Mc Cloy

To the Editors of The Crimson:

We are disheartened that the majority of Crimson editors support Harvard's honoring a man who symbolizes several of the most serious blemishes on this country's human rights record. It is a disgrace that the April 27 majority editorial endorses the naming of a "reverse Rhodes" scholarship program for John J. McCloy.

McCloy's involvements with Japanese-Americans, with Holocaust victims, and with Nazi war criminals were not merely those of an administrator "only following orders," nor did he simply support policies that turned out in hindsight to be wrong.

Even today, McCloy refuses to recognize that the American government erred in its wartime internment of Japanese-Americans. Despite Congressional findings to the contrary, McCloy denies that he and other decision-makers were guided by war hysteria and racial prejudice. We are appalled that Crimson editors, who acknowledge that wartime hysteria caused the internment, accept the continuing racism of a man who still maintains that 120,000 innocent Japanese-Americans were interned because of "military necessity."

McCloy played a key role in the decision not to bomb Auschwitz or the railroad tracks leading to the camp where millions of Jews were murdered. Despite McCloy's assertion that President Roosevelt made the decision not to bomb, David Wyman, a leading expert on the Holocaust, has found "do documentary evidence that the bombing decision ever came to Roosevelt."

On the other head, there is ample documentary evidence of requests for the bombing being directed to McCloy. One such request came from the head of the U.S. War Refugee Board. He detailed for McCloy the positive results such a bombing would have not only in saying Jewish lives, but in helping the Allied war effort.

And it was McCloy alone who decided to commute the sentences of many of the most abominable Nazi war criminals. Contrary to the implications in the Crimson majority editorial, it was McCloy's initiative that led to the establishment of an American review board which significantly reduced sentences war criminals received at Nuremberg. He did much more than simply follow their instructions.

For example, the War Clemency Board recommended death for all members of the Einsatzgrappen, the SS elite guard, who McCloy acknowledges were responsible for the deaths of 2,000,000 people. Nevertheless, McCloy exceeded the recommendations of his own board and commuted the sentences of these mass murderers.

The "temporary acceptance of evil" does not mean that we must honor the architects of evil acts, particularly when they continue to defend the propriety of their actions. Whether or not the Japanese-Americans' relocation was motivated by war hysteria, and whether or not McCloy commuted the sentences of war criminals because of fear of communism, McCloy demonstrated far more concern for the entitlements of convicted war criminals than for the rights and lives of innocent Japanese-Americans and Jews.

McCloy's postwar "benevolence" does not chance his status as a continuing symbol of disregard for human rights. If the Kennedy School and the Volkswagen foundation honor john J. McCloy by attaching his name to worthy scholarships, they announce to the world that they will condone bigotry and racism when expedient. We cannot accept such a decision. Debarah Kevesh for the   Harvard Jewish Law Students' Association   Joseph A. Cislowskl for the   Kennedy School Jewish Students' Association   Francis Mukal for the   Asian Law Students' Association   Jeffrey Mendelsohn '84   Chairman, Hillel Coordinating Council