Aerlinthian

John Hay “Jock” Whitney, the multi-millionaire sportsman, pioneering color-movie producer, soldier, financier, philanthropist, art-collector, diplomat, and newspaper publisher was born in Elsworth, Maine on August 27, 1904. He was a descendant of John Whitney, a Puritan who settled in Massachusetts in 1635, as well as of William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower. Both of his two grandfathers, one a Republican and one a Democrat, were presidential cabinet members. So socially secure he was never listed in the Social Register, Whitney denounced it as a form of social arbitration that was undemocratic. John Hay Whitney was a Scion of Society; he needed no one or nothing to tell him that. A stalwart of moderate Republicanism, Whitney was one of the ultimate symbols of the Eastern Establishment that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan later repudiated with their neo-conservative populism.

Jock's father, William Payne Whitney, a capitalist and philanthropist born in New York City on March 20, 1876, was the son of William Collins Whitney and Flora Payne Whitney. Flora Payne Whitney was the daughter of prominent Democratic politician Henry B. Payne, who represented his Cleveland, Ohio district in the United States House of Representatives for one term from 1875 to 1877, and served one term as United States Senator from Ohio from 1885 to 1891. Henry Payne was descended, through his grandfather, from William Bradford, the Puritan governor of the Plymouth Colony.

Payne Whitney matriculated at Yale College (Class of 1898) and then studied at Harvard Law School, graduating with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1901. Building on his several million dollars worth of inherited real estate assets, Payne Whitney soon became a leading player in New York's financial community. He eventually was appointed director or executive officer of many large corporations, including the First National Bank of New York, the Great Northern Paper Co., the Northern Finance Corp., and the Whitney Realty Co. He married Helen Hay, the daughter of the serving U.S. Secretary of State, in 1902.

Jock Whitney's mother Helen Hay Whitney was the daughter of John Hay, Jock's name-sake, who served as Lincoln's assistant private secretary, Ambassador to the United Kingdom under President McKinley, and as Secretary of State under both McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, acquitting himself quite well during the Spanish-American War. Jock's paternal grandfather William Collins Whitney, the man who helped rid New York City of the deleterious influence of Boss Tweed's gang, was President Grover Cleveland's Secretary of the Navy (first or second administration) and was touted as the possible Democratic candidate for president in 1892 before Cleveland himself stood once again for re-election.

The family's New York City residence, located at 972 Fifth Avenue, was designed by Stanford White and is considered one of that great architect's finest mature works. Now the home of the French Embassy's Cultural Services department, White designed and oversaw the construction of the exterior and interiors of the house, which had been commissioned in 1902 by Payne Whitney's uncle Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne as a wedding gift for his nephew and his bride. The Colonel had put up $625,000 to build the five-story mansion (approximately $16 million in 2008 dollars, when factored for inflation), the construction of which was still under White's supervision when he was murdered in 1906. Jock's mother, Helen Hay Whitney, continued to live in the house until her death in 1944.

The 1920 census lists the Payne Whitneys as living at 972 Fifth Ave. with their two children and 13 servants. At the time, they lived around the corner from James D. Duke, the cigarette baron, and his wife Natalie and daughter Doris. Payne Whitney's uncle Oliver Hazard Payne had arranged the financial buyout of Duke's competitors to create the American Tobacco Co., though Payne Whitney and James Duke did not do business together. Fifth Avenue along the streets numbered in the 60s and 70s was the place to live for the very rich in the first half of the 20th Century. By the 1930 census, Helen Hay Whitney was listed as living with her son John Hay Whitney and 21 servants at the family's fabulous 438-acre estate Greentree in Manhasset, situated on Long Island's Gold Coast.

Jock was related to the railroad Harriman family through his sister Joan's husband Charles Payson, and to the Vanderbilts through his aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the eldest daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. (She was also related to the Harrimans.) He was also related by marriage to Columbia Broadcasting System founder William Paley, who was married to his wife's sister, the former Barbara Cushing, who was the first wife of James Roosevelt, the son of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. Jock's cousins included his aunt Gertrude's son Cornelius Vanderbilt (”Sonny”) Whitney, the chairman of Pan American , and his wife's brother-in-law was Vincent Astor, the son of slumlord John Jacob Astor IV, who went down with the Titanic, perishing in the North Atlantic.

Jock Whitney attended Yale College, where his major pursuits were drama and rowing. His father, grandfather and great-uncle had all been oarsmen at Yale, and his father Payne had been captain of the crew in 1898. Payne Whitney followed the Yale rowing team all his life and helped finance the team, including donating financing to build a dormitory for the crew. While at Yale, John Hay Whitney allegedly coined the term “crew cut” for the haircut that now bears the name. Yale lore holds that young Jock went to a local tonsorial palace and asked for a short “Hindenburg” military cut. It was not long after the First World War, and anything German was still unpopular. (Sauerkraut had been renamed “liberty salad” during World War I.) The barber suggested to Jock that the hair-style should have a new name. They called it the “crew cut” in honor of Yale oarsmen.

After graduating in 1926 (the Yale Yearbook listed Jock's ambition as being the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom), Whitney went on to Oxford, but the death of his father at the family's Greentree estate on May 25, 1927 necessitated his returning home. He inherited a trust fund of $20 million from his father (approximately $240 million in 2008 dollars), and would later inherit an estimated four times that amount from his mother. The money came from his paternal grandfather, William Collins Whitney, a traction magnate who consolidated New York City's street and railway lines, and his uncle, Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne, a business partner of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

Jock Whitney also inherited his mother and father's love of horses, a predilection he shared with his sister, Joan Whitney Payson, who went on to be the first owner of the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club from the Mets' founding in 1961 until her death in 1975. Payne Whitney had been interested in horse racing, and he had established a racing stable of his own to raise thoroughbred horses. After Payne's death, Jock's mother Helen owned the famous Kentucky horse-breeding farm Greentree Stables, which Jock and his sister ran for her. In 1928, Jock became the youngest member ever elected to the Jockey Club.

A master horseman, he almost won Britain's Grand National steeplechase in 1929. Jock was enjoying a commanding and apparently safe lead when Easter Hero, his horse, twisted a plate and was beaten by a nose at the finish by a 100-to-1 long shot. Though Whitney entered the Grand National annually after his heartbreaking loss, he never again came so close to winning.

He entered four horses in the Kentucky Derby in the 1930s: Stepenfetchit, which finished 3rd in 1932, Overtime, which finished 5th in 1933, Singing Wood, which finished 8th in 1934, and Heather Broom, which finished 3rd in 1939. Jock was an outstanding polo player, with a four-goal handicap, and it was as a sportsman that John Hay Whitney made the cover of the March 27, 1933 issue of TIME Magazine.

Other horse races he was involved in were the 1952 and '56 presidential elections, where he was the major financial backer of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike had emerged from World War II as the great hero of his generation, supplanting Franklin D. Roosevelt in the hearts of tens of millions of Americans after the President passed away just before the Crusade in Europe was over. (Eleanor Roosevelt told a story of how FDR's pet Scotty dog Fala, bereft at the loss of his beloved master, one day heard the sirens of a motorcade approaching the Roosevelt home at Hyde Park, New York. Fala was beside himself with joy, as he was convinced the President was finally coming home. It wasn't FDR, but General Eisenhower, back from the war and calling on the First Lady of his former Commander-in-Chief.)

Dwight Eisenhower had served as the first commander of NATO and as President of Columbia University before entering politics. So popular was he with such a broad swath of Americans, that incumbent President Harry S Truman, his second Commander-in-Chief, offered him the 1952 Democratic Presidential nomination when he realized his party would not nominate him for a third term. (The two later fell out when Ike did not repudiate a slur on General George C. Marshall, Ike's superior and Truman's Secretary of State and Defense, made by “Tail-gunner” Joe McCarthy, the notorious red-baiter.)

General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower had never been registered to a party, as per fellow General of the Army George C. Marshall's dictum that a professional soldier should have no politics. With the war in Korea stalemated, Ike decided to make a run for Commander-in-Chief and First Magistrate of the Republic, and he threw in his lot with the G.O.P., turning his back on the Democratic Roosevelt-Truman administration that had made his career and reputation.

The problem was that the head of the reactionary old guard of the Grand Old Party, then in full flower with McCarthyism at its high-water mark, the isolationist and anti-internationalist Robert Taft, the Senator from Ohio (son of former President and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard “Heavy Cargo” Taft), wanted the nomination. Taft, as profiled in John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, had blown it in 1948 when his principled stand against the Nuremburg Trials eroded his support for the nomination. The party had given the nomination to New York Governor Tom Dewey, who reprised his '44 defeat. In 1952, Robert Taft was still anxious to follow his father into the White House.

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur had briefly flirted with becoming a candidate for the Republican nomination in 1948 (ironically, Robert Taft's father, in his capacity as Governor General of the Philippines, had sacked Dugout Doug's father, Major General Arthur MacArthur, from his military command in the Philippines at the turn of the century), but his candidacy had fizzled. But Eisenhower was the real thing. He had risen to the top of the military heap not from tactical brilliance, like MacArthur (arguably, the most able battlefield commander of World War II), but through politics: Ike had been able to command the warring egos of the Allied commanders in Europe. Ike was as much politician as general, where Douglas MacArthur's sense of politics was as poor as his generalship was superb.

Both parties wanted Ike, and Ike threw his hat in the GOP ring. Now, it was a matter of delivering the nomination The Eastern Establishment, as personified by 1944 and '48 Republican nominee Thomas Dewey, the Governor of New York, U.S Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. of Massachusetts (who spent so much time on Ike's campaign, he managed to lose his seat to a Democratic Congressman yclept John F. Kennedy), and Jock Whitney threw their backing to Eisenhower. With Dewey and Lodge as his floor managers at the GOP convention, Ike took the nomination on the first ballot and took the November election in a landslide. Then, as now, it took a lot of loot to play politics, and Jock Whitney helped deliver the boodle.

During his second term as President, Ike appointed Jock ambassador to the Court of St. James, following in the footsteps of his grandfather and realizing the ambition he had mentioned in the Yale yearbook. Whitney played a major role in improving Anglo-American relations, which had been severely strained during the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Eisenhower demanded that the British, French and Israelis terminate their invasion of Egypt.

But that lay in the future. First, Hollywood beckoned.

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