Background
He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Thomas Dickson Finletter and Helen Grill. Finletter's father and grandfather were judges of the Court of Common Pleas.
(Title: Power and policy : U.S. foreign policy and militar...)
Title: Power and policy : U.S. foreign policy and military power in the hydrogen age.
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(This book, "Survival in the air age, a report", by Finlet...)
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He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Thomas Dickson Finletter and Helen Grill. Finletter's father and grandfather were judges of the Court of Common Pleas.
Finletter attended the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia from 1905 to 1910.
After spending a year in France with his mother, he enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, receiving a B. A. in 1915. He then entered the University of Pennsylvania Law School, but his studies were interrupted by service in World War I.
Finletter served in France with the 312th Field Artillery, in which he attained the rank of captain by the war's end. He then returned to law school, receiving his LL. B. in 1920.
Thomas Finletter then made two breaks with his past.
He also decided to leave Philadelphia and practice law in New York City.
He became a partner at Coudert Brothers in New York City, specializing in bankruptcy law. During the 1930's, in addition to his responsibilities at Coudert Brothers, Finletter committed to a part-time teaching post at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and published three law texts.
In March 1941, Finletter was named special assistant to the secretary of state. Two years later he became the executive director of the Office of Foreign Economic Coordination. His principal responsibilities consisted of acquiring strategic materials from abroad and diverting them from enemy use.
He left the State Department in 1944 when Edward Stettinius, Jr. , replaced Cordell Hull as secretary. Finletter returned to Coudert Brothers but served in May 1945 as a consultant to the American delegation to the United Nations Conference. President Harry S. Truman named Finletter in July 1947 to chair an Air Policy Commission to examine all phases of military and civilian aviation.
The commission heard 150 witnesses, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and visited air facilities and aircraft factories. Its report, Survival in the Air Age, argued for a rapid expansion of the air force over the next five years to meet the impending threat of an air attack by the Soviet Union.
The New York Times characterized it as "one of the most solemn reports on the defense of the United States ever prepared in time of peace, " and it became a key Cold War document.
He served in this Marshall Plan post until June 1949. President Truman named Finletter secretary of the air force in April 1950. Finletter succeeded Stuart Symington, the first air force secretary, who had been an outspoken proponent of air force expansion beyond the president's budgetary constraints. Finletter was an equally ardent defender of expansion, but more politic in expressing the case. He particularly stressed strategic air capability as the cornerstone of the nation's defense.
The outbreak of hostilities in Korea in June 1950 initiated tremendous expansion in defense outlays, and the air force gained disproportionately from that spending. When Finletter left his post at the end of the Truman presidency, the air force had grown well beyond the size he had called for in his report five years earlier.
Finletter returned to Coudert Brothers in 1953 but continued to engage in public affairs. He served as an adviser to Adlai Stevenson leading up to his 1956 and 1960 presidential campaigns.
In 1954 he published Power and Policy, a reassertion of his beliefs that nuclear supremacy was the backbone of deterrence and that self-preservation came before economy.
By the end of the decade he was arguing that a "missile gap" had emerged. For all of Finletter's insistence on nuclear deterrence, he expressed a continuing hope of cultivating the rule of law rather than the use of force as the core of international policy. In 1958, Finletter sought the New York Democratic nomination for the United States Senate.
Despite receiving endorsements from Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert Lehman, he lost the nomination to Frank Hogan, Manhattan District Attorney. President John Kennedy appointed Finletter United States ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1961.
He proved to be a key player in winning European support for American policy during the Cuban missile crisis. He continued in the position into the Johnson administration, resigning in July 1965. Thus ended a quarter-century of significant, but largely anonymous government service.
Finletter, then seventy-one, returned to New York City to practice law, write, and continue as a behind-the-scenes player in Democratic politics.
He died in New York City.
(This book, "Survival in the air age, a report", by Finlet...)
(Title: Power and policy : U.S. foreign policy and militar...)
(Old History)
Dismayed by the Republican role in denying American entry into the League of Nations, he became a Democrat.
From 1920 to 1926 he was a member of the Cravath and Henderson firm.
On July 17, 1920, Finletter married Gretchen Blaine Damrosch, daughter of the conductor Walter Damrosch and granddaughter of the 1884 Republican presidential nominee, James G. Blaine.
His first wife died in 1969, and Finletter married Eileen Wechsler Geist on January 13, 1973. The couple had two children.