BANKING: Bearer of Light

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The bank could do no more. It was in need itself, had to sell its bonds on U.S. securities markets to raise the money for loans. But foreign bonds were almost unsalable; so many foreign issues had defaulted in the '30s that more than 40 states restricted the purchase of foreign bonds. What McCloy needed was a good bond salesman, someone who could tell the story of what the bank was trying to do. His man was Gene Black, then 49, a senior vice president of Manhattan's Chase National Bank, and a salesman of rare talents. Within a year, as the U.S. executive director of the World Bank, Black had put over the first $250 million World Bank bond issues. In 1949, when McCloy resigned to become U.S. High Commissioner for Germany (he is now board chairman of the merged Chase Manhattan Bank), Bond Salesman Black was tapped as his World Bank successor —at $30,000 (tax free) a year.

The Four Bs. President Black is much more than an expert securities peddler. He is the world's leading salesman of the benefits of capitalism, and the Bank did not really reach its stride until he became its president.

Black seems to do his job with no more effort than it takes to sign a check. A tall (6 ft. 2 in.), setter-slim (160 Ibs.), amiable Southerner, whose high-domed head is as bare of top hair as the globe itself, he floats effortlessly through the stratosphere of world finance. He is an elegant dresser (Homburg from London's James Lock & Co., suits from Savile Row's Henry Poole), an amusing storyteller, a man of omnivorous tastes, who sums up his chief delights (besides Shakespeare) as "the four Bs—banking, baseball, Balzac and bourbon." As he makes his rounds, he speaks in an irretrievable Southern drawl, mixes so well that he charms people no matter how anti-banker or anti-American they are apt to be. Once, at a state dinner given by Marshal Tito, the conversation through interpreters was dragging badly when Tito, rotundly resplendent in his dress uniform, asked Black if he might try one of the banker's fancy Corona Corona cigars. After the Yugoslav dictator started to puff away, Black looked at him and drawled: "Now you look like a capitalist." Tito roared, and everyone relaxed.

Black's relaxed approach penetrates the entire World Bank. No tight-collared protocol man—"don't have time for it"—he keeps paperwork to a minimum, hardly ever writes a memo, instead prefers to work out problems face to face. He lets underlings work out projects, does not like to "discuss loans until they are just about on the edge of the stove."