While highly regarded by historians, Henry F. Grady remains relatively unknown to the general public. Yet his is a story that should be told, as the ambassador, who played a key role in American foreign policy from the Truman Doctrine through the cold war, has been called “America’s top diplomatic soldier for a critical period of time.” Pleasant Ridge resident Dr. John T. McNay is doing his part to help bring Grady’s story to light. McNay, associate professor of History at the University of Cincinnati’s Raymond Walters College, has now resurrected Ambassador Grady’s memoirs from the archives of the Harry S Truman Library in Missouri.
The Memoirs of Henry F. Grady: From the Great War to the Cold War has now been published by the University of Missouri Press. McNay has written a 20-page introduction to the memoir and has included extensive editorial notes throughout as well as footnotes.
“Editing a manuscript like this required some different skills than writing one’s own book,” McNay said. “When it is your own material, you can just change it if you think something could be done better, but with this, an editor needs to be very careful not to change the author’s intent.”
Grady wrote the manuscript in 1953 and 1954 and then attempted to get it published. He was unable to get to any revisions before he succumbed to heart failure in 1957. “So, I’ve tried to be the editor that he never had,” McNay said.
According to McNay, Grady’s role in the early Cold War has been obscured until now, in part because his memoirs were not published during his lifetime and also because he left government service ended on bad terms with legendary Secretary of State Dean Acheson, a major figure in the Truman administration.
“The result was that Grady was not embraced as were the other Truman cold warriors in the 1950s,” McNay said. For example, Grady garnered barely a mention in Acheson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Present at the Creation, published in 1969.
Grady’s insightful opposition to American policy in Iran shortly before the CIA’s overthrow of the government there sheds important light on the relationship between the United States and Iran today, McNay, a historian of American foreign relations, believes. “Many of our problems in the Middle East come from decisions made during that period, decisions that Henry Grady opposed. I felt it was important that Ambassador Grady have a chance to tell his side of the story. Now he has that opportunity.”
McNay discovered the unpublished manuscript at the Truman library while researching his first book, Acheson and Empire: The British Accent in American Foreign Policy. “I realized then that Grady was a consistent critic of Achesonian policy in the former colonial world during the Truman presidency,” McNay said.
Early in the New Deal, Grady was swept into the Roosevelt administration as a small part of FDR’s “brain trust.” Appointed head of the trade agreements division by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Grady did what may be some of his most important work in creating an extensive system of reciprocal trade treaties to rebuild international trade that had been destroyed by the Republican tariffs of the 1920s.
In the post-war period, Grady was involved in several missions for President Truman, one of the most important of which was to work with the British Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison on a plan for Palestine. The well-known Grady-Morrison Plan proposed a federated government with separate states, one with a Palestinian majority and the other with a Jewish majority. “Once violence broke out, events overwhelmed the possibility of implementing the plan, though it is interesting today that events now seem to be moving very slowly to a two-state solution,” McNay explained.
But the high point of Grady’s career came with his three ambassadorships. Grady was the selection primarily because of his expertise in economics. He was always very proud that he was the first American ambassador to an independent India. “Grady’s is the only first hand account we have from an American diplomat of the communal violence that broke out in 1947 with the partition of India,” McNay said.
The Memoirs of Henry F. Grady: From the Great War to the Cold War is available at most bookstores or can be purchased online at press.umsystem.edu/spring2009/mcnay.htm.