Noel Hynd: Flowers From Berlin

William T. Cochrane, Banker and Educator, Dies at 90

By Abigail McFedries (Special to The New York Times)

Published: November 28, 1996

William Thomas Cochrane, an economist, author, banker, retired F.B.I. agent and university professor, died on Thursday at his home in Newton, Massachusetts. He was 90.

The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage, said his daughter, Carolyn.

Mr. Cochrane enjoyed a long and distinguished career in several fields spanning the Twentieth Century. He was most proud, however, of his little known service to his country during World War Two…

Cambridge,

Massachusetts

May 1984

Memorial Hall, on the fringes of Harvard Yard, is the quintessence of old-guard university architecture. Ivy climbs its aged white columns and red brick walls in abundance. Built in tribute to the Harvard men who perished in wartime, the hall maintains a quiet, timeless dignity amid the bustle and clamor of Cambridge. Yet on the final day of spring term in May of 1984, even Memorial Hall was alive with excitement. Students who might otherwise be on their way to the Cape or to the beaches of the North Shore on an impeccably sunny morning were busy jockeying for seats in the great lecture hall, rousing and crowding out the ghosts of other eras.

Undergraduates had completely packed the sprawling, multi-tiered amphitheater by 10 A.M. Political Science 217 was concluding for the semester. Today was the final lecture. But it was the lecture, the one Dr. William Thomas Cochrane of the Economics Department gave every year. And every year, as the students put it, it was a "sell out." No extra places in the eight-hundred-seat hall, even though the topic was never covered on final exams.

Dr. Cochrane gave the lecture each year because it added that ineffable extra insight into the course. It put things in perspective. Poli Sci 217. American Political Systems in Wartime; 1917-18,1941-45. Today's topic, "Roosevelt and the World War." Harvard students had their own nickname for the close-out lecture: "Poli Spy 217." Even at age seventy-eight, Bill Cochrane could still pack a house.

Dr. Cochrane entered the lecture hall a few minutes before ten. He was a man comfortable in tweeds and a tie and who wore his age with equal grace. Tall and sturdy, his shoulders were still straight. His hair was thinning and flecked with gray, but surprisingly dark. His one concession to age: reading glasses of a stronger prescription than he had worn back when he had worked for the government- below cabinet level during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years.

There was a woman a few years younger than the lecturer seated at the far left of the first row. Had she opened her mouth to speak, they would have known she was English, though she had spent the last half century losing the intonations of her birthplace. She was, had anyone looked closely, the paradigm of the patrician English lady of her day. She had a pleasant face and a clear complexion. She wore a dark green cardigan sweater and a wool skirt. A few years earlier, she had given up the pretense of chasing age from her hair, so now she was very frankly gray. But her hair was arranged in a neat bun and she remained very pretty in an uncommon, aristocratic way. Men who noticed her did not immediately take their eyes off her. It had always been that way.

At 10 A.M., without a cue, the students quieted. Copies of The Harvard Crimson rustled as they were folded into notebooks. Dr. Cochrane looked up from the lectern-he always spoke without notes- removed his reading glasses, paced a few feet from the front center of the hall, and in his unmistakable yet unassuming way took control of the class.

"Roosevelt and the War," Dr. Cochrane said by way of introduction. He spoke in a clear, concise voice. "You'll allow me, I hope, a bit of historical speculation over the next ninety minutes. You will indulge me, I hope, the opportunity to suggest what might have been, in addition to what was."

He paced thoughtfully near the front row of students. He felt his audience settling in with him.

"For any of you who are recent transfers from New Haven or any other institution," he digressed momentarily, "we are discussing the second Roosevelt. And the second world war."

A ripple of laughter eased across the amphitheater.

"August 3, 1939," the popular emeritus professor began, recalling his material vividly. He spoke in a bold voice that filled the hall. The students were already entranced. The Englishwoman permitted herself a smile. She remembered also.

"Washington, D.C. Ninety-one degrees of city-wide steam bath for the fifth day in a row…"

Washington, D.C. and New York

August 3, 1939. Washington, D.C. Ninety-one degrees of city-wide steam bath for the fifth day in a row. A relentless sun and a humidity unfit for any living, breathing creature. Six more weeks of summer in the American capital and not an evening breeze or a thunderstorm in sight.

The windows were open at the White House and fans whirled in more than a hundred rooms. Fifteen minutes remained before a luncheon meeting between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the President. Franklin Roosevelt sat in his wheelchair in the Oval Office and studied the disturbing four-page report that he had received that morning. These days the President's mood matched the weather, hot and oppressive. Neither seemed likely for sudden change.

Europe was going to hell. The Nazis had taken Austria and had been given Czechoslovakia. Salazar was entrenched in Lisbon, and Franco had taken Madrid in March. Hitler lunched with Mussolini on a fourth-century A.D. veranda in Rome, and Joseph Stalin, freshly invigorated by the liquidation of his enemies at home, folded his arms on a Kremlin balcony and glared westward. The Red Army, under Stalin's direct command, was bigger, tougher, and better equipped thin ever. But then again, Hitler had more panzer divisions than anyone could count already in place in Bohemia and Moravia. At his desk, Roosevelt lit a cigarette. As soon as current work could be concluded, the USS Tuscaloosa, docked at the Washington Naval Yard, was ready to take FDR and his family to Campobello until September. The President longed for the foggy, misty New Brunswick coastline that he had loved since his boyhood. His sinuses bothered him; so did his arthritis.

Meanwhile, the Republicans imprisoned on Capital Hill sniped daily at Roosevelt. A second Democratic term in Washington had failed to cure a 12 percent unemployment rate. And the 1938 elections had put the taste of FDR's blood in the mouths of the opposition: the Republicans had gained eighty-one seats in the House of Representatives, eight seats in the Senate, and control of thirteen additional statehouses. Suddenly, new presidential prospects were everywhere. Ohio's Senator Taft had won re-election big, as had governors Stassen of Minnesota, and Saltonstall of Massachusetts. New York's racket-busting district attorney, Thomas Dewey, was drawing the largest crowds of any Republican since the President's cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. And the influential eastern press was lining up behind the longest shot of all, Wendell L. Willkie, the president of a utilities company and a former Democrat. All these were added to Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a paunchy cigar-puffing white-suited gray-haired arch isolationist whom everyone expected to be the candidate and who led Roosevelt in every important poll. Quaintly, Roosevelt referred to Vandenberg, an old-fashioned tub thumping orator, as "the windbag," and the rest of his potential opponents were the "the Neanderthals." But Roosevelt's private dismissal of his opposition was defensive. Since the midterm elections, he had become increasingly isolated within the White House. And the enemies were everywhere.