I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignanez show.

Phyllos Miscellany hasn't been here in a while, but he's back.

What's going on, Phyllos?

Not much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you for having me back on.

You are welcome.

I can't wait for this because there was a name that came up in the recent series I did with Stormy on the robber barons.

And we never really dove into who that was.

And you had mentioned that you had a book on them, and then you started researching them and going down a rabbit hole.

And it was like, hey, let's talk about this on the show.

Who are we talking about today, Phyllis?

We are talking about a man named Bernard Baruch, but I'm not going to say it like that because it's going to get really obnoxious.

So I'm just going to call him Baruch.

The book that was written about him is a hagiography, written while he was still alive, by a woman named Margaret Coyt in 1957.

Mr. Baruch himself commissioned the book, and she spent seven years writing.

She had access to all of his personal papers, interviewed everyone that he knew, but Baruch disliked the final product so much that he entirely withdrew permission to access his private papers. And the author vowed never to write the biography of a living person again. But that doesn't tell you so much about who the man is.

To keep it very brief, he is responsible for the mobilization of commodities

and the logistics operations behind most of World War I and a good portion of World War II.

And he was a close advisor to every U.S. president from Wilson all the way through to Truman before he fell out of favor with President Truman in the late 1940s and sort of retired from politics.

He was a political connection to a vast majority of any powerful people within Washington at the time,

and he was responsible for gearing the wartime economies in both of those wars.

He is a critical piece of understanding the American rearmament for World War I and World War II.

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