Background
He was born in Brookline, Massachussets on June 12, 1895? being the son of George Chalmers Cutler, a lumber manufacturer, and Mary Franklin Wilson.
(Excerpt from Louisburg Square Dr. Cary to see you, sir. ...)
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He was born in Brookline, Massachussets on June 12, 1895? being the son of George Chalmers Cutler, a lumber manufacturer, and Mary Franklin Wilson.
The youngest of five brothers from a close-knit, affluent old New England family, Cutler attended the Volkmann School in Boston. At Harvard, where he received a B. A. in 1916, Cutler was chosen class poet and commencement orator and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
He had all but decided to make writing his life's work when World War I intervened. Cutler enlisted in the army in 1917 but did not reach France until 1918. He saw no significant action as a first lieutenant with the Seventy-sixth Division of the American Expeditionary Force before the Armistice and was subsequently assigned to the Army of Occupation in Germany. Serving as adjutant to the Third Army Military Police Battalion in Coblenz, Cutler handled the administrative duties at headquarters with aplomb and efficiency. When he returned to civilian life in 1919, his father and author Owen Wister urged him to attend Harvard Law School. Somewhat to his surprise, Cutler found the subject matter to his liking and decided upon law as a career.
After graduation, he taught freshman English at Harvard and Radcliffe for a year, wrote short literary pieces for The Nation, and published a novel, Louisburg Square. Cutler's love story of an ill-fated debutante ably depicted the manners and morals of the proper Boston the author knew best and won praise from the critics.
After receiving an LL. B. in 1922, he was so eager to begin practice that he spurned an offer to become private secretary to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Instead, he joined his brother George at the Boston law firm of Herrick, Smith, Donald & Farley. Before he immersed himself in his new profession, however, Cutler turned out one last novel. The Speckled Bird, published in 1923, chronicled the sad life of another wealthy young woman and received only mixed reviews. As an associate with Herrick, Smith, Cutler found a home in corporate law. He drafted bylaws, wrote records, and handled rate regulation cases for numerous subsidiary companies during the 1920's. Having been made a full partner in his firm in 1929, he graduated to the role of corporate counsel for some of the largest enterprises in New England. Soon after the inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, Cutler became an expert on the finer points of the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Securities Act and was often called upon to represent industrial and financial clients before federal agencies. Because of his professional standing, capacity for hard work, and skill as an after-dinner speaker, Cutler was in demand for the charitable and political fund-raising chores of the Great Depression decade. He volunteered his services to the Greater Boston Community Fund (GBCF), a coalition of private welfare groups, for four years (1936 - 1940), chaired the GBCF's successful drive in 1937, and went on to the presidency of a national charitable association, Community Chests and Councils (1940 - 1942). In politics he served as finance chairman of the campaign of his friend, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. , who defeated the roguish Democratic governor, James Michael Curley, for the United States Senate in 1936. Cutler also was an enthusiastic backer of reform Democrat Maurice J. Tobin, who bested Curley in the Boston mayoral elections of 1937 and 1941. In 1940 Tobin prevailed upon the nominally Republican Cutler to join his administration as city corporation counsel. His responsibilities in this position included issuing opinions on a wide range of city business, drafting enabling bills for consideration by the state legislature, and commanding a battery of lawyers who argued Boston's cases in the trial courts. In 1942, Cutler left Boston and the practice of law to become a colonel and assistant deputy director of the Army Specialist Corps (ASC), which had been created to recruit noncombatant officers with special skills, such as lawyers, scientists, and technicians. In short order, he recognized that the ASC was competing needlessly with the regular Army Procurement Service and prepared a memorandum proposing that the two personnel operations be merged for greater efficiency. It naturally followed that he would become a senior colonel of the Officer Procurement Service, the agency created as a result of his memo, which commissioned nearly 30, 000 new officers in twelve months. In the fall of 1943, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson sought to make further use of Cutler's legal and organizational skills. He made Cutler a special assistant in the War Department and put him in charge of the knotty problem of accommodating voting by members of the armed services in wartime. Cutler influenced the course of service voting legislation in Congress and then, upon passage of a complex compromise bill, functioned in the dual role of coordinator of soldier voting for the army and executive officer of the newly formed War Ballot Commission. As a result of his efforts, a full 35 percent of the 9. 2 million American servicemen at war around the globe had their marked ballots delivered by priority mail to the United States in 1944.
For most of the next year Cutler carried out special assignments for Stimson, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, and other War Department officials. In December 1945 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and the Legion of Merit and left the army with the rank of brigadier general. Upon his return from Washington, Cutler moved up in the Brahmin establishment of Boston. He was elected president of the Old Colony Trust Company (1946) and chairman of the board of Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (1949). He headed the Committee of Citizens to Survey Metropolitan Boston (1947 - 1949), a large-scale effort to gather and publish accurate data on the health and welfare facilities and services available in the region. Rejoining government intermittently during the postwar years, Cutler managed the military's successful presentation of the case for a supplementary defense budget at U. S. Senate hearings in 1948 as a special assistant to Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal. He also served briefly as deputy director of the Psychological Strategy Board, part of the country's new Cold War planning apparatus, in 1951. In 1952, he joined Senator Lodge in the movement that drafted General Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president and, at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, played a key role in the successful credentials fight for disputed seats in the Texas delegation which led to Eisenhower's nomination on the first ballot. Eisenhower had known Cutler since the 1948 defense budget hearings, and in the fall asked his Bostonian friend to serve as his personal companion and principal factotum on a climactic campaign train trip across the country. After his landslide victory, president-elect Eisenhower tapped Cutler to do a study of the National Security Council, the advisory body established in 1947 to bring together the various elements of national security policy, and to make recommendations toward its overhaul and improvement. Among Cutler's proposals was the creation of the new post of special assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, which he assumed at Eisenhower's request in 1953. Through Cutler, Eisenhower established and maintained a military-style planning operation in his administration and gave the NSC a more central role in the formulation of Cold War defense and foreign policy than it had under Harry Truman. Working up to seventy hours a week, the special assistant chaired the Policy Planning Board of experts from the various departments and agencies, briefed the president on the papers produced by the planners, and prepared the agenda for weekly NSC meetings at which he was moderator. After the NSC meetings, where policy options were discussed fully and debated, Eisenhower informed Cutler of the decision he had reached and the latter recorded it and oversaw its implementation. Unlike the special assistants in succeeding administrations, Cutler was not a national security "adviser. " Although he did express himself on matters of policy, his role was more that of a coordinator or "custodian" of the process leading to a presidential decision. "My job, " Cutler later wrote, "was to administer, to serve, to get things done, and to be trusted. " Cutler was present at the creation of Eisenhower foreign policy for nearly four years (January 1953-April 1955 and January 1957-July 1958) and received the presidential Medal of Freedom in 1955. He was instrumental in the deliberations that resulted in the termination of the Korean War (1953); CIA-engineered coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954); the avoidance of war in Indochina after the fall of the French at Dien Bien Phu (1954); the innovative but ill-fated "Atoms for Peace" (1953) and "Open Skies" (1955) arms control initiatives; the anti-Communist "Eisenhower Doctrine" for the Middle East (1957), and the subsequent landing of Marines in Lebanon (1958). Within the administration, Cutler made an unsuccessful attempt to convince the president to speak out against Wisconsin senator Joseph R. McCarthy.
In 1959, Eisenhower lured Cutler away from private banking to serve as both special assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury and the United States member of the eight-man board of executive directors of the Inter-American Development Bank, a precursor to John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, which supplemented private capital with government loans in order to promote economic development and modernization in Latin America. He left this last government post in 1962. Outside of his beloved Boston, Robert Cutler was probably the least-known member of President Eisenhower's inner circle. However, because he held that decision making should be left solely to the president and that those entrusted with government secrets had an obligation to "keep their traps shut, " journalists and others seeking a glimpse inside the corridors of power viewed him as something of a glib and shadowy mandarin.
"No Time for Rest", his engaging autobiography, was published in 1966. Cutler died in Concord, Massachussets.
Records pertaining to Robert Cutler's government service are in the files of the War and Defense Departments in the National Archives and in the papers of the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and other collections in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. Some of Cutler's work with the National Security Council is revealed in the documents included in the volumes of Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1960.
(Excerpt from Louisburg Square Dr. Cary to see you, sir. ...)
Although he himself was a tough-minded opponent of Communism who saw the leaders of the Soviet Union as an "implacable gang dedicated to ruling the world, " Cutler believed McCarthy's hyperbolic red-baiting to be indecent and damaging to America's prestige.
To friends and those with whom he worked closely, he was the highly efficient but always affable "Bobby, " a raconteur with a ready supply of ribald stories.
Cutler, who never married, spent his remaining years writing and raising money for the Harvard Medical Center, other institutions affiliated with his alma mater, and St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral in Boston.