Background
Christian Archibald Herter was born on March 28, 1895 in Paris, France. He was the son of two American artists, Albert Herter and Adele McGinnis.
Christian Archibald Herter was born on March 28, 1895 in Paris, France. He was the son of two American artists, Albert Herter and Adele McGinnis.
After spending his first eight years in the bohemian art world of Paris, Herter was sent to New York to live with his austere uncle, Christian Archibald Herter, a noted physician and biochemist, and to receive an American education. In 1908, Herter returned to his parents, who had settled in East Hampton on Long Island.
He attended the Browning School and Harvard College, where he studied fine arts and Romance languages and received his Bachelor of Arts in 1915.
Following an unsuccessful experience as an architecture student at Columbia, Herter was convinced by a Harvard classmate to join the diplomatic service in 1916 as a clerk in the American embassy in Berlin.
In 1948 Herter received a Doctor of Law degree from Bates College.
In both Germany and Belgium, where he was transferred in 1917, the multilingual Herter performed his duties with distinction.
When the United States entered World War I, Herter was judged too tall and underweight for the army; instead, he accepted a desk job in the State Department in Washington. In the fall of 1918, Herter served with John W. Davis at a German-American conference on prisoners of war in Bern, Switzerland, which hammered out an agreement just as the war ended. Herter remained in Bern until his appointment as secretary to Henry White, one of the five American commissioners at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.
Promoted to secretary to the entire American Commission to Negotiate Peace (under the supervision of Secretary-General Joseph C. Grew), Herter became disheartened by President Woodrow Wilson's capitulation to the Allies on harsh treatment of Germany and other matters. Though he was tempted, Herter did not join William C. Bullitt in resigning his post in protest. Herter subsequently became a State Department expert on the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. Seeing no future for himself at the State Department after the United States Senate's defeat of the treaty and the League in 1920, Herter angled for, and won, the job of secretary to relief administrator Herbert Hoover. Thus began an association of mutual admiration and respect that lasted until Hoover's death.
When President Warren G. Harding appointed Hoover secretary of commerce in 1921, Herter became the secretary's special assistant. He served as Hoover's press coordinator and liaison to the State Department. In 1922, Hoover dispatched Herter to Soviet Russia to investigate famine conditions and determine whether American Relief Administration (ARA) feeding programs should continue. Despite the prospect of a good Russian harvest, Herter recommended that ARA assistance go on for another year. He feared that Bolshevik authorities would precipitate another famine by selling harvested grain abroad for gold.
In 1924, Herter left government for publishing. With an associate he purchased the Independent, a bankrupt New York-based magazine of politics and the arts, and moved it to Boston. The Independent catered to elite tastes, lacked popular appeal, and was sold in 1928.
After serving as vice-chairman of the Hoover presidential campaign in Massachusetts, Herter sought appointment as an assistant secretary of state in his old chief's new administration. However, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson had promised to reappoint all incumbent assistant secretaries in 1929 and could only offer Herter a lesser position, which he declined. Herter kept busy helping to establish a new magazine, the Sportsman, teaching a course in international relations at Harvard, and involving himself in civic and philanthropic ventures in Boston. In 1930, Herter ran for public office for the first time as the handpicked successor of the patrician political leader Henry Lee Shattuck, who had left his state legislative seat to become the treasurer of Harvard.
Herter triumphed easily as a Republican and was reelected five times. After Pearl Harbor, Herter was recruited back to Washington as a deputy director of the Office of Facts and Figures, the wartime clearinghouse of government information headed by Archibald MacLeish. An ardent internationalist, Herter returned to Massachusetts in April 1942 to run for Congress against the isolationist Republican George Holden Tinkham. The elderly Tinkham, whose district had been altered severely by the Herter-led legislature's redistricting committee in 1941, stepped aside. Herter narrowly defeated an Irish Catholic Democrat to win the seat. He was reelected by large margins four times.
Outside of Congress, Herter was a founder of, and a major fund-raiser for, the School of Advanced International Studies, which became part of Johns Hopkins University in 1950. Along with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. , Herter took part in the successful effort to draft General Dwight D. Eisenhower as the Republican candidate for president in 1952. Herter was then drafted himself by Massachusetts Republicans to run for governor against two-term Democrat Paul A. Dever. He won by a slim margin on Eisenhower's coattails.
With Eisenhower safely reelected, Herter was made undersecretary of state at the urging of Nixon and White House chief of staff Sherman Adams; Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had wanted Herter at the lower rank of assistant secretary. After two years of doing relatively little, Herter had important duties thrust upon him in early 1959, when Dulles was ailing with cancer.
He died on December 30, 1966 at his home in Washington, at the age of 71. He was buried at the Prospect Hill Cemetery in Millis, Massachusetts.
Herter triumphed easily as a Republican and was reelected five times. In the Massachusetts House, Herter voted as a moderate conservative on social and economic questions and a liberal on civil liberties. He was also an elite reformer who bitterly opposed the unorthodox methods of the "Kingfish of Massachusetts, " Democratic governor James Michael Curley.
By the middle of the Depression decade, Herter was one of several eastern Republicans seeking a pragmatic accommodation with the policies of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.
Herter thus chaired a 1935 commission that designed state unemployment-compensation legislation applauded by labor unions and their supporters.
Elected speaker of the Massachusetts House in 1939 and 1941, Herter edged slightly to the left of moderate Republican governor Leverett Saltonstall. He broke with the governor most notably in 1941 by opposing a Saltonstall veto of a bill liberalizing old-age assistance payments.
As a congressman during World War II, Herter criticized the Office of Price Administration and other wartime agencies for bureaucratic excesses and strongly backed the idea of a postwar United Nations organization. After languishing on insignificant committees from 1943 to 1947, Herter got a chance to shine in the Republican Eightieth Congress as the vice-chairman and virtual head of the House Select Committee on Foreign Aid. Under his leadership, the "Herter Committee" toured eighteen war-torn countries, issued a series of detailed reports demonstrating the need for substantial American economic assistance to Europe, and laid the groundwork for congressional passage of the Marshall Plan. Herter ended his years in Congress as the quintessential "modern Republican. "
Though steadfastly conservative on labor-management issues, he lined up with other self-styled progressive Republicans in support of civil rights, public works, vigorous antitrust law enforcement, and selected social welfare programs.
In foreign affairs, Herter accepted the Truman administration's hard-line view of the Soviet Union as an expansionist power in need of containment, and endorsed the economic and military measures proposed for that purpose.
As might be expected, the Herter governorship was characterized by careful moderation. He pushed through a Republican legislature a mix of bills to reorganize the state tax-collection department, to create a special commission on Communism, to initiate a public-housing program, and to increase benefits for the elderly and needy.
During his second term when Democrats controlled the Massachusetts House, he was somewhat less successful. Still, in four years as governor, Herter won approval for 90 percent of his legislative initiatives. Just prior to the 1956 Republican National Convention, presidential adviser Harold Stassen proposed Herter as a replacement for Vice-President Richard Nixon, whom Stassen saw as a drag on Eisenhower's reelection chances. Upon advice from Republican elders, Herter disavowed the Stassen gambit and nominated Nixon at the convention.
Though his appointment as secretary of state shortly after Dulles' resignation in April 1959 seemed the fulfillment of a dream, Herter's brief tenure proved a disappointing anticlimax to his long career. Herter never established the close working relationship with Eisenhower that Dulles had developed over time; the president also decided to become more active in designing American foreign policy as his administration drew to a close. Major Herter proposals for disarmament and a "permanent settlement" of cold-war disputes in Europe failed to break the ice in Soviet-American relations. Simmering crises in Cuba, the Congo, and Laos vexed Herter but were left to be resolved by a new administration.
The lowest point of Herter's secretaryship came in May 1960 when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev used the downing of an American U-2 reconnaissance plane over the Soviet Union to break up the long-anticipated East-West summit conference. After Herter admitted the U-2 missions and defended them as necessary to American security interests, Khrushchev insisted that the flights cease and demanded an apology from the president, thereby destroying the last hope for détente in the Eisenhower years. Herter did manage to win high marks from the professional foreign service for his administration of the State Department. He corrected some personnel wrongs committed during the McCarthy era and regularly consulted foreign-service policy experts ignored by his predecessor. In addition, Herter's low-key anti-Communism has been viewed generally as a historical bridge between the stridency of Dulles and the more flexible cold-war diplomacy of President John F. Kennedy.
As if to illustrate the point, Democrat Kennedy appointed Republican Herter as the president's special representative for trade negotiations in 1962 (despite the persistence of crippling arthritis that had plagued Herter throughout his secretaryship). Retained by President Lyndon Johnson, Herter participated in the "Kennedy Round" tariff-reduction negotiations in Geneva from 1964 through 1966. Differences with European Common Market countries prevented Herter from achieving a substantial agreement before he died. Upon his death in Washington, Congressman Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. , a Massachusetts Democrat, paid Herter a fitting final tribute: "His style was that of the classic diplomat. He was patient, understanding and fair; and beneath his pleasant, polite manner was assurance and strength. "
Christian Herter's lifetime reputation was as an internationalist, especially interested in improving political and economic relations with Europe.
Herter was an active freemason. He was a member of the Grand Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Herter was tall and underweight.
Herter married the wealthy heiress Mary Caroline Pratt in 1917. She was the daughter of Frederic B. Pratt, longtime head of the Pratt Institute and granddaughter of Standard Oil magnate Charles Pratt. They had three sons and one daughter, including Christian A. Herter Jr. , who was active in international relations.