Baruch, Bernard Mannes

(1870–1965)

   US financier and presidential adviser. ‘Barney’ Baruch made a fortune as a stockbroker by acquiring an expert knowledge of the international market in raw materials. In World War I, President Wilson put him in charge of the Commission on Raw Materials, Minerals, and Metals, and then of the War Industries Board. He was a member of the Supreme Economic Council of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Baruch remained an unofficial economic adviser to successive presidents. During World War II he dealt, at President Roosevelt’s request, with problems of rubber shortage, manpower for the new war plants on the West Coast and post- war reconstruction plans. As the US representative on the United Nations Atomic Energy Committee in 1946, he put forward the famous Baruch Plan for the international control of atomic weapons. It was vetoed by the Soviet Union in 1948.

   Baruch lived to the age of ninety-five and in his later years became a legendary figure, always sitting on the same bench in New York’s Central Park, dispensing sage advice to newspapermen and anyone else who sought it. Among the books he wrote were American Industry in the War (1941) and two volumes of memoirs.