Perhaps some of the outrage directed to McCloy on this matter can be attributed to his controversial decision to order the unconditional release of Alfried Krupp, the armaments magnate. Krupp had originally been convicted for employing slave labor from the concentration camps in his family's munitions factories during the war. McCloy received a barrage of criticism back home for freeing this man who for many was a living symbol of the Nazi nightmare. This is a point consistently raised by students protesting the scholarship naming. McCloy, Brinkley says, simply saw the commuting of Krupp's sentence as a symbolic, friendly gesture to German industry.

Internment of Japanese-Americans

In February 1942, eight weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt signed an executive order calling for the commitment of about 120,000 Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast to "relocation centers." At the time, the government cited military necessity for this action; a commission appointed by Congress to look into the matter two months ago concluded that prejudice and war-time hysteria were responsible for this dark chapter in American history.

An assistant secretary of war. McCloy was officially responsible for carrying out the internment program. However, the debate still lingers over just how important-he was in pushing the program in the first place.

Brinkley, for example, writes in Harper's that McCloy "had not initiated the relocation plan, and he was not a major factor in the decision to implement it." Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson strongly supported the proposal, as did the West Coast military command and California Attorney Genera Earl Warren, he notes.

However, both James Rowe, then assistant attorney general, and Arthur Goldberg, the former Supreme Court justice, credit McCloy as the driving force in the War Department in getting the proposal turned into an executive order. Goldberg says that McCloy opposed the idea at first, but then became one of its strongest supporters.

"I think McCloy was wrong. We were all wrong," adds Rowe, expressing the belief, however, that policy reasons--not racism--were behind the internment.

But despite the ambiguity of his role, one factor that may have particularly irritated students protesting the scholarship is McCloy's continuous defense--to this day--of the program. For instance, McCloy recently defended the internment in a New York Times op-ed article. In addition, he expressed no misgivings about it in an interview with Brinkley. "I don't apologize a bit for that," he told the Harvard historian. The relocation, he said, was "reasonably undertaken and thoughtfully and humanely conducted."

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It apparently was not the student who first got wind of what some consider the K-School's gaffe in naming the scholarship after McCloy Rather, it was a group of several Law School alumni in Washington who read of the naming in the Harvard Gazette. These young lawyers--including one in the Justice Department who deals with Nazi war criminals, notified Dershowitz, who in turn notified members of the Harvard Jewish Law Students Association. One of the lawyers also contacted the head of the Law School's Asian American Association.

"There are many people more deserving of this honor than John J. McCloy," several campus groups then wrote K-School Dean Graham T. Allison '62. Argued members of Hillel: "McCloy served as more than a mere spokesman for the decisions of the Roosevelt Administration. His recommendations and suggested policies carried great weight, and it clearly fell within his power to protest these policies he felt were improper."

Nonetheless, it appears likely that the efforts to get the name changed will fall short. It was Volkswagen officials idea to name the scholarship after McCloy, a decision based on his service in reconstructing postwar Germany during his years spent as the high commissioner, according to James A. Cooney, who will be the assistant director fo the program.

And while Volkswagen or K-School officials have yet to make an official statement on the name protest, that idea seems here to stay, as all indications seem to suggest they believe the good in McCloy's record overweighs any possible bad.

"McCloy is Mr. Germany in this country," observes Goldman, noting the statesman's "distinguished" record in bolstering German-American relations. Adds Hale Champion, executive dean of the K-School: "If you object ot McCloy's name on the scholarship, then you'd have to object to Earl Warren on the Supreme Court."