Thomas K. Finletter

Thomas K. Finletter (born November 11, 1893, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died April 24, 1980, New York, New York) was an American lawyer and government official whose policy recommendations reshaped the United States military during the Cold War.

A corporate lawyer by profession, Finletter frequently interrupted his practice to hold government posts. Before the U.S. entry into World War II, he became (1941) a special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull; in 1945 he was a consultant to the U.S. delegation to the conference that drew up the Charter of the United Nations in San Francisco; and after the war he headed a task force (the Air Policy Commission) on the future of U.S. air power. Finletter was the principal author of the commission’s influential 1948 report, “Survival in the Air Age,” which led to the rapid expansion of the U.S. Air Force. The report warned that the Soviet Union would reach air parity with the United States by 1952 and advocated improving military preparedness by increasing the budget of the Air Force and the number of military aircraft in the U.S. fleet . Subsequently, the Air Force tripled in size. Despite the recommendations in his report, Finletter was an avowed proponent of world peace and favoured eventual world disarmament, and he believed that U.S. military strength should be used only as a deterrent and a countermeasure.

During the Korean War, Finletter was named (1950) secretary of the Air Force by President Harry S. Truman, and a decade later he was again drafted (1961), this time by President John F. Kennedy, to become the U.S. permanent representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.