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Raymond W. Goldsmith Oral History Interview

Oral History Interview with
Raymond W. Goldsmith

Economist with SEC, War Production Board, State Department, 1934-48; staff, National Bureau Economic Research, 1952-70.

New Haven Connecticut
June 25, 1973
by Richard D. McKinzie

[Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]

 


Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened July 1977
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

 

[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]

 



Oral History Interview with
Raymond W. Goldsmith

 

New Haven Connecticut
June 25, 1973
by Richard D. McKinzie

[1]

MCKINZIE: Professor Goldsmith, many historians would be interested in the kinds of people who worked on economic problems in the Truman administration. Would you tell me a little bit about how you first became associated with Government work in, I think, 1934?

GOLDSMITH: I started in 1934 at the Securities and Exchange Commission in the then very small

[2]

Research Division headed by Doctor Paul Gourrich, and slowly worked up as it was rapidly enlarged. I was for a number of years, from about '37 to about '39, in effect Deputy Director. When Dr. Gourrich got another job within the SEC, I became the head of the Research Section which became part of the Trading and Exchange Division. I stayed there until early '42 when I transferred to the War Production Board, where I worked in the economic side of the Planning Division, headed by Professor Simon Kuznets, the Nobel Prize man. The boss of the whole show was Robert Nathan, who since 1946 has had a fairly big consulting firm in Washington. I dealt mainly there with problems of war finance. I also worked on war expenditures and war production of other countries, allies as well as enemies, and wrote several reports in this field. Finally I wrote

[3]

a long memorandum on the submarine war together with James R. Newman, the well known writer.

I stayed on there until 1947, I think, when Mr. [Joseph] Dodge, whom I met in Berlin (as I will refer to in a minute), asked me to come along with him as economic adviser for the Austrian State Treaty negotiations in Vienna. David Ginsburg, a very well-known Washington attorney, was his legal adviser and really the brains.

Then after that I did a few odd jobs for the State Department until early 1948 when I went back to academic work, doing a three volume study: A Study of Saving in the United States. Let me get back to the most interesting part, which was the committee to evolve a plan for German currency reform.

Mr. Dodge at that time, i.e. in 1945-46,

[4]

was the head of the Finance Division, in General [Lucius D.] Clay's Military Government. On Clay's legal staff was Mr. David Ginsburg, who had, since he was very young, been drafted into the Army and was at that time a captain in the Army. He knew me because his wife and my wife were good friends, and we lived in the same apartment house in Washington.

I paid him a short visit in December 1945, after I was through with acting as statistical advisor to the American delegation to the Reparations Conference. We had talks, and then in the spring, they asked me and Gerhard Colm, who was by that time one of the top economists in the Bureau of the Budget. So we went over and we right away decided it was best to invite Mr. Dodge to join us. So it became a three-man group, the report which the mission submitted in the spring of 1946,

[5]

is usually known as the CDG, Colm-Dodge-Goldsmith, report. We were for about three months in Germany, traveled around half of the time and spent half of the time in Berlin. We had really argued out the essence of the plan on the plane flying over.

MCKINZIE: Whose original idea was it?

GOLDSMITH: Colm and myself, I can't disentangle the share of the two of us, but we had the basis of it when we went to Germany. Of course, we had to firm it up and one of the big jobs was, number one, to talk to all possible people in Germany who could help, and number two, also keep liaison, since at that time everything was quadripartite.

The British had a very good man at the head of their Finance Division. His name was Paul Chambers, he's now Sir Paul Chambers. He's been

[6]

chairman of Imperial Chemicals and came to grief when a merger didn't work out; but he's still a big shot. He came from the Indian civil service.

MCKINZIE: Who was the Frenchman?

GOLDSMITH: I forget the name of the man whom they had sent. I simply don't know. They played no great role. The Russians had an excellent man, Mr. Maletin who later became a vice minister of finance and may have already have been that when he was sent to Berlin. He came from around Murmansk, and his father was a fisherman, he was extremely smart, and also spoke excellent academic Russian, like cultivated people do.

So, we sat around with them and had a number of very interesting discussions. Of course, we never got together, everyone had his

[7]

instructions. One time, I remember that was around Easter 1946, the Russians invited us to take a trip with them to Prague, through the Russian occupied zone, but, I regret to say, since we just drove through, all we saw was Leipzig where we stayed one night.

Since the people who had been high up in the Nazi council were ruled out, we consulted a number of older people whom, generally, Dr. Colm knew from before 1933. We talked with all of them and there were numerous plans floating around. The report we made has been printed in one of the German economic periodicals and was translated a few years later after it was de-classified. So we traveled through the American zone, but also through the French zone and British zone. As a matter of fact, there was at that time a joint western sort of headquarters, I think in Minden.

The result of all this was a report which

[8]

when we left we submitted to General Clay, and it's that report which later was published in Germany.

This report really had two essential parts. The two essential parts were, first, that all monetary claims, currency, mortgages, whatever it was, must be written down in the ratio of ten to one, so what had been a hundred reichsmarks became ten deutsche marks . The second was, that since the first step, of course, could not do anything from the point of view of social equity, that the Germans were supposed to put some levy on those people who gained by this operation and to some extent to compensate those who lost. This was called an Ausgleichsabgabe -- equalization fund.

General Clay accepted the first part of the plan, but did not accept the second one, saying, "We are not here to introduce social

[9]

reforms into Germany. If the German Government wants to do that it's all right, but I'm not going to do it." He simply regarded this equalization levy as too close to socialism.

MCKINZIE: Had you discussed this point with him before you left?

GOLDSMITH: We had, of course, explained why we had made this suggestion. There is a description of his reaction in his book on his experience as military governor. I should say that I have the highest opinion of him as administrator. He was extremely fair and he mercilessly dealt with anybody on his staff who didn't have the answer. He never said so, but I'm sure that the reason he did not want to go into this second part, which we thought to be the really an intrinsic part of the whole plan, was that this was against his conservative feelings.

[10]

He was a very close personal friend of Jimmy [James F.] Byrnes, and Mr. and Mrs. Byrnes once visited Berlin, and of course, they stayed with the Clays.

The Germans, as you probably know, never did go ahead with the Ausgleichsabgabe we had envisaged. They did, of course, make some quite substantial compensation to people who suffered from the Nazis. But that was not what we had intended. Ours was to compensate the people who were losing by the currency reform. They did a few odds and ends, but after a few years the country was prosperous enough that nobody cared anymore. The ratio of ten to one unfortunately was somewhat changed in the actual reform which came one year later. In the early summer of 1948 the four powers broke up and at that time the whole quadripartite arrangement exploded, and it became obvious that the westerners were to do

[11]

in their zone what they wanted, and the Soviets in theirs what they wanted. There had already been available for many years, a supply of German bank notes printed, and the plates were never given to the Russians as far as I know. In Austria they were not given to them -- and the man who was the head of the finance division in Austria, the Professor of the University of Minnesota, [Arthur W.] Marget, always regarded as one of his main achievements that he had prevailed upon General Mark Clark not to hand the plates over to the Russians.

In '49, then when the quadripartite arrangements broke up officially, we put through a currency reform. But unfortunately, to be on the safe side, the actual write down became one to fifteen, because they froze part of the written down tenth.

My feeling has always been that this was a

[12]

serious mistake, because it led to a very low price level in Germany, and wage level, and it gave them a great competitive advantage, but by the fifties or so they lost it. But I think it was a serious mistake and a lot of the troubles that we've had in international monetary affairs, was due to their having over-cut the money supply.

When a devaluation is too sharp, you undervalue the currency and thereby give an advantage. That's what the French did in the 1920's, and which they did again in the late forties, with excellent effect each time; it's even possible that Clay and his advisers did this consciously, because late in '48 there came, of course, a great shift from treating the Germans as a conquered country to treating them as future Allies and, hence, of harming them as little as possible. That also led, of course,

[13]

to the stopping of reparations in kind.

All in all I'm quite proud of the plan. It's the nearest I've ever been in this life to the higher levels of policymaking and I think even after 20 years this will stand up. It would even have been better if it had been really a one to ten write down. It's difficult to figure out what it actually was, because a part the new marks were frozen in a way that differed according to all sorts of complicated regulations. The effect was that the money supply really was cut effectively by well over one to ten, I would say between one to twelve and one to fifteen, and I think that this gap was responsible for a great deal of the trouble by undervaluing the mark, the troubles we've had to the middle and late fifties. After that, of course, this disappeared, and the Japanese began to be the "bad boys."

[14]

MCKINZIE: At the time you were undergoing this study, did General Clay or anyone else on your staff talk to you about the place of Germany in the future of Europe?

GOLDSMITH: No. I think Clay was not given to general talk. He just handled one thing after the other as it came. He was an operator and administrator. I'm sure he had some ideas, but I don't remember that they were discussed. There were always, in the military government, two wings: the one which while, of course, not adopting the Morgenthau plan as such, was, however, for a rather strict control of Germany; and the other one, which definitely got the upper hand by the middle of '49, wanted to, as I say, hustle their recovery so that the government became an ally.

In the early military government there were

[15]

very strange characters still around, who later turned out to be fellow travelers. In the famous mission which [John K.] Galbraith headed, several members fairly soon went to Eastern Germany -- Jurgen Kuczinsky being, maybe, the main example.

It was a period of great interest. It is, of course, well-known that the United States Government was rooked. We were paid in dollars, but many people changed them, not at the official rate, because it was ridiculous, but at the black market rate, into marks. But the messes and similar supply organizations were accepting marks, so you could buy cigarettes at the PX, and for ten cartons, known in Germany as a Stange, you could transfer them into marks, at a thousand marks, I think. With that you could then go into a PX and buy yourself some uniforms or whatever. This fantastic thing went on for

[16]

several months. Colm and I once were riding in a car driven by a GI. We discussed how some of these loopholes could be plugged. Finally the chauffeur turned around, and said, "Give up, there are about a thousand of you, but there are a hundred thousands of us who try to get around it;" and so it was. It was a fantastic thing.

Then Clay or Mrs. Clay hit upon the idea to regularize some of these things. They opened a shop in the American zone with Germans who wanted to sell things, silver and so forth, and there would be a price put on it, and then anybody could buy it. We hoped that way to get these people better prices and also keep out swindlers. He regarded that, and in a way it was, as a solution for the Germans who had to live on selling their things. I know that I bought one of these big atlases for the equivalent

[17]

of, well, six packages of cigarettes. I did it on occasion, but there were fellows who made little fortunes. It took the higher-ups quite a while to get wise.

The head of the finance division of the military government was Bernard Bernstein, Colonel Bernstein; a very smart and tough lawyer who has been in private practice for many years in New York. He tried to get these things changed. He was there for months and months, and as a matter of fact, he had been one of the assistant general counsels of Morgenthau. A few days before the North African invasion, he was called over and General [George C.] Marshall said that he was being made, this very day, lieutenant colonel and he would be in charge of finance operations. So, he landed with the troops in Algiers, and took over the Banks of Algiers, finance etc., and then he was transferred

[18]

to Germany. Bernstein, of course, tried to get these rules changed, and finally they were.

MCKINZIE: I wonder if you could say a little bit about the Germans that you dealt with?

GOLDSMITH: We looked up everybody not associated with the Nazi regime. We talked to everybody we thought could give us ideas including some well-known professors, and I still think that the two men who were most helpful and most understanding, were two very old professors [Eugen] Schmalenbach in Cologne, and [Alfred] Weber in Heidelberg. But we also talked, of course, to some bankers and some economists, dozens and dozens of people. And there were at least a dozen plans around, currency reform plans. Also there were German books describing all of these currency reform plans. Well, I think that ours--

[19]

not because we were the powers that be,-- was really better; but some of them were very similar. There aren’t that many possibilities.

The Germans were, to a good extent, people who Colm of I had known, but a number we had not known well. We always visited the finance ministers of the different Laender.

There was Dr. Veit who later became the head of the Regional Central Bank of Hessen. As you know, the Germans have a central bank-- but they have also semi-independent banks in each of the states (Laender). They didn’t exist at that time but some of the people we dealt with later became heads. While the advice of all these people was useful and we tried to get their reactions, I don’t think we really got too much out of them. I think we assessed the psychological situation better then they did. They had, of course, lived through four

[20]

terrible years, so they were ultra-cautious. At least some of them. I would now have difficulty distinguishing what one said from the other. We really talked to most of the people who in the next decade became important; not to Adenauer. Adenauer as you know, might even have been in British custody, but we certainly didn't talk to him. But we did go to Cologne and talk to Schmalenbach who had been -- he was in retirement --the leading, business economist in Germany, in the academic sense. I mean as if he had been at the Harvard Business School. Alred Weber, of course, was a younger brother of Max Weber and very universal-minded like his brother, not a specialist on currency reforms.

We also talked to a few other people that had been in the Reichsbank. As I said, we really had the plan in essence when we came over on the plane. So what we really did is to see

[21]

whether there was any hitch and whether there couldn't be something done better. Some things, of course, we did do better. We had quite a good staff, because in addition to the report itself, which was only, about a hundred pages -- and Clay read it in its entirety -- we had back-up memoranda. Nobody knew at that time how much currency was around to make close estimates. So we had sample surveys, which our military government introduced into Germany, along the line it had been done by Michigan University during the war. There were some people who were familiar with that in the American military government headquarters in Frankfurt and they organized a survey in Germany where they tried to find out how much currency people had, on a sample basis, and what they would do in this or that situation.

[22]

MCKINZIE: Did this kind of information come in steadily and voluntarily from the Soviet delegates here?

GOLDSMITH: Oh, absolutely nothing. It was a very formal relationship. I don't know whether to be so positive -- but I think we always met in a building which was a quadripartite facility, which constituted a free zone. It was physically in the American zone. No, no, the Russians from the beginning always were only interested in getting what they wanted.

MCKINZIE: That was clear to you at the time?

GOLDSMITH: Yes, that was clear. They were pretty tough to deal with, but Maletin, I repeat, was a very competent and very smart man; and he was the delegation. The second man on was a university professor who ran around in a colonel's uniform, but spoke only rarely. Some of them

[23]

spoke German, had learned enough of it so that sometimes I could talk with them. Maletin didn't speak English, and I don't think German; but he had, of course, his interpreters and we had ours. I had great respect for him; I don't know whether he is still alive. When I was in the Soviet Union in 1963 I tried to reach him, but I never had a reply. He was either out of town or just didn't want to meet me. At that time he was Deputy Minister of Finance; he must be retired now.

MCKINZIE: Could you tell me a little bit about how you happened to go to the Paris Peace Conference in 1946?

GOLDSMITH: Oh, that was very simple. That was headed by Professor [James Waterhouse] Angell, and he had asked Homer Jones of, I think, the FDIC at that time to be his statistical advisor.

[24]

For some reason or another, Jones didn't want to go, and he suggested they ask me which they did. I didn't mind, because I could speak French; so that's how I got there. It was quite interesting. For the first time I worked in diplomatic negotiations. There were twelve countries involved and it wasn't like victors and vanquished; we were all supposed to be Allies. By that time the Russians weren't in but the Yugoslavs were; and the Yugoslav delegate, whose name I've forgotten -- later became a minister -- was extremely active. What was to be determined was the distribution of the spoils, the percentages of the reparations to be taken out of Germany. Each delegation, of course, wanted to get the maximum percentage. The Yugoslav delegate was very, very good, and he must have gotten a few percent extra. It all proved to be of no avail, because a few months

[25]

later reparations were stopped in the Western zones. The chairman was the French delegate, a very conservative French economist named Jacque Rueff, who is still alive and still insists that the world must go back to the gold standard.

I remember the Greeks. The Greeks like everyone else set down what they had lost to the Germans In doing so the Greek delegation came up with a fantastic figure, and I tried to point out that this was larger than the total national wealth of Greece. They took that very ill and regarded me as an enemy of Greece. Finally it didn't matter, but in December '45 everybody there still thought there was money to be had.

We argued a great deal about these submissions and worked things out diplomatically. The figures have been published: the Belgian delegate, after it was over, simply handed them

[26]

to his central bank and they were printed in an issue of the monthly bulletin of the Banque Nationalede Belgigue. The conference lasted about six or eight weeks and was very interesting. We from the beginning said that we would only claim as much as we had alien assets in the United States. That was to make sure that we didn't have to cough anything up; we had no interest in getting anything. These were our instructions, and that's more or less how it came out. So, we just insisted that we got a high enough percentage that would cover what we had taken here, like some chemical company subsidiaries, and a few other things. We wanted to be sure that nobody laid claim to that.

The British would like to have had something, but they were also moderate; but the other ones fought for the highest possible share -- I remember when the Belgians thought their quota was too low,

[27]

they sent for support from Brussels and the finance minister came down.

MCKINZIE: Did you know any of the delegates from other nations at that time?

GOLDSMITH: No, I'm pretty sure I did not. I have since been in touch with a number of them, but I don't think that anybody knew anybody. The American delegation was to a good extent academics, people temporarily in the State Department; but the other delegations were mostly civil servants.

MCKINZIE: There were quite a few, as you point out, academic economists in the State Department then, and there was a kind of "Hullian view," or a view put forward by Will Clayton, his assistant, at the end of the war which was that the "brave new world" was going to have to be an economically integrated world. That there were

[28]

going to have to be across the board reductions in tariffs and there were going to have to be all kinds of unprecedented changes in the economics.

GOLDSMITH: Well, I think that's probably true. I was aware of it, but when it came to the hard facts, these things went by the board; but both of these things had nothing to do with us, so I really don't know.

MCKINZIE: Well, I was wondering.

GOLDSMITH: No, both the reparations conference and the German currency reform had nothing to do with that.

MCKINZIE: But in your discussions of other kind of action...

GOLDSMITH: I simply don't remember, but I doubt it very much. I think these fellows had for

[29]

several years, after all, been around the State Department, negotiating with our Allies and so forth, so I think they had become reasonably realistic. I may have met Mr. Clayton once. We mentioned the Paris Conference, well I was there also for a month or two months. Then there was a London meeting early in '48; that was my last job with the State Department, and I think Willard Thorp was the head there. I saw much more of him when I was on the OECD in 1962-65, and he was at that time the head of the AID committee -- rank of Ambassador and lived in a very nice house -- and so I saw him a number of times. But he was really my boss at these two conferences. At one of them we got involved in the Trieste question. At that time the wonderful idea was to make Trieste a free port, so it could become -- it always had been, but so it could become again, or even more so, a great shipbuilding center, because it would be a free trade

[30]

zone. The food would come in without duty, so they would have much lower food costs and, hence, supposedly lower wages, and that way could out-compete other shipyards that did not have these advantages. But, as you well know, it ended by simply the Italians getting the "A" zone and the Yugoslavs the "B" zone, which was more or less always evident. But Trieste as a free city, was an interesting idea although the fate of Danzig should have been a warning sign, but in the case of Trieste it never eventuated.

MCKINZIE: Could you speak about the Austrian treaty on which you worked?

GOLDSMITH: This dragged out for five months, haggling over every piece of German owned property in Austria. It was one of the most frustrating five months I've spent, Vienna at that time was still down and out, a beautiful city and beautiful

[31]

surroundings, but you couldn't go into the Russian occupied zone. I did it once without knowing. Nothing happened, but I was given a dressing down. But, as I said, over every factory the Germans had acquired, each side worked on a paper, we were trying to prove that it had been taken away from the original owners, and it should be given back to them. The Russians said these were voluntary commercial deals and hence should now be given to the occupying powers.

MCKINZIE: You mentioned that there was an oil refinery in...

GOLDSMITH: Oh, yes, that I have forgotten the name of, but Walter Levy knows all about that. So don't ask me about that; he knows it from beginning to end and he's an oil specialist. At that time the Soviets were afraid of being

[32]

short of oil. This was before the big finds in Western Siberia and elsewhere, so they were tremendously anxious to get as their properties, the Zistersdorf Oil, and we wanted to avoid that partly because it had been American owned and the American company -- I don't want to say which one of the big companies -- had a very smart representative in Vienna, who helped our delegation quite a lot and so we obviously tried to do the best for him. But, moreover, this was our State Department policy that whatever was American property we wanted to get back.

MCKINZIE: But you regarded this work on the Austrian settlement as extremely painstaking and particularly trying -- an item by item....

GOLDSMITH: Item by item -- oh, it was terrible. This was also important politics, and the head of the Russian delegation later became Ambassador to

[33]

India, but he looked really like a Turk. You wouldn't like to meet him at night. He was a very disagreeable fellow. There were one or two better people on as economists including one who later became a Soviet official at the U.N. But they had strict instructions.

We had a political adviser, of course; he later became counselor at the Rome embassy, but he's dead now. There was Walter Levy, of course, for oil. I did some of the economics, and I had one assistant named Strauss, who was an old friend of mine; he was in the State Department, so I had asked for him since he knew German and knew the Austrian affairs. So he mostly worked through the cases for us. The French. delegate was a general. The French secretary to the delegation was the son of Paul Valery, who now is Ambassador at the Quaff d'Orsay and represents France at the OECD. He wrote

[34]

beautiful French. The minutes rotated. When the French delegate had been the chairman he had to write them. Of course, he didn't; so Valery did it in beautiful French, of course. I once was in Paris, in his wonderful apartment, and the Cezanne and the things that hang on the wall there -- pictures by friends of the family, and so on. But he was an interesting man!

One of the British economists I got fairly friendly with, and he is now an official at the International Bank. His name is Cyril Martin. The Russian attaché I don't remember; and the British delegate, was a foreign office man, who later became an ambassador or something. I don't know who the French economist was. I don't think they really had any. It was the smallest delegation. The power situation being what it was, this delegate knew well enough that what he said was of very limited weight. It's true, however,

[35]

they occupied Tirol and Vorarlberg, but there was very little property situated there.

MCKINZIE: You referred once or twice now to the business of "the power situation being what it was;" I take it that all of these people were acutely aware that in the end there was going to be

GOLDSMITH: Yes, as a matter of fact, it was really embarrassing because -- but not for the Russians -- ours were negotiations between the Allies and it was clear to everybody from the beginning that if the United States really definitely decided on something they would get it; so, why waste all that time. But sometimes we did become convinced that they were right; we weren't always in the right. In all the quadripartite things where there were three on the Allied side, it was essentially the United States with two

[36]

assistants.

MCKINZIE: Did you have any talks with economists in the Department about the Marshall plan?

GOLDSMITH: Well, I had been around a few weeks in the State Department, when they first drew it up. There was a group of economists headed by Charles Kindleberger, and I worked with him for a few weeks before going over. That was before going over to the Paris peace conference; but I was not really close to those discussions.

Marshall only had thrown out this idea, and then it had to be worked out, and there was a group of pretty good economists with Kindleberger the head of it; and I think there was Isaiah Frank, who is now in Johns Hopkins, and a few other pretty good economists.

MCKINZIE: Why did you decide to leave the Government service in 1948?

[37]

GOLDSMITH: By that time, you know, I had been in the SEC from 1934 on, and I wanted, really, to get into an academic type job. I started with a large research job, the study of saving, which was a special project financed by the Life Insurance Association.

When that was over, I worked for the National Bureau, and then I got into, first, New York University and then Yale. After '48 I could have gone back to the SEC, because you had the right; but, number one, they were at that time in Philadelphia -- they had been shifted to Philadelphia during the war -- and, number two, by that time it was dead. It had been, of course, one of the most active agencies in the Government and had had among other commissioners Justice [William O.] Douglas, John Kennedy, Sr., and a number of people who later became big-shots. [James M.] Landis, became dean of Harvard Law

[38]

School; [Ferdinand] Pecora had been counsel of the Stock Exchange investigation, etc. So, they had had an extraordinary group of commissioners the first three or four years -- Jerome Frank, also. Then, as I said, they were shifted to Philadelphia, to which I didn't want to go, and, then, we knew that during the war there wouldn't be the slightest interest in securities. So, I went to the War Production Board, and when that was through the SEC was still in Philadelphia. I didn't like to go there and I knew the commission finally would come to Washington; and it had pretty much by that time become routinized, and for more than ten years was down and out. It continued to work, but did not play a great role in the Government. It's really only in the last five years that they've come back.

MCKINZIE: But that's where your interest would have been?

[39]

GOLDSMITH: Oh, yes, if I had stayed in the Government I would probably have gone back to the SEC, because in the State Department after all, we were all temporaries and not Foreign Service officers, so you couldn't stay there. And I don't think I would have liked to. The War Production Board, of course, was ephemeral, and the SEC for reasons explained, didn't look like it would be too interesting. And, as I say, by that time I was 44, so it was then or never.

MCKINZIE: Well, thank you very much.

GOLDSMITH: Okay. I don't think you got much.

[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]

 


 

List of Subjects Discussed

Adenauer, Konrad, 20
Angell, James Waterhouse, 23
Ausgleichsabgabe, 8, 10-13

Banque Nationale de Belgigue, 26
Bernstein, Bernard, 17-18
Byrnes, James F., 10

Chambers, Paul, 5
Clark, Mark, 11
Clay, Lucius D., 4, 8-10, 12, 14, 16, 21
Clayton, Will, 27-29
Colm, Gerhard, 4-5, 7, 16, 19

Dodge, Joseph, 3-4
Douglas, William 0., 37

Frank, Isaiah, 36
Frank, Jerome, 38

Galbraith, John K., 15
Ginsburg, David, 3-4
Goldsmith, Raymond W.

    • and the Austrian treaty, involvement with, 30-31, 32-35
      German currency reform, participation in, 3-9, 11-13
      and the German people, 18-21
      government service, U.S., decision to leave, 36-39
      and oil refinery in Europe, 31-32
      Paris Peace Conference, 1946, statistical advisor at, 23-27
      Securities and Exchange Commission, Deputy Director of, 2
      Soviet diplomats, assessment of, 2, 22, 23
      State Department, U.S., last assignment with, 29
      Trieste, question, involvement with, 29-30
      War Production Board, transferred to, 2-3
  • Gourrich, Paul, 2

     

    "Hullian View", 27-29

    Jones, Homer, 23-24

    Kennedy, John, Sr., 37
    Kindleberger, Charles, 36
    Kuczinsky, Jurgen, 15
    Kuznets, Simon, 2

    Landis, James M., 37
    Levy, Walter, 31, 33

    Maletin, Mr., 6, 22-23
    Marget, Arthur W., 11
    Marshall, George C., 17
    Martin, Cyril, 34

    Nathan, Robert, 2
    Newman, James R., 3

    Pecora, Ferdinand, 38

    Schmalenbach, Eugen, 18, 20

    Thorp, Willard, 29
    Trieste question, 29

    Valery, Paul, 33-34

    Weber, Alfred, 18, 20
    Weber, Max, 20

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