it with Trumbull, Central
Alloy Steel, Steel & Tubes, Donner Steel, Union Drawn Steel, and
Bourne-Fuller—this last a Cleveland company that had supplied the nuts
and bolts that held together both the Union Navy and the Brooklyn
Bridge. Tom M. Girdler, the flinty industrialist whom Eaton recruited to
preside over Republic Steel, said in his memoirs that Eaton's
“mysterious buying of stock in steel companies had excited the interest
of everybody in the industry.” Girdler, who went to work for Eaton on
October 28, 1929, the day before the stock market collapsed, thought his
new boss was “as smart as any man I ever met.” Eaton had also become
37
a major investor in Youngstown Sheet & Tube by 1930, when Eugene
Grace and Charles M. Schwab tried to take it over, merge it with their
Bethlehem Steel Corporation, and thus create an entity that would have
the size and clout of U.S. Steel. Eaton, hoping instead to merge
Youngstown with Republic, fought the proposed merger with assorted
weapons, including a court battle over proxies. He lost that particular
fight but instituted another suit, which he won, thus scoring a solid
victory over the East Coast financial world. “How are we going to have
leadership in this vast country if everything must be directed from Wall
Street?” he asked. “It would make clerks of us all here in the Middle
West.” In the course of that litigation, Eaton became an intractable foe
of the corporation lawyer Newton D Baker, who represented Bethlehem,
and who once likened Eaton to a portrait of Napoleon in the Louvre--
one in which the Emperor was depicted riding to conquest between rows
of corpses. In 1932, when the Democratic Party convened to choose its
Presidential candidate, Eaton got his revenge. Baker was an early
contender for the nomination. In Eaton's version of political history, it
was his success in persuading James A. Farley and William G. McAdoo
to join him in a stop-Baker movement that ultimately swung the
nomination to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
By 1929, still in his mid-forties, Eaton was a director of more than
a dozen corporations, and was widely known, and sometimes feared, as
a shrewd, hard-headed, cold-blooded fiscal wizard whose guiding
philosophy, as one acquaintance summarized it, was “All's fair in love
and war, and business is the war of peace.” According to the perhaps
slightly biased author of “The Eaton Family of Nova Scotia,” which was
published that year, Cyrus had “a future of unlimited possibilities before
him.” Eaton's income in the heady year of 1929 was so substantial that
in later litigation over the federal income tax due on it he argued that the
38
government had made a miscalculation that tilted the bottom line in its
favor by more than four hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars.
Then came the crash, which hit Cleveland especially hard; three of its
big banks closed their doors. By the mid-thirties, when all the tangled
affairs of all of Eaton's corporations had been unraveled as well as they
ever could be, he had little left beyond a stake in Otis & Company. One
of his daughters was glad to land a sixty-dollar-a-month job as a
receptionist in a Cleveland law office; when she got married, not long
afterward, her father, coming around to her place for Christmas dinner,
could bring only a basket of jellies and apples and a ten-dollar bill. He
would eventually prosper again, but for a while he had hard going.
When he was divorced from his first wife, in 1934, it was stipulated in
the settlement that if his net worth ever reached the level of a hundred
and five thousand dollars he would have to buy her a house. At no stage
of his topsy-turvy career has he been a lavish spender. Though he enjoys
the good life—in Paris, he stays at the Ritz; in London, at Claridge's—he
has never emulated his mentor Rockefeller in philanthropy. The Cyrus
Eaton Foundation is too small to warrant inclusion in the Foundation
Directory. One of his children said not long ago, “If I needed a hundred
dollars or a loaf of bread, my father would be the last person I'd turn to.”
In fact, Eaton may not be as affluent as he sometimes lets people think
he is. Recently, an Ohioan who knows him about as intimately as
anyone does told an acquaintance that there were probably a hundred
people in Cleveland alone who were richer than Eaton
Eaton's first wife was Margaret House, the daughter of a Cleveland
physician. He married her in 1907 after they had met at a Baptist Church
social function. Before they separated, in the thirties, they had seven
children. One, Margaret Grace, known as Lee, spent her adult life in a
wheelchair, following botched spinal surgery; after she died, at forty, her
father donated some land in the Cleveland suburb of Northfield for a Lee
39
Eaton Primary School, Eaton's youngest son, MacPherson, became an
ordained Baptist minister, but not until he was in his forties. Not all of
Eaton's children have always applauded their father's public
pronouncements. “My father's views are not mine,” one daughter told a
Cleveland paper in 1959, when his sponsoring of conferences of
intellectuals in Pugwash and his hobnobbing with Nikita Khrushchev
were creating something of an international stir. “I think there are better
ways to spend money than to hold conferences or make speeches.”
Eaton's children were raised chiefly in Northfield, twenty miles from
downtown Cleveland He bought a late-eighteenth-century house on a
couple of dozen acres there in 1912 and, in deference to the early French
name for Nova Scotia, called it Acadia Farms. The house was close to a
road, and Eaton thought at first that he'd have the building razed and a
new but similar residence constructed farther from the traffic. He
engaged an architect, who, having heard of his client's fiscal
achievements, came back with plans for a replacement that would cost,
he estimated, about a million and a half dollars. “I'D stay with the old
house,” Eaton said, and he has stayed with it ever since. Just inside his
front door is an example of the kind of memento that his singular
crusading has won for him— a Stuffed boar's head from his sharpshooting
friend Chairman Khrushchev. When Eaton gave a lunch party
in 1962 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his occupancy of Acadia
Farms (he thriftily used the same caterer's marquee for a
stepdaughter's coming-out dance that evening), among the guests were
the Bulgarian, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, Polish, and Rumanian Ambassadors.
Over the years, he has increased the size of his estate to its
present eight hundred acres. And he has given some of it away: in 1955,
he transferred fifty-eight virgin acres to the city of Cleveland to form
part of what Clevelanders speak of as their Ring of Green, or Emerald
Belt.
40
Living as he does on a place that is called a farm, Eaton prefers to call
himself not a financier or an industrialist—or, as others have called him,
a tycoon—but, rather, a farmer. He believes that one of the reasons he
and Khrushchev were attracted to one another was that both of them had
been raised on farms After a visit to Cuba in 1968, at a time few
Americans were heading that way, Eaton was asked in what capacity he
had gone there, and he said, “I'm just a farmer,” adding that he had
talked with Fidel Castro mostly about the artificial insemination of
cattle. (Eaton was pleased to be introduced by Castro to a hundredthousand-
dollar prize bull, housed in an air-conditioned stall with music
piped in.) As a farmer, Eaton is understandably partial to trees, and his
devotion to them may exceed that of most tillers of the soil It has been
said of him in print without his entering a denial that he can name all the
trees, plus all the birds, native to the entire North American continent,
and an admiring employee at Acadia Farms not long ago remarked of
the proprietor, ' He knows every tree here by its first name.” After Eaton
drifted away from the Baptist Church, when he was asked which was his
preferred religion he -would sometimes choose Druidism, because
Druids worshipped trees. He is as fond of poetry as he is of trees. He
professes to have read some lines of poetry every single day of his adult
life, and it follows that one of his favorite poems (along with
Shakespeare's sonnets, Tennyson's “Ulysses,” Milton's sonnet on his
blindness, and Keats' “On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer”) is
Joyce Kilmer's dendrological chef-d'oeuvre. In 1962, in exchange for a
hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars, Eaton granted the
Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, of which he was a director
from 1955 to 1965, an easement across twenty-four acres of his
farmland to build a power line. The line went in without incident, hut in
April 1970, C.E.I. started work on a second line while Eaton's attention
was elsewhere, and chopped down four hundred and fifty of his trees.
41
The normally pacifistic Eaton all hut declared war. An Eaton truck was
rammed by a C.E.I, bulldozer whose progress it was trying to block.
Eaton filed a seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar lawsuit against
his erstwhile associates and stormed into Summit County Common Pleas
Court toting a slaughtered stump. His anguish was only partly assuaged
when the utilities company, probably suspecting that otherwise its feud
with the then eighty-eight-year-old adversary might go on forever,
settled for an additional hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars.
One portion of Acadia Farms is devoted to the breeding and raising of
Scotch Shorthorn cattle, a specimen of which Eaton had shipped to the
Soviet Union in 1955 in an effort to improve the quality of Russian beef.
Scotch Shorthorns, like Eatons, came to North America early; the
English brought some over in 1783, and they were the first variety of
cattle bred specifically for beef to graze on American grass. Eaton's
animals have won many prizes, and since 1951 he has held a biennial
cattle auction on his premises. Some Russian livestock experts were in
the States at the time of the 1961 sale, but the State Department wouldn't
let them visit Summit County; some East Germans who also hoped to
attend couldn't even get into the country The all-time star of the Eaton
stable was P. S. Troubadour, a steer that in 1956 was proclaimed the
International Grand Champion among all kinds of cattle. The “P.S.” in
its name came from Penn State. The university bought Troubadour's
mother from Eaton while she was in calf. Troubadour himself was later
purchased from Penn State by the Greenbrier Hotel, which belonged to
the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway. That transaction was easy enough to
arrange, because Eaton was by then into railroads and was chairman of
the board of the C. & O. (He had two prize oxen at his farm called C.
and O.) The price was a robust $20,397.50. The Greenbrier serves good
cuts of beef, but it used Troubadour for promotional purposes The
42
animal was featured, along with Eaton, on an Ed Murrow “Person to
Person” television show, and it went on tour for a while— in its own
railway car, attended by a handler. On July 4, 1957, it paid a patriotic
courtesy call on President Eisenhower at his farm, in Gettysburg. Eaton
wanted to send Troubadour to Russia, too, as a hefty symbol of coexistence,
but an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in Europe stymied
that scheme. Troubadour died in 1959; a decade later, Shorthorn World
acclaimed Eaton as “Shorthorndom's most famous breeder,” Eaton also
raises cattle at his other principal residence—Deep Cove Farms, a threethousand-
acre establishment in Upper Blandford, Nova Scotia, a
hundred and fifty miles from Pugwash. Though he became a citizen of
the United States in 1913, he has retained a strong affection for Canada,
and up to the last couple of years used to take both summer and winter
vacations there. At Deep Cove Farms, he has also bred waterfowl,
among them the first European widgeons ever raised in North America-
Eaton's relationship with his grandchildren, who number fourteen, has
been unusual and intense As each of them became old enough to walk,
the grandfather would take the child, sometimes over its parents’
protests, to Upper Blandford for a summer month, in the company of
brothers and sisters and first cousins. No mothers or fathers were
permitted to tag along. It was such a happy experience for the youthful
guests that some of them who are now in their thirties still go back to
Deep Cove Farms whenever they can, and at least two of the male
grandchildren elected to take their brides there for honeymoons. The
grandchildren had to follow a strict regimen Eaton had a theory that a tot
as young as two could do something useful around a house—help make
a bed, say, or clear a table. He would assemble his clan for breakfast
each morning and impart the orders for that day— laundry, or
woodcraft, or bird spotting, or a lecture on local history, or ridding a
road of rocks. When it rained, all hands would be fitted out with foul43
weather gear and marched off to climb the nearest mountain. To manage
the crowd, Eaton would augment his regular household staff with a
couple of patient college students. (His full-time majordomo since
1953 has been a French Canadian who until he joined Eaton was a
Canadian Pacific Railway dining-car superintendent and also a member
of the Nova Scotia legislature.) On the top floor of the Upper Blandford
farmhouse, Eaton set up two dormitories—one for girls, one for boys. If
there were too many children on the scene to fit into them, the overflow
was harbored in tents. There were frequent picnics Eaton loves picnics
almost as much as trees. He used to give an annual picnic at Acadia
Farms for Chesapeake & Ohio employees and their families, but he had
to stop after the C- & O. absorbed the Baltimore & Ohio system; he
could not comfortably accommodate more than a couple of thousand
picnickers at once. During most of the years in which Eaton ran his
summer camp, he was much featured in the press, but the children in his
engaging company were all but unaware of his not always flattering
celebrity. “To me, my grandfather was simply the man I played tennis
with,” one of them said years afterward. To Eaton, the family holidays
were an unalloyed joy, though not without risks: when he was seventyone,
one of his grandchildren gave him the mumps.
A firm believer in physical fitness, Eaton was cool toward one
prospective son-in-law until the young man grabbed a tennis racquet and
beat him at singles. At Acadia Farms on winter weekends, he would
corral whichever grandchildren showed up, shepherd them to a frozen
pond, and play ice hockey with them. He skied every winter until he
turned eighty-seven, but he remained contemptuous of ski lifts. He had
begun skiing before lifts were invented, and he believed that half the
challenge of the pastime was climbing up a hill before sliding down it.
He never could get the hang of rope tows; he kept falling off them, with
44
indignity and indignation. At seventy-five, he stopped riding jumpers.
He had begun riding at four (he started his own children in at one), and
he belonged to two hunt clubs. Since he reached ninety-two, he has
reluctantly given up all sports, but he still walks a couple of miles a day.
Fifty years ago, he suffered from chronic indigestion. A doctor he
consulted urged him to forswear tobacco, alcohol, tea, coffee, and
corned-beef hash. Since then, his staple potables have been orange juice
and hot water. “Sir William Osier once said that a man should eschew
Lady Nicotine, Bacchus, and the younger Aphrodites,” Eaton likes to
say. “A lot of my contemporaries have had shorter lives because they did
not obey Sir William's injunctions.” One of Eaton's physicians attributes
his healthy longevity to a capacity for instant sleep. The doctor once
joined Eaton on an inspection tour of an iron mine. The two men were
assigned to the same room in a bunkhouse. Before his companion even
had both shoes off, Eaton was in bed and snoring.
IN the mid-nine teen-thirties, Eaton began hauling himself back up
the financial ladder, at first principally through the underwriting of
railroad and utilities bonds. These had traditionally and profitably been
marketed through the large Wall Street investment-banking houses, with
little or no prior competitive bidding to determine who would manage an
offering. Fighting Wall Street was for Eaton not merely a means of
making money; it was fun, and it also took on the dimensions of a
crusade. Nothing pleased him more than to learn, in 1947, that he federal
government had indicted seventeen East Coast investment-banking
houses for allegedly having arranged among themselves to handle twothirds
of all the country's underwriting business over the previous nine
years “The nation simply will no longer stand for the continued
concentration of financial control in a few hands and in one place,
because it has been amply demonstrated that such control militates
against the creative and constructive finance that is the keystone of our
45
free-enterprise system,” Eaton said in a prepared statement. “The New
York houses that have been indicted form a colorless fraternity, banded
together to do only the riskless, high-grade business and to divide it up
into tiny participations, according to fixed percentages, with the houses
that should be their competitors.” In his efforts to make the underwriting
business more truly competitive, Eaton found an eager accomplice in
another alien to the Establishment—Robert R. Young, the Texan who,
until his suicide in Palm Beach in 1958, cut quite a swath through the
American railroad industry. “Young was a man of great courage,” Eaton
says, “and we were friends in all areas, although he grew more interested
in the social life of Newport and Palm Beach than I could ever be, and
though he didn't entirely share my interest in seeking answers to the
problems that concern philosophers and scholars.” Young's first big
railroad acquisition was the Chesapeake & Ohio, and his domination of
it was solidified by a thirty-million-dollar refinancing, which the
railroad's directors had planned to confer, as was the routine practice, on
the familiar old Wall Street houses of Morgan Stanley and Kuhn
Loeb. Eaton, through Otis & Company, joined with the Chicago firm of
Halsey, Stuart and, by underbidding the New Yorkers, forced the
railroad's board to throw its business their way. Young put Eaton on the
C. & O. board of directors in 1943, and in 1954, when Young left to
wage his successful battle to control the New York Central, he sold his
C. & O. stock to Eaton, who succeeded him as chairman.
All this skirmishing for control of railroads inevitably involved the
federal government. In threading their way through the bureaucratic
mazes of Washington, Eaton and Young attracted the sympathetic
attention of Senator Harry S. Truman. Eaton had first met Truman in the
nineteen-t wen ties in Kansas City, where Eaton had a stranglehold on
public utilities (and, of course, saw nothing wrong with that). The two
46
men met again in Washington in 1941, when Eaton testified—in
opposition to Wall Street— at some Securities and Exchange Commission
hearings on the intricacies of financing utilities bonds. At about
that time, with the United States at war, Eaton learned from friends of
his in Canada about the discovery of a vast deposit of iron ore beneath
Steep Rock Lake, in northwestern Ontario. He remembered what John
D. Rockefeller, Sr., had told him two score years earlier about natural
resources; by then, moreover, he himself had concluded that “iron ore is
the foundation of American industry.” Eaton went to Ontario and, from
canoe and airplane, scrutinized Steep Rock Lake. There was no question
about the potential value to the Allied war effort of the ore under the
water; the problem was how to get rid of the water. After talking to
some engineers, Eaton concluded that this could be accomplished, at a
cost of no more than seven or eight million dollars, by regiments of
pumps and a three-thousand-foot drainage tunnel. With the backing of
the Canadian government, he went to Washington in the fall of 1942 to
submit his proposal to the War Production Board, which did not think
much of the idea until Senator Truman, chairman of the Senate
Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, gave it his
blessing. Then, with the W.P.B. prodded into his corner, Eaton was able
to go to the Canadian government and the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation for assistance. By 1947, the onetime lake bed was yielding
up iron ore at the rate of a million tons a year, through two corporations
organized by Eaton. One of them, Premium Iron Ores, of whose stock
he controlled seventy-four per cent, acted as Steep Rock's sales agent.
For obtaining contracts to sell ten million tons of the ore over a ten-year
period, Premium received nearly a million and a half shares of the other,
Steep Rock Iron Mines, at a price of a penny a share. In 1955, the
Internal Revenue Service contended that Eaton owed it ten million
dollars in back taxes, on the ground that the Steep Rock shares for
47
which he had paid one cent had actually been worth a dollar sixty-seven
apiece. Eaton was especially put out because the incumbent Secretary of
the Treasury, and thus the boss of the I.R.S., was George M. Humphrey,
a fellow-Clevelander. The case dragged on through the tax courts for a
couple of years before Eaton was adjudged the winner—a verdict that
prompted Fortune to describe him as “a living refutation of that old
American saying 'You can't win 'em all.’ “
Eaton was able to reciprocate for Truman's earlier intercession when
the Missourian campaigned for the Presidency in 1948. Just before
Election Day, Eaton was visited at the Biltmore Hotel—where he
usually puts up while in New York—by the president of a railroad
brotherhood. The caller said that President Truman was planning to
travel by train from New York to St. Louis for his last big voters’ rally,
that the New York Central wouldn't let the train depart unless it got five
thousand dollars, and that the Democrats had run out of cash. Eaton
paid for the train.
During the Second World War, Eaton had embarked on a
collaborative venture with still another non-Establishment man, the
California industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. Along with Joseph W. Frazer,
Kaiser wanted to break into the postwar automobile market, and for that
he would need steel. Through Otis & Company, Eaton underwrote a sale
of stock in the Portsmouth Steel Corporation, whose output was
supposed to go largely into Kaiser-Frazer cars. In 1947, another equity
financing seemed desirable—this one to sell Kaiser-Frazer stock.
Arriving at Kaiser's office to discuss the terms, Eaton folded his hands
together, much in the manner of a Baptist at prayer, and said, “Henry,
we want to be very careful in this matter, because it is a very bitter
experience to lose other people's money.” The Californian seemed
48
somewhat taken aback when it turned out a few minutes later that Eaton
was assigning himself more than the conventional underwriter's
percentage for floating the stock issue. Afterward, Eaton, his hands
again piously folded, said, “Dear me, I'm afraid Henry Kaiser must think
I'm a bit of a bandit.” Kaiser did indeed come to think so. In 1948, when
he expected Otis & Company to sell almost four million dollars' worth
of the new company's stock, Otis suddenly pulled out of the deal,
explaining that the securities market had turned sour and that the issue
could not succeed. Kaiser believed that Eaton had welshed unreasonably
on a firm commitment, and for the next few years their disagreement
occupied the time of numerous judges and lawyers. (Abe Fortas was one
of Eaton's attorneys.) In 1951, a federal court found against Otis and
ordered it to pay Kaiser-Frazer more than three million dollars—this at a
time, embarrassingly, when the Eaton firm's total assets were a million
dollars shy of that figure. But Eaton continued to refute the you-can'twin-'
em-all adage: the following year, a higher court reversed the
judgment.
LONG before the Second World War, Eaton had got himself involved
in domestic American politics. In his business life, he scarcely
ever dealt with anyone who wasn't a Republican, but, in his iconoclastic
fashion, he personally tended to gravitate toward Democrats. He had
first met Franklin Roosevelt in 1920, during Roosevelt's unsuccessful
candidacy as the Vice-Presidential running mate of Ohio's Governor
James M. Cox. After becoming President, Roosevelt hoped to develop,
in conjunction with Canada, a St. Lawrence Seaway. He asked Eaton to
stop by and talk over the project. For Eaton, it was a familiar subject. He
had once hoped to build a seaway privately, but had been forestalled by
Governor Al Smith of New York, who told him that any such
undertaking would have to be carried out by federal, state, and
49
provincial governments, and not by any individuals for their own profit.
Roosevelt told Eaton that he was being hindered by a provincial
government—specifically, that of Mitchell Hepburn, the Premier of
Ontario. “Inasmuch as Mitch Hepburn was a cousin of mine and also a
fanner who raised cattle, Roosevelt asked me to persuade him to go
along with the scheme,” Eaton says. “I said I'd be glad to, but I would
need full and official information on how negotiations stood. The
President said that was easy, and made a date for me to go see Secretary
of State Cordell Hull. I did, and learned what I wanted, but a week
later I received a letter from Hull to the effect that his department, on
reviewing the whole matter, had concluded that all negotiations should
he carried on not by private citizens but exclusively by government
officials. I sent a note to Roosevelt saying that I assumed he didn't want
me to continue. He replied that Hull was, of course, absolutely correct,
that official undertakings had to be handled through official channels,
but—I don't know what, if anything, he told Hull—wouldn't I please
proceed as planned? So I went and spent a weekend with Hepburn on his
farm, and we talked about cattle breeding and various agricultural
matters, and I finally got around to the question of his supporting
Roosevelt on the St. Lawrence. Hepburn said, “I’ll go along. You're the
only man in the world for whom I'd change my stand.” And everything
moved forward from that moment on.”
Eaton tends to consider almost as consequential his participation in
another turn of events, in 1940, shortly after the fall of France. He was in
Nova Scotia, and was invited to lunch, aboard the flagship of a British
battle squadron at Halifax, by Rear Admiral S. S. Bonham-Carter, the
ranking naval officer in the harbor. “The Admiral served a first-rate
lunch, with excellent wines, but he was naturally distressed about what
had happened on the other side of the Atlantic,” Eaton says. “I told him
50
at one point that there appeared to be little chance of success for his
country, and that perhaps the prudent thing for Britain to do would be to
make peace swiftly on the best possible terms. Bonham-Carter
disagreed. “If we could get the use of some of your old destroyers, we
could win this war,” he said. After lunch, we had a confidential chat and
he asked me to help obtain the destroyers. I said that I would, try—that
my Uncle Charles was a man of some influence in Washington, and that
I was sure his heart was with England. I went straight to Washington and
told Uncle Charles what the Admiral had said, and Uncle Charles went
straight to Roosevelt, and the President told him, ‘I’ll provide the ships
if I can get it by you Republicans in Congress.' Uncle Charles said, ‘I
will deliver the Republicans if you will take the lead.' Well, the
destroyer deal went through, (of course, and I suppose my helping to I
bring it about may have been the most (important event of my life.”
Eaton enthusiastically backed President Roosevelt when he ran for a
third term, in 1940—even composing a pamphlet, “The Third Term
‘Tradition’” in which he observed that Walpole had been the Prime
Minister of England for twenty-one years and the younger Pitt for
twenty, and that for forty-nine of the seventy-three years Canada had
had its own government a mere three men had held the reins.
Moreover, Eaton didn't like Wendell Willkie, who had been counsel for
some of his bitterest enemies in some of his bitterest fights in the public
utilities arena. The Republican who most frequently got Eaton's hackles
up, though, was the one often known as “Mr. Republican”—his fellow-
Ohioan Robert A. Taft. In the fall of 1941, when Taft, a redoubtable
noninterventionist, opposed Roosevelt's attempt to have the Neutrality
Act revised, Eaton wrote him a letter saying that his stand was
“distressing to your Ohio constituents,” and continuing, “Republican
senators and congressmen owe it to the nation to desist from demagogic
51
appeals to human weakness and human folly, which give only Hitler
cause to be enchanted.” Eaton and Taft had tangled a couple of years
earlier over the underwriting of a twelve-million-dollar bond issue for
the Cincinnati Union Terminal. Eaton had, as usual, wanted competitive
bidding, and Taft, the chairman of the terminal's finance committee,
resented Eaton's rocking that particular boat. And in 1952, when the Taft
family disclosed its intention of buying the Cincinnati Enquirer, which
the paper's employees had hoped to buy themselves, Eaton delightedly
lent the employees the seven million six hundred thousand dollars they
required.
In 1950, during Taft's senatorial reelection campaign, Eaton
contributed thirty-five thousand dollars to his Democratic opponent,
Joseph Ferguson. Inasmuch as five thousand dollars was supposed to be
the maximum any individual could give, a Senate subcommittee
inquiring into campaign expenditures subsequently asked Eaton for an
explanation. At first, he begged off appearing, on the excuse that he had
bursitis, hut he finally showed up in Washington and said that he hadn't
exactly given all the money himself. Some was his son's, and some came
from Otis & Company employees, whom he had later reimbursed,
though he didn't seem to be able to lay his hand on any of the relevant
cancelled checks. In any event, he told the Senate subcommittee, “I felt
that my place was on the side of the laboring man—in my own interests
as a capitalist.” The committee let the matter rest there. To identify
himself with labor was one of Eaton's favorite pastimes. He more than
once proposed, to the outrage of many of his fellow-capitalists, that it
would he an estimable notion for employees to sit on the boards of
corporations for which they toiled. In 1947, he had written, “The casualness
with which we capitalists seem willing—nay, even eager—to invite
the collapse of our economic system, in almost every industrial dispute,
52
for the sole purpose of thwarting labor, is utterly incomprehensible.”
These sentiments—utterly incomprehensible to many of the men who sat
around boardroom tables with Eaton—were expressed in an article in the
University of Chicago Law Review. When it was republished in Labor, a
journal put out by fifteen railroad unions, its editors stated, “So far as
Labor can recall, nothing quite like it has appeared in print in recent
years.”
The funds that didn't help Ferguson defeat Taft were contributed
by Eaton through Labor's Non-Partisan League, an entity created by
John L. Lewis. It was perhaps natural that the mine worker’s leader,
considered by many of his fellow-unionists the most cantankerous
specimen of their breed, should have been a warm friend of Cyrus
Eaton, who enjoyed much the same reputation on his side of the
industrial fence. When, during the Second World War, there was angry
talk of drafting miners who were dissatisfied with their working
conditions, Eaton rushed to Washington at President Roosevelt's behest
and assisted in achieving peace between Lewis and the mine owners.
“John Lewis has again proved that he is a brilliant leader,” Eaton
declared after that war within a war had ended. “I wish American
industry and government had more men of his courage and
statesmanship.” Eaton says that he and Lewis, who died in 1969, at
eighty-nine, had a lot in common. Lewis's mother-in-law was an Eaton,
for one thing, and, for another, both men were fond of poetry. “John and
I liked to talk about the great authors and philosophers and scientists of
the world,” Eaton says. “I was an admirer of Darwin and Huxley and
Tyndall and their views of the origin of man and of his destiny, and we
discussed these matters a great deal. It didn't bother Lewis to be known
as my friend any more than it bothered me to be known as his.” One
aspect of their friendship was explored in an article in the December,
53
1961, issue of Harper's, which recounted in considerable detail how, a
decade earlier, the United Mine Workers had lent perhaps ten million
dollars to various Eaton companies, thus enabling Eaton to procure
control of the West Kentucky Coal Company, which, theretofore never
organized, soon recognized Lewis's union.
FROM his involvement in American politics it was an easy enough
step for Eaton to move on to the international scene. This he did,
initially, by sponsoring the Pugwash scientific conferences, which since
1957 have been moved from Nova Scotia to many other places. His
objective, as he put it once, was to afford intellectuals a chance to ''relax
together, exchange views, sharpen their own thinking, and design
formulas for us to live by in this brand-new world.” Perhaps the most
rewarding conference, in Eaton's estimation, was an early one, held in
Austria in 1958. It was sponsored by the Austrian government, drew
eighty scientists from twenty-two nations, and met in two venues—first
Kitzbuhel and then Vienna, where a crowd of fifteen thousand, including
the President of Austria, filed into an auditorium to hear the visiting
scientists thumpingly condemn nuclear weapons. During one session,
Eaton, Bertrand Russell, and a distinguished European scientist were on
the agenda for a ten-minute talk apiece. The scientist led off. It is one of
Eaton's favorite footnotes to the annals of Pugwash that after the Herr
Professor Doktor had held the floor for forty minutes and was showing
no signs of relinquishing it Lord Russell turned to the American and
whispered loudly, “It's time to drop the bomb.”
Inasmuch as Russian and Chinese scientists were among those
invited to Pugwash Conferences, these affairs inescapably attracted the
attention of outsiders. Eaton is convinced, for instance, that eventually
the Pugwash movement was infiltrated by the Central Intelligence
54
Agency. A few of the hundred thousand-odd shareholders of the
Chesapeake & Ohio Railway from time to time got interested in their
chairman's hobnobbing with all those erudite foreigners, not to mention
the heads of Communist governments, and expressed some misgivings
about his behavior, but his staff did some checking and was relieved to
find that the writers of the angriest letters generally turned out to own a
trifling number of shares. Nobody ever tried to calculate the possible
effect on C. & O. stock prices of any of the irrepressible chairman's
extra-business pronouncements. In any event, Eaton usually managed to
appease his C. & O, flock at their annual gatherings by exerting his
considerable Old World charm and by, on one occasion, reminding his
auditors that George Washington had been the first president of the
company that became their railroad, and so they were all part of a fine
continuing American capitalistic tradition. In private, he was sometimes
less than totally convinced of the sanctity of American capitalism. He
was all for it, certainly, but no one knew better than he did the
imperfections and inequities of the system. He had in his time exploited
these to his huge profit, and he had also been monumentally undone by
them. Thus, he saw no reason that an alternative system, even a
Communist one, should not coexist with this one. He believed that
American businessmen were foolish to be obsessed with Russia at the
very time when Russians, in their approach to commerce, seemed to be
acting more and more like American businessmen. That there was
ruthlessness inherent in the Communist way of doing things was to him
not particularly significant; as a capitalist, he had, when necessary, been
as ruthless as anybody who ever foreclosed a mortgage. Yet it appeared
that he was denounced as a turncoat every time he tried to aver that
although he was for the one system he did not mind if others were for
the other. It was therefore not surprising that he greatly relished the trips
55
he began making to Eastern Europe and other Communist regions in
1958; in those oases, nobody ever said anything nasty about him.
In his tilts with the conventional, Eaton found, during his early
seventies, an articulate helpmeet. She was Anne Kinder Jones, a
Cleveland divorcee who had helped him entertain his thinkers at the
1957 gathering in Pugwash, and who contributed to the old Eaton family
home there”, which the newspapers had begun calling Thinkers' Lodge,
a welcome sign that read “Retain your hope, all ye who enter here.”
Eaton had not remarried after his 1934 divorce. His ex-wife died in the
spring of 1956, and that December he married Anne Jones. Some
Cleveland eyebrows shot up. The bride had an impeccable social
background—debut at the 1940 Cleveland Assembly Ball, Hathaway
Brown School, Vassar College. Her father, Walter T Kinder, was a much
respected probate judge in Cleveland, and had been a senior partner in
one of the city's most distinguished law firms, Jones, Day, Reavis &
Pogue, with which her first husband was also associated. But she was
ten years younger than Eaton's oldest daughter, and she had been
confined to a wheelchair since being stricken with polio, in 1946. Eaton
did not care what anyone in Cleveland thought about his private life or
any other aspect of his life, and the newlyweds were cheered by
congratulatory messages from farther afield—from Harry S. Truman,
John L. Lewis, Julian Huxley, and a group of scientists whose joint
telegram made them sound like the most splendidly named law firm of
all time: Russell, Powell, Rabinowitch, Rotblat, Skobeltsyn, and Szilard.
Anne Eaton, who had been teaching an adult-education course in
semantics at Cleveland College, had never been known as a political
activist, but she quickly came to share her husband's feelings about the
skewed state of the world. Over the last twenty years, indeed, she has
seemed to some of her friends to have become even more militant than
56
he, and she has vigorously defended him against all comers. One anti-
Eaton comment in the Cleveland Plain Dealer elicited from her the tart
rejoinder “Cyrus Eaton has been the first spokesman for millions who
share his concern. Until more of them are quoted on your editorial page,
I am proud to hold his coat.” On her own, she became a forthright
participant in the deliberations and demonstrations of groups like the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and Women
Strike for Peace. Because of her wheelchair, let alone her husband's
celebrity, whenever she joined a protest rally outside the White House or
the United Nations she was a prime target for photographers. When she
went back to Vassar for her twenty-fifth reunion, in 1969, she took with
her a scolding message about Vietnam for her classmates to send to
President Nixon.
Mrs. Eaton has accompanied her husband on most of his trips to
Moscow, Prague, Sofia, Budapest, Warsaw, East Berlin, Bucharest,
Havana, and Hanoi, in all of which they have received V.I.P. treatment.
More than usual courtesies have also been extended by the Communist
world to other members of Eaton's clan; a stepson-in-law, Alfred Heller,
has conducted symphony orchestras all over the Soviet Union. When
Eaton visited Moscow in December 1960, for two days running Pravda
put his picture on its front page—an unprecedented accolade for a
private citizen from the imperialistic West. He has had such ready access
to top Soviet officials that when Adlai Stevenson was representing the
United States at the U.N. he would invite Eaton to have lunch with him
as soon as Eaton got back from Russia, to ascertain what was on the
Russians' minds at the moment. “Adlai thought the Russians were
franker with me than with any other American,” Eaton says. In June,
1965, shortly before Stevenson's death, Eaton briefed him on the reaction
of the Soviet Union and its allies—not surprisingly, a negative
57
reaction—to the American bombing of North Vietnam. Stevenson
replied that there was little likelihood of the Johnson Administration's
diminishing its military buildup in Indo-China, and a few days later,
addressing the Economic Club of Detroit, Eaton said, “I must tell you
with sadness that my life is a failure.... In my sober judgment, we are on
the brink of catastrophe, and unless some miracle occurs in the next
month, I fear that mankind is doomed.” He had seen Premier Kosygin at
the Kremlin, he said, and he went on, “The deep significance of his
remarks was that the United States had declared war on the Soviet
Union, that the Soviet Union was compelled to meet the challenge and
would do so in cooperation with the armies of Vietnam and China....
There is nothing left for them to do but to go in with everything they
have. I want you to take it from me that I'm certain they will.... Nothing I
could say to him would suggest further patience, waiting and
forbearance.... The people of the Soviet Union and their leaders
earnestly hope that at the last minute the business interests of the United
States will persuade the President to take whatever steps are necessary to
avoid the catastrophe that our present actions in Vietnam threaten.”
When the State Department suggested that perhaps these views were
Eaton's rather than Kosygin's, Eaton defensively made public a transcript
of some notes his wife had scribbled at the Kremlin.
Eaton has sometimes regarded himself as an ambassador between two
opposing worlds—though, as Senator Barry Goldwater once gruffly
noted, one manifestly without portfolio—and whenever he drops in at a
foreign capital he makes a point of calling on the bona-fide American
envoy and, if time permits, on the Canadian, British, French, Soviet,
Vietnamese, and Chinese Ambassadors, too. One of his few frustrations
is that he has never been to China; even from afar, though, he once
declared that Mao Tse-tung “has been able to analyze our financial
58
problems with deeper insight than a long line of American Secretaries of
the Treasury.” The breach between China and Russia has distressed
Eaton. For one thing, it robbed him for a while of his customary niche in
Pravda. “When I was in Moscow in 1965,” he says, “I was told, 'If your
name and picture are displayed on the front page, as in the past, it may
suggest undue devotion to American capitalists, and it could be
misunderstood in China. We hope that you, as an old friend, won't take it
amiss if we leave you off All the conferences that are planned for you
will go on as scheduled, but nothing will be reported in the Soviet
press.'“
It has been Eaton's feeling all along that effective coexistence
between the Communist and capitalist worlds could be attained most
easily by increasing commerce between them. The more trade, the less
tension is his credo. He had been a proponent of doing business with the
Russians years before many Americans could even bring themselves to
contemplate that possibility, and he is fond of citing an encounter he had
with President Nixon in June, 1973, in the course of a White House
reception for Leonid Brezhnev. “With an arm around each of us,” Eaton
says, “Nixon told Mr. Brezhnev, 'For more than twenty years now, Mr.
Eaton has been a leading advocate in this country of trade with yours, a
belief that I have belatedly come around to myself.’ Mr. Brezhnev
laughed and agreed, adding that it made him extremely happy that my
efforts had finally been vindicated.”
Curiously, Eaton—aside from swapping gifts with Khrushchev—has
never traded extensively with Russia himself, although his older son and
namesake helped nave the way for a multibillion-dollar Soviet-American
natural-gas project that Armand Hammer and his Occidental Petroleum
Corporation disclosed in July 1972. Anticipating that announcement,
59
Eaton told a C. & O. shareholders' meeting three months earlier, “It will
be a memorable day in my life when the New York Daily News, our
newspaper of largest circulation and the most vigorous denouncer of
Communism, uses power produced by Soviet natural gas to run its
presses I will also be delighted when the Cold Warriors of Washington
cook their breakfast by natural gas brought in from the Soviet Union.”
Cyrus Eaton, Jr., runs a company called Tower International (his
headquarters, like his father's, are in Cleveland's Terminal Tower),
which since 1960 has specialized in doing business—building hotels,
making movies, random imports and exports—with Eastern Europe.
That the head of Tower International bears a name almost as well known
there as Charlie Chaplin's hasn't hurt.
Cyrus Eaton, Sr., was in his eighties when the Vietnam war began to
escalate, but this did not deter him from expending much of his still
enormous energy in trying to bring that tragedy to an end He liked to tell
people he had a sound capitalistic reason—he had business interests in
Indo-China. That was stretching the point a little, however he was
apparently alluding to the acquisition of rubber by the tire industry, with
which he hadn't been associated for thirty or forty years. He also liked to
cite as special allies in his crusade two illustrious military men of his
acquaintance—General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery.
“Ike and Monty were the greatest soldiers of their time, and they both
told me it was madness to send American troops in Vietnam and
Cambodia, because we couldn't possibly win.” Eaton says. “Eisenhower
explained to me in some detail that while North Vietnam was a small
nation, it had as allies the Chinese, with the largest standing army on
earth, and the Russians, with the most sophisticated military equipment,
Montgomery told me that, to a military man, going into Vietnam was an
absolute absurdity, and that anyone who was an Army officer should
60
resign rather than take part, because there was no chance of success” I
suggested to Monty in June, 1966, after we spent a day together at his
country place in England, that he come over and talk President Johnson
into getting out of Vietnam, but we were never able to work it out.
I also made public a letter Monty wrote me in 1970 in which he said,
'President Nixon is, of course, totally unfit to be Commander-in-Chief of
the armed forces of the U.S.A. His knowledge of the conduct of war is
nil’ There was an avalanche of criticism against Monty for that. Ike,
unfortunately, never came out publicly; there was too much fanaticism
in Washington. But he did tell me privately once, after his retirement,
that one of his problems as President had been to restrain Nixon and
Dulles, who were forever urging the dispatch of American troops to
every continent to destroy Communism by force.”
Unable to get others to stop the war, Eaton characteristically decided
to act himself. He had met emissaries of both the North Vietnamese and
the Vietcong while making his ambassadorial rounds in Paris, Moscow,
and elsewhere. In late November of 1969, he set out for Hanoi, with
interim stops in Paris, Moscow, Teheran, Karachi, Rangoon, Phnom
Penh, and Vientiane, He was eighty-five years old. In Cambodia, Eaton
and his wife were joined by one of his grandchildren. Fox Butterfield.
As a Far East correspondent of the New York Times, Butterfield could
not easily gain admittance to Hanoi; as Cyrus Eaton's grandson, he
found it a cinch. During eight days there, Eaton talked with, among
others, Pham Van Dong and Le Due Tho, the principal North
Vietnamese spokesmen. “President Nixon was saying at that time that
North Vietnam wouldn't negotiate,” Eaton says, “so I asked Pham to
give me the terms upon which it would He said it wouldn't do any good,
because Nixon wouldn't make peace. I pressed him. I said, 'Give me the
61
terms, and let me see what I can do,' and he did. I also asked if he would
be willing to meet Nixon in person. To go anywhere in the world to talk
to him at any time,' he said. The terms I brought back were virtually
identical to those that were accepted four years later. When I returned to
the States, I got in touch with the White House, and was told to report to
Secretary of State William Rogers. He told me that he didn't believe I
could give him any insights into North Vietnamese thinking that he
didn't already have. 'We've decided that the only thing they respond to is
force,' he said, 'and that's what we're going to give them, and plenty of
it.' When I got to see Nixon not long after that, I told him that the head
of the government of North Vietnam would meet him anywhere,
anytime, and he said he'd have to think about it. Then he launched some
new attacks. It was a great deception on the American people.” In
Cleveland, Eaton told a press conference that the North Vietnamese had
assured him they didn't want to take over South Vietnam. He also
mentioned, no doubt enviously, that on his way to Asia he had met a
Soviet shepherd who was a hundred and sixty years old and still rode
horseback.
It pleases Eaton to travel with an entourage, and he has reached an
age when having grandchildren along can be more blessing than burden.
One grandson, David LeFevre, who, before he began practicing law, did
a Peace Corps stint in Uruguay, is fluent in Spanish, so Eaton took him
along as interpreter when he visited Chile, in December, 1970, just after
the election that made Salvador Allende President “I felt that it was
important for the United States to have good relations with all South
American countries, and here was one we certainly ought to be friends
with,” Eaton says. “I was interested, of course, in Chilean agriculture,
and I wanted to be of assistance in the breeding of beef cattle there. I was
received with great courtesy, and Allende and I became great friends.
62
However, the attitude of our government representatives there toward
him was indescribably hostile.” On Christmas Day in Chile, Eaton
decided to do what he does best. He gave a picnic, choosing as the site a
cooperative farm. He expected thirty or so guests, calculating on three or
four children per resident family, but the first family to arrive had eleven
offspring, and the second eight. Fortunately, LeFevre knew South
America and had fore handedly arranged to triple the amount of food
Eaton had ordered. With Allende, as with the Russians, Eaton talked
trade. “I said to him, 'Let's start Selling you things,'” Eaton says, “‘Then
the politicians won’t be able to undo what we’ve put together.” The
Santiago newspaper La Nacton quoted testimonials by Eaton to
Allende's strength and brilliance; the Cleveland Plain Dealer found it
odd that he should have so unstintingly praised the leader of a country
that was so busily engaged in expropriating and nationalizing public
utilities.
David LeFevre also accompanied his grandfather on one of several
journeys the old man has made to Cuba since Castro took over. Eaton
sometimes says that he thinks Cuba is the most beautiful spot on earth,
and he has seen much of it. He began going down there in the nineteentwenties,
but he had no stomach for the Batista government; he
maintains that while trying to float a hundred-million-dollar bond issue
to rehabilitate Cuba's railroads the Batista regime planned to siphon off
ninety-five per cent of the proceeds into its own pockets. When Castro
came to New York for a U.N. meeting in 1960—the time he moved from
the Shelburne Hotel to the Hotel Theresa, in Harlem, because the first
hostelry took a dim view of the live chickens in his retinue—Eaton was
one of the few Americans who called on him to pay their respects.
Castro was touched, and invited him to Havana, at his convenience. It
was May 1968, before Eaton got there, but he was so affably received
63
that he returned seven months later on the occasion of his eighty-fifth
birthday. Castro sent a cake. While talking trade with Cubans, Eaton
offered to take some iron ore of theirs back with him and have it assayed
for commercial potential. (He carried home about fifty pounds' worth,
but it turned out to be of unpromisingly low grade.) Castro gave Eaton
some rum and cigars, neither of which fit in with his austere regimen.
Eaton gave Castro, who rarely wears neckties, some Chesapeake & Ohio
promotional ties, with Chessie kittens cuddling all over them Eaton
also spent his ninety-second birthday in Havana. The war in Angola was
then going on, with Cuban troops importantly involved. Their
participation upset some Americans but left Eaton untroubled; in view of
the long-standing United States practice of sending troops to Asia, he
said, why shouldn't Cuba send some to Africa? On returning home, he
wrote to the Times, “My latest visit to Cuba reinforces mv long-held
conviction that the American giant is making a grievous mistake in
continuing to bully the tiny but enterprising island just ninety miles from
our mainland.” He added that after meeting President Osvaldo Dorticos
and the rest of the thirteen-man Politburo of the country, “contrary to
impressions fostered by our officialdom, there is not a rubber stamp
among them,” An item about Eaton and President Dorticos that ran in
Granma, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of Cuba, had, however, a rubber-stamp look, “Yesterday
morning,” it went, in toto, “Osvaldo Dorticos, President of the Republic
and member of the Politburo of the Party, held a long interview with
Cyrus Eaton, an outstanding personality in economic, industrial, and
financial circles in the United States, whose positions and activities in
favor of peace are known throughout the world During the interview,
which was held in a cordial, friendly, and frank atmosphere, they had a
wide interchange of opinions on different aspects of the present
64
international situation. Mr. Eaton repeated his friendly statements
toward the Cuban people.”
At almost ninety-four, Eaton travels less frequently than he used to.
Indeed, in grudging deference to the increasing fragility of his bones he
spent most of last winter in the Florida Keys. He soil has a good many
plans for the future, though. His son is hoping to build a big new hotel in
Moscow, for the 1980 Olympics, and Cyrus, Sr., who will be going on
ninety-seven when the Games get under way, has already booked a
room.
—E-J. Kahn, Jr.