Email this citation


8. Resignation

 

By the summer of 1943, Welles had concluded that the stories circulating in Washington about his personal life could no longer be ignored, and in early August he offered his resignation to President Roosevelt. 1 Although the real reasons behind his departure were hushed up, many knew the truth. "There is a lot of talk," Breckinridge Long confided in his diary in late August, "about Welles's departure being on account of differences in opinion about policy. That is not the case. The trouble was purely and simply that Welles was accused of a highly immoral bit of conduct, that Bullitt became advised of it, and spread the story. There was an investigation. The office of [the] District Attorney had some part in it I am informed. Hull told me repeatedly about the F.B.I. reports — the file which was sent to the White House and disappeared for the time. The story was whispered around Washington." 2 		 1

For three years Bullitt had worked relentlessly with Hull to bring the incident to the attention of the president and the Senate's wartime watchdog committee headed by Missouri Senator Harry Truman. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover gave his quiet assistance to Roosevelt on the matter and helped the president conceal the scandal for three years. Roosevelt told Hoover that he suspected that Welles's drinking had precipitated the incidents, and he accepted Hoover's suggestion that "someone should be assigned to travel with Mr. Welles to see either that he did not indulge in the use of liquor or that, if he did, that he then did not endeavor to make propositions for such immoral relations." 3		 

When Bullitt confronted Roosevelt about the controversy, the president sought to halt the effort to have Welles removed by telling Bullitt he was aware of the charges and that he had already remedied the situation by providing Welles with a bodyguard to look after him. Bullitt was unbowed. How could the president call upon "Americans to die in a crusade for all that was decent in human life," Bullitt asked, when he had "among the leaders of a crusade a criminal like Welles"? Bullitt told the president that Hull believed Welles "worse than a murderer." Roosevelt was so distressed by Bullitt's comments that he canceled his appointments for the rest of the day. 4		 

Stymied at the White House, Hull and Bullitt sought to enlist the Washington press corps, delivering evidence of the incident to journalists and publishers. Yet no newspaper dared use the explosive charges. "I wrote a column at the time regretting the loss of this talented diplomat," James Reston of the New York Times recalled of Welles resignation, "and Mr. Hull called me the following day to his office. He said that perhaps I was not well enough informed about 'the facts' and offered to remove 'this deficiency.' He then reached into a drawer of his desk and handed me a thick FBI report alleging homosexual charges against Welles. I asked him if he was prepared to take responsibility as the source of this information, but he said he was not, he was just doing me a favor. I turned the report over to Arthur Krock, but the Times didn't print a word of it. I began to understand, however, the depth of competition and personal hostility that existed even at the top of the government." 5		 

Hull and Bullitt then passed their evidence to some of the administration's Congressional critics, such as Democratic Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana and Republican Senator Owen Brewster of Maine, further complicating the president's efforts to contain the scandal. 6 "The lurid story had been circulating for months," Breckinridge Long wrote. "A number of people outside the department had asked me about it. I always passed it off in a light vein and stated my belief that the story was false. It persisted. Finally it got to some Republican members of the Senate. None of them spoke to me about it but the fact that they knew it was dangerous." 7		 5

Several officials warned the president that, with his campaign for a fourth term just around the corner, the Republicans would take a renewed interest in the Welles matter. Roosevelt had successfully protected him for three years, and may not have believed the accusations. After all, he himself had been the target of false slanders in the past, and he was well aware of Bullitt's volatile temperament. But when confronted by the threat of Hull's resignation in the summer of 1943, it became clear to the president that Welles had to leave the State Department. Hull later recalled that Welles confronted him in his office and accused him of turning the president against him. Hull denied the charge and claimed that Roosevelt, too, thought he must resign. The president believed Hull's presence in the administration would be needed in the coming presidential campaign, as well as during the battle in the Senate over the new international organization and peace treaties. Welles understood this, and in a note to the president on August 16 he explained his decision to resign. "Since talking with you," he wrote, "it has seemed very clear to me that the present hue and cry in the press, and elsewhere, will continue unless this step is taken immediately." 8		 

The outcry over Welles's resignation was considerable, not only in the press, where he had served as a valued source to newsmen like Pearson, Lippmann, and Reston, but also with the public. Hundreds of letters poured into the White House demanding that the president reappoint Welles to another senior position. 9 "There is no doubt that the strength and wide extent of the popular reaction over Welles's dismissal was a complete surprise both to the State Department and the White House," noted Sir Ronald Campbell at the British Embassy. 10 The circumstances and timing of Welles's resignation also made him something of a cause celebre in the liberal and progressive press, which claimed him as the latest victim of Hull's "reactionary" machinations. "I never dreamed that Hull would some day force us to make a hero of Sumner Welles," lamented Nation columnist I. F. Stone, who claimed that the president and Hull were "startled by the reaction of the country to the Under Secretary's forced resignation." 11		 

Across the nation, sympathetic newspapers called upon the president to reconsider. "Keep Welles, Mr. President," blared the headline editorial in PM, New York's progressive afternoon daily. "We have come to think of him as a kind of Wallace of the State Department, a man who has learned to think in world terms not only in respect to the war, but in respect to the peace to come. Now you understand what we mean, Mr. President, when we say that Sumner Welles has become a kind of symbol of yourself and the things you believe in. Isn't this the place to make your stand, Mr. President? There is no satiating the howling wolves." 12 A St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline asked "Why Was Sumner Welles Fired?" reminding its readers that it was Welles "who gave greatest meaning to our fight, who crystallized it for the downtrodden everywhere with the strong words, 'This is in very truth a people's war.'" 13		 

In his nationally syndicated column Drew Pearson claimed Welles was the victim of a conservative conspiracy — led by Hull — that desired a harder line with Moscow. Pearson claimed Welles was sacrificed because he was "liberal in his attitude toward Russia," charging that Hull wanted "to bleed Russia white." Hull reacted furiously, calling Pearson's accusation a "monstrous and diabolical falsehood," and an uncharacteristically enraged Roosevelt told a startled White House press corps that Pearson was a "chronic liar." 14		 

Pearson also warned that other officials of a progressive bent would soon be stripped of their influence, a charge seemingly confirmed by the subsequent abolition of Henry Wallace's Board of Economic Warfare, which was seen as yet another victory for Hull. According to New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Arthur Krock, a close ally of the secretary, "Hull told the President that if he was not vigilant, the Wallace-Welles combination would 'ruin him as Woodrow Wilson was ruined' by idealistic and reckless promises that could not be fulfilled and that the American people would not redeem." 15		 10

Conspiracy theories about Welles's resignation gained much currency. Brain Truster Rexford Tugwell suggested that a subterranean campaign existed to undermine and destroy New Dealers. "Washington was awash just now with derogatory gossip, malicious rumor, and fantastic allegation," Tugwell wrote. "The game was to pick off all those who were really loyal to Franklin. The conservatives who were now gathering about Hull succeeded with Welles who was too proud and too reserved to fight back." 16 Others thought the resignation part of a "conservative coup" engineered by Hull with the acquiescence of the president. 17		 

Yet while the scandal ended Welles's official career, it also destroyed Bullitt's. Roosevelt told his Press Secretary Steve Early that "Welles may be a poisoned man, but Bullitt is a poisoner." 18 When Hull subsequently proposed Bullitt for a senior position, the president wrote on the bottom of the request: "Why not Minister to Saudi Arabia?" — a proposal he knew Bullitt would refuse. When Bullitt later asked the president for support in his effort to become mayor of Philadelphia, Roosevelt told him: "If I were the Angel Gabriel and you and Sumner Welles should come before me seeking admission into the Gates of Heaven, do you know what I'd say? I would say: 'Bill Bullitt, you have defamed the name of a man who toiled for his fellow men, and you can go to hell.' And that's what I tell you to do now." 19		 

While the train incident sparked Welles's downfall, a number of other factors also contributed to his resignation and might have led to his departure even had the scandal never occurred. The president had muddied the working environment at the State Department by allowing and even encouraging the emergence of hostile factions of "Welles men" and "Hull men." Furthermore, Roosevelt preferred working with Welles in matters that clearly should have been in Hull's domain. "By frequently bypassing Hull and permitting Welles to enunciate foreign policy from its very source, the President added to the feud," a September 1943 Newsweek story concluded. 20 The resignation also damaged morale in the State Department, 21 and Sir Ronald Campbell observed that there was "profound distress" among foreign diplomats in Washington over Welles's departure. 22		 

The president, always seeking the path of least resistance, offered as a consolation to appoint Welles to head the delegation to the upcoming conference in Moscow, which would address tripartite postwar matters for the first time. 23 Welles gave careful consideration to the assignment, because he believed the Alliance stood at a crucial juncture in its effort to coordinate postwar policies, and he remained greatly concerned about growing tensions in the Washington-Moscow relationship. "If the situation runs much longer it will be insoluble," Welles said, and he warned senior officials that Hull was "intensely prejudiced against Russia." 24 He continued to fear that Hull's domination of the department would mean that Washington would find it more difficult to create a relationship with Moscow independent of British aims, and that Hull's approach would cede leadership of postwar planning to London and Moscow. 25 But, to the surprise of many in Washington, Welles rejected Roosevelt's offer, telling the president that he did not believe he could ever again work with Hull in any capacity. 26 		 

Reporting the details of these events to the Foreign Office in London, Campbell noted that the imbroglio could not have occurred at a worse time for Alliance relations. Public concern about Washington's relations with Moscow had been heightening, and the resignation fueled speculation that there was a sinister connection between Welles's departure and recent strains in the U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union. Campbell reported that "the turmoil within the State Department adds to the disturbed feeling" in the country, and that the episode would now "serve to exaggerate the Russian issue, and provide a cue for the left-wing press, in whose eyes Welles is now a Liberal martyr sacrificed to a 'reactionary clique' in the State Department." Campbell observed a "nation-wide feeling of discomfort and suspicion about the 'inside story' of Welles's removal ... [and] general dismay at his retirement cut far deeper than the indignation of Liberals at the deprecation of Wallace." 27		 15

It now appeared that Welles had lost the most important sources of his power — his proximity to the president and his iron grip on the State Department bureaucracy. Yet even after his resignation he continued to be one of the more influential voices in the debate over America's role in the postwar world. In a stream of books, articles, and lectures, he promoted his views on almost every aspect of American foreign policy. He began a weekly syndicated column, appearing in seventy papers, which he used to promote his views on regionalism, international trusteeships, and closer cooperation with Moscow. 28		 

Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, his influence with the president did not cease, but continued surreptitiously. Roosevelt's desire to send Welles to the Moscow Conference, despite everything he knew about his personal life and the train scandal, demonstrated to a remarkable degree the president's continued confidence in him and his deep reliance upon his views. Shortly after Welles's resignation Roosevelt urged him to continue his advocacy of the new world order, suggesting that Welles write a book popularizing the Four Freedoms. Within only a few weeks of his resignation, Welles began meeting privately with Roosevelt, where they had detailed discussions about the administration's postwar designs. The president thought he could play a valuable role in promoting the government's aims, perhaps even more so now that he was outside the administration. Roosevelt urged Welles to continue his lecture tours, and he called upon him to use his newspaper column to attack opponents of his foreign policy, particularly those at the organs of Henry Luce's publishing empire, which now employed William Bullitt as a featured columnist. 29		 

The president continued to rely upon Welles to brief him prior to important meetings with foreign officials. A few days before Roosevelt departed for Teheran for the first meeting of the Big Three, for example, Welles surveyed preparations for the conference with the president and offered advice on postwar proposals. Roosevelt wrote to him after returning from Teheran: "It would be good to see you as soon as you come North. I want to tell you all about Cairo and Teheran. I think that as a roving ambassador for the first time I did not pull any boners." 30		 

Welles soon became the highest-paid lecturer in the country, and the arrival of his best-selling book, The Time for Decision, in the summer of 1944, coincided with the peak of the debate over the postwar world. He concluded his book by outlining his plans for an international organization and issuing a call to action. 31 He also used the book to call for eventual full and equal partnership for the Axis powers in this new world body. He reiterated his appeal for a regional approach to the postwar settlement, and stressed the importance of international police power and collective security. He also advocated international trusteeships and called for the independence of European colonies in Asia and the Middle East. 32		 

One of the most widely-read and discussed sections of his book was the chapter on Soviet-American relations, titled "The Constructive Power of the U.S.S.R." 33 Welles expressed his view that, in its quest for security, Moscow had a legitimate need to create a system in Eastern Europe comparable to America's sphere of influence in Latin America. He lamented that the security council of the United Nations had not yet been erected, for he thought that many of the issues facing the great powers could be better dealt with under the guidance of a new world organization. "The maintenance of world peace and the progress of humanity is going to depend upon the desires and the capacity of the peoples of the [United States and the USSR] to work together," he wrote. "It will depend upon their ability to replace their relationship of the past quarter century, which has not only been negative but marked by fanatical suspicion and deep-rooted hostility on both sides, with one that is positive and constructive." 34 		 20

Reviewers and the reading public received the book with equal enthusiasm. It became the surprise publishing success of the summer of 1944, displacing Bob Hope's I Never Left Home as the number-one best seller on the New York Times list and remaining there until 1945. The Book-of-the-Month Club made The Time for Decision its August selection, and nearly half a million copies sold nationwide. In a year-end poll of book critics, it ranked as one of the ten outstanding books of the year. 35 		 

Throughout 1944 and into 1945, Welles continued his campaign for a world organization, and in speeches he called on the great powers to immediately inaugurate a new league. The United Nations Monetary and Financial conference held at Bretton Woods in July 1944 affirmed many of the principles he had fought for, and underscored the extent to which the United States would dominate any postwar economic arrangements. Delegates formed an International Monetary Fund and an International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The subsequent Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which ran from August to October of 1944, addressed the framework for a new global security organization. The conferees issued guidelines for the formation of a United Nations Organization, thus further building on the foundation that Welles had laid over the preceding years. 36		 

When an ailing and exhausted Cordell Hull resigned in the fall of 1944, numerous telegrams reached the White House calling for Welles's appointment to the top State Department post. 37 But after Roosevelt's fourth-term victory over New York Governor Thomas Dewey in November, he named Under Secretary of State Edward Stettinius to replace Hull. Eleanor Roosevelt, commenting on the president's fourth-term team at State, wrote plaintively to her husband: "I can hardly see that the set-up will be very much different from what it might have been under Dewey." 38		 

Undaunted, Welles continued to campaign for the creation of a new international organization along the lines he had advocated. The United Nations Conference in San Francisco in the spring of 1945, which gathered to inaugurate the new world body, in many ways represented the crowning achievement of his career. Scores of telegrams once again flooded the White House calling for the appointment of Welles as secretary general of the conference. That honor instead went to Alger Hiss. Welles did attend the conference, but only as a radio commentator delivering nightly interpretive reports. In one commentary, he warned that U.S.-Soviet relations were in jeopardy and he charged Truman and Stettinius with fumbling relations with Moscow. "In five short weeks since the death of President Roosevelt," Welles announced, "the policy which he had so painstakingly carried on has been changed. Our Government now appears to the Russians as a spearhead of an apparent bloc of the western nations opposed to the Soviet Union." 39 		 

In the years after the war William Bullitt continued to bedevil Welles. Bullitt had angrily turned against Roosevelt's policies and, along with Whittaker Chambers, took up what colleagues called the "Red-wrecking" beat at Henry Luce's publishing empire. Bullitt became a popular critic of the Roosevelt and Truman foreign policies. He tirelessly alleged that Stalin had duped an ailing Roosevelt at the Big Three conferences into "selling out" Eastern Europe and handing the region over to the predations of Stalin and the Kremlin. His accusations created a sensation as he charged that the nations of Eastern Europe would have achieved freedom and independence had it not been for the president's feeble-mindedness and the pro-communist duplicity of his advisers. 40		 25

Welles used his next two books — Where Are We Heading? (published in 1946) and Seven Decisions That Shaped History (1950) — to respond to many of Bullitt's lurid charges. "It is ... in the field of foreign policy that I fear lasting harm may be done by some of the recent efforts to falsify the record made by President Roosevelt," he wrote in Seven Decisions That Shaped History. "The danger is that, by their attempt to blacken the character of the man whose memory they would assassinate, the Roosevelt-haters may also kill the ideas with which his name is associated." 41		 

Welles also reacted hotly to the publication of Hull's memoirs in 1948. "I had naturally anticipated Mr. Hull's diatribe against myself in the book he published last year," Welles wrote to Roosevelt's former speechwriter Sam Rosenman. "In any event this is not of any material importance. What to my mind, however, is important, what I deeply resent, and what I will never forgive is his consistent effort in his book to make it appear that in his conduct of foreign affairs President Roosevelt always failed when Mr. Hull was not in agreement with him and that the President's only successes were those instigated by or approved by Mr. Hull." 42		 

With Roosevelt dead and Truman seeking to put his own stamp on his administration, Welles began to seem, for all intents and purposes, like a character out of another time. His influence — in the State Department, throughout Washington, and across the nation at large — began to gradually wane. His name returned to the headlines briefly during the height of the Whittaker Chambers-Alger Hiss controversy. Called upon to assist the House committee investigating Hiss, his former subordinate, Welles identified the famous "Pumpkin Papers" — which had been dramatically concealed on Chambers's Maryland farm in a hollowed-out pumpkin — as authentic State Department documents.		 

Only five days after the indictment of Hiss by a grand jury, Welles's former assistant Laurence Duggan plummeted to his death from a building in midtown Manhattan. In Washington, the House Un-American Activities Committee Chairman Karl Mundt and his colleague, Representative Richard M. Nixon, announced to a crowded press conference that Duggan was under investigation as part of a vast communist network in the State Department that had allegedly operated during Welles's tenure. When a reporter asked the Congressmen about the identity of the others, Mundt promised to name them "as they jump out of windows." Welles responded by publicly praising Duggan as one of the finest officials in wartime Washington, describing him as "one of the most brilliant, most devoted, and most patriotic public servants" whom he had ever known. 43		 

Privately, Welles expressed doubts that Duggan had killed himself. "There was not the slightest motive for suicide in his case," he wrote to a friend. "On the contrary, there is, I think, unmistakable proof that he had no such idea in his mind and knowing him as you and I do he is certainly the last man on earth whom one could think to have wished to take his own life." 44		 30

Duggan's death, and the suspicion and controversy surrounding it, left Welles deeply shaken. Three days after he returned home from Duggan's funeral, he fell unconscious and nearly froze to death beside a stream on his Oxon Hill property. With his clothing frozen to his body and his face cut, he was rushed to a nearby hospital. When he regained consciousness he said he remembered nothing. Investigators surmised that he had fallen into the stream, dragged himself out, and collapsed a short distance away. There he remained, unconscious, the entire night, suffering life-threatening exposure and frostbite. 45 Conflicting accounts emerged as to what had taken place. Investigators speculated that perhaps he had passed out and fallen into the stream. He had been drinking heavily since his resignation, and had a history of alcohol-induced blackouts. Still, numerous questions remained unanswered. 46		 

The press began to speculate, sometimes luridly. "By one of those curious coincidences that make you wonder," wrote Jay Franklin in his syndicated column, "the death of Larry Duggan was followed shortly by the discovery of his friend and sponsor, Sumner Welles, lying half-frozen in a Maryland field." Franklin hinted that there was a sinister connection between Duggan's death and Welles's accident. "It requires a heroic degree of self-control not to speculate as to whether — just as with Larry Duggan — there is not more to the tragic incident than the outward appearances." 47		 

Drew Pearson called the accident "Hull's Revenge," claiming the former secretary continued to seek Welles's destruction. "Hull's vengeance never relaxed," Pearson charged in his column. 48 Others blamed the House Un-American Activities Committee for Welles's mishap. "It is hard to avoid the impression," stated an editorial in The Nation, "that the near-tragedy that overtook Sumner Welles had its origin in the reckless conduct of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Mr. Welles, who had been in an extremely agitated state for many hours before he was found lying unconscious and nearly frozen in a field near his house, was known to have been deeply affected by the death of Laurence Duggan and the scandalous efforts of Representative Mundt to link Duggan with the Chambers spy ring." 49 Others alleged that his collapse had seamier origins, such as a homosexual encounter gone awry. 50		 

Welles's recovery was slow, and for more than a year he ceased most of his lecturing and writing activities. He soon gave up his syndicated column and, due to his extensive physical therapy, was unable to travel or lecture. He had to endure several painful surgical procedures to remove severely damaged tissue and repair nerve trauma. He became restless and frustrated with his slow and painful recovery, and he drank more heavily than before. By the summer of 1949 he was at last able to travel, and he and Mathilde departed for further rehabilitation in Switzerland. In Lausanne, misfortune stuck again when Mathilde developed peritonitis and died suddenly. Her death devastated Welles, and he descended into what he described to friends as a complete "physical and mental breakdown." 51 "Sumner Welles is in terrible shape," Drew Pearson confided in his diary, "his wife is dead, his big toes gone, some of his fingers off. He has no interest in life, won't see his friends, can't sleep at night. I'm afraid he wants to die." 52		 

Now out of the public eye, and depressed and drinking heavily, he began to lose his appeal as a commentator. According to the head of the booking agency for his lectures, they "had to drop Sumner Welles from the list of its lecturers; the reason — Welles's drunkenness and homosexuality. Welles is said to have started drinking like a fish. Combined with the homosexuality, the other vice often makes Welles entirely unfit for lecturing." 53		 35

His remaining years were often filled with despair. While many of his contemporaries and former colleagues received appointments in the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations, he was never again considered for any official position. He spent the remainder of his years in Bar Harbor and Palm Beach, living in isolation and drinking heavily. 54		 

Without his column, and making no public appearances, he gradually faded from public memory. He slipped into a long state of depressive brooding, where his heavy drinking grew so reckless that close friends and family feared for his life. His mental state grew increasingly fragile. He attempted suicide. A few years after Mathilde's death he remarried, but lived in seclusion throughout most of the 1950s. 55 When he died of pancreatic cancer (a possible result of his years of alcoholism) on September 24, 1961 in Bernardsville, New Jersey, at the age of 68, his eulogists perfunctorily listed his many posts and achievements, but failed to note both the pathos surrounding his destruction and final years, and that he never attained the promise of his early career. 56		 


Notes:

Note 1: The official announcement of his departure came in late September, but he had effectively left the administration weeks before, and word of his resignation leaked to the Washington press corps.  Back.

Note 2: Breckinridge Long diary, August 29, 1943, box 5, the Papers of Breckinridge Long, Library of Congress; Geoffrey C. Ward, ed., Closest Companion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), 244.  Back.

Note 3: Athan Theoharis, J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime: An Historical Antidote (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1995), 32.  Back.

Note 4: Orville H. Bullitt, ed., For the President: Personal and Secret: Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 511-518; Adolf A. Berle Diary, September 1, 1943, box 215, Adolf A. Berle Papers, FDRL. "Welles first spoke to me about the story," Breckinridge Long recalled in his diary. "That was in the spring of 1942. He said Bullitt had started it and that it was a malicious lie. I assumed it was. Bullitt is a person without honor, in my eyes. I have known him a long, long time and know him well but I have never had any confidence in him. And — he wanted Welles's position. So I accepted Welles's statement at face value. Even without Bullitt's instigation of the story I would still have accepted Welles's statement." Breckinridge Long diary, August 29, 1943, box 5, the Papers of Breckinridge Long, Library of Congress Manuscript Division.  Back.

Note 5: Orville H. Bullitt, ed., For the President, 511-518; Will Brownell and Richard Billings, So Close to Greatness: A Biography of William C. Bullitt (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 297; James Reston, Deadline: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), 103. That Krock did not use the material is somewhat surprising, as he had devoted much of his career to using the pages of the New York Times to promote friends such as Hull and Joseph P. Kennedy. Lord Halifax noted that, "Krock, who veers between the extremes of vindictive spite and sycophantic flattery, has for some months held up Mr. Hull as a paragon of virtue gratuitously frustrated by the greatly inferior persons among whom it is his bad fortune to be compelled to function." See FO 371/34160 minute by Halifax, August 7, 1943, PRO.  Back.

Note 6: Brownell and Billings, So Close to Greatness, 297; Reston, Deadline, 103.  Back.

Note 7: Breckinridge Long diary, August 29, 1943, box 5, the Papers of Breckinridge Long, Library of Congress.  Back.

Note 8: Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 1229-1231; Welles to Hull, September 21, 1943, PSF 77, FDRL; Welles to Roosevelt, August 16, 1943, PSF 77, FDRL.  Back.

Note 9: See "Resignation of Sumner Welles," Official File 20, Department of State, box 16, FDR Papers, FDRL.  Back.

Note 10: FO 371/34161, Campbell to Foreign Office, September 18, 1943, PRO; "FDR and the Conservative Trend," New Republic, August 23, 1943; FO 371/34161, "Situation in the United States," by Campbell, September 5, 1943, PRO.  Back.

Note 11: The Nation, September 13, 1943.  Back.

Note 12: Welles to Roosevelt, August 16, 1943, PSF 77, FDRL; New York Times, August 25, 1943; "Resignation of Sumner Welles and appointment of Edward R. Stettinius to Under Secretary of State," White House Press Release, September 25, 1943, Documents on American Foreign Relations, vol. VI (Boston: World Peace Foundation) 55; Department of State Bulletin, IV, 208; "Resignation of Sumner Welles," OF 20, Department of State, box 16, FDRL; The Nation, September 13, 1943.  Back.

Note 13: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 30, 1943; New York Post, August 25, 1943  Back.

Note 14: Oliver Pilat, Drew Pearson: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1973),175-176.  Back.

Note 15: Drew Pearson: An Unauthorized Biography, 206; Arthur Krock, Memoirs: Sixty Years on the Firing Line (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), 206; Drew Pearson: An Unauthorized Biography, 175-176; Donald F. Drummond, "Cordell Hull," in An Uncertain Tradition: American Secretaries of State in the Twentieth Century edited by Norman Graebner (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 615-617.  Back.

Note 16: New York Post, August 25, 1943; PM, August 27, 1943; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 30, 1943; Drummond, "Cordell Hull," 615-617; Rexford G. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt: A Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), 622-623.  Back.

Note 17: "FDR and the Conservative Trend," New Republic, August 23, 1943; FO 371 34161, "Situation in the United States," by Campbell, September 5, 1943. Writing to his friend Jefferson Caffery, the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, Welles placed the blame for his resignation on Hull's angry response to Welles's actions at the January 1942 Rio Conference. "To you," Welles wrote to Caffery, "I do not have to give any explanation, particularly in view of our association a year and a half ago. I need merely add that the past few months have been a very bitter time for me." Welles to Caffery, August 22, 1943, Welles papers, box 91, resignation letters, FDRL.  Back.

Note 18: Eden noted that "Bullitt is poisonous and his record in France in 1940 discreditable." FO 371 34161, Campbell to F.O. August 30, 1943.  Back.

Note 19: Berle Diary, September 1, 1943, box 215, Adolf A. Berle Papers, FDRL; Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 677-685.  Back.

Note 20: Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 12; Newsweek, September 6, 1943.  Back.

Note 21: Berle Diary, September 1, 1943, box 215, FDRL; Drew Pearson to Welles, November 29, 1943, Welles papers, box 147, FDRL.  Back.

Note 22: FO 371/34161, Campbell to Foreign Office, September 5, 1943.  Back.

Note 23: Roosevelt to Stalin, September 4, 1943, FRUS, vol. I, 1943, 518-519; Welles to Roosevelt, September 21, 1943, PSF 77, FDRL  Back.

Note 24: Berle Diary, September 1, 1943, Berle Papers, box 215, FDRL.  Back.

Note 25: Henry Wallace, The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946, ed. John Morton Blum (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973), 237-241; FO 371/34161, minute by Campbell, August 24, 1943.  Back.

Note 26: "Resignation of Sumner Welles," Official File 20, Department of State, box 16, FDRL; Welles to Roosevelt, September 21, 1943, PSF 77, FDRL; Wallace, The Price of Vision, 240; Eden's private secretary, Oliver Harvey, noted: "Sumner Welles is on such bad terms with Hull (everywhere we now come across Hull's deadening influence) that he won't in all probability be allowed to undertake such a mission. There is no other American who has the clear head or the experience to do it so well." Oliver Harvey, August 24.  Back.

Note 27: FO 371/34161 "Situation in the U.S." by Campbell, September 5, 1943, PRO.  Back.

Note 28: "Columnist Welles," Newsweek, December 13, 1943; speech by Welles, "Safeguarding Our Interests," Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Foreign Policy Association, in Vital Speeches of the Day, November 1, 1943.  Back.

Note 29: Roosevelt to Welles, October 15, 1943, PSF 77, FDRL; Roosevelt to Welles, not dated, 1943, PPF 2961, FDRL; Sumner Welles, Where Are We Heading? (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946), 27-30; W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Scribners, 1972), 218-219.  Back.

Note 30: Welles, Where Are We Heading?, 27-30; Roosevelt to Welles, January 4, 1944, PPF 2961, FDRL.  Back.

Note 31: Robert Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America During World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 178-181; Sumner Welles, The Time For Decision (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 414. His publishers sought to boost sales of the book by proclaiming that he possessed inside information about the administration's postwar plans. "Only a handful of men in the world have had access to the information on which this book is based," the book's dust jacket proclaimed.  Back.

Note 32: Welles, The Time For Decision, 55, 374-378, 413-14. In this detailed 400-page account of American foreign policy over the course of the last decade, only once did Welles mention Cordell Hull by name.  Back.

Note 33: Welles, "What Russia Wants," Readers Digest, November 1944.  Back.

Note 34: Welles, The Time For Decision, 306, 334-35.  Back.

Note 35: The New Republic, July 31, 1944; Welles to Roosevelt, June 2, 1944, PSF 77, FDRL.  Back.

Note 36: Sumner Welles, "The Outlook for a Democratic World Order," Newton D. Baker Lecture, November 20, 1944, Council on World Affairs publication.  Back.

Note 37: For letters and telegrams to White House regarding Sumner Welles, see Official File 470, FDRL.  Back.

Note 38: Wallace, The Price of Vision, 397-400; Hull, Memoirs, 1716-1719; Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers (New York: Norton, 1971), 713-715.  Back.

Note 39: See Official File 470, "Sumner Welles," FDRL; President's Personal File 2961, FDRL; "Herald Tribune Broadcasts, 1945," box 199, folder 10, Welles papers, FDRL; Broadcast speech by Sumner Welles, May 22, 1945, Appendix to the Congressional Record, 1945, A2507-A2508, May 25, 1945.  Back.

Note 40: Swanberg, Luce and His Empire, 215-219.  Back.

Note 41: Welles, Seven Decisions, xi.  Back.

Note 42: Welles to Rosenman, June 17, 1949, Welles papers, box 140, FDRL.  Back.

Note 43: A. M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times (New York: Freundlich Books, 1986), 317-318; David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 567.  Back.

Note 44: Welles to Guachalla, January 13, 1949, box 138, Welles papers, FDRL.  Back.

Note 45: Philadelphia Inquirer, January 30, 1949.  Back.

Note 46: Benjamin Welles, Sumner Welles: FDR's Global Strategist (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 365-366.  Back.

Note 47: Jay Franklin column, January 4, 1949, Welles papers, box 259, scrapbook January 1949-November 1950.  Back.

Note 48: Washington Post, January 1, 1949.  Back.

Note 49: The Nation, January 8, 1949.  Back.

Note 50: Irwin F. Gellman, Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 392.  Back.

Note 51: Welles to Welch, November 17, 1949, box 140, Welles papers, FDRL; Welles to Weisbach, October 14, 1949, box 140, Welles papers, FDRL.  Back.

Note 52: Drew Pearson, Diaries 1949-1959, edited by Tyler Abell (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1974), 76.  Back.

Note 53: Morgan, FDR, 685.  Back.

Note 54: Benjamin Welles, Sumner Welles: FDR's Global Strategist, 373.  Back.

Note 55: Welles married Harriette Post, a childhood friend who was the daughter of a founder of the New York Stock Exchange.  Back.

Note 56: New York Times, September 25, 1961; John F. Kennedy to Harriette Welles, September 25, 1961, box 22, Welles papers, FDRL; Winston S. Churchill to Harriette Welles, September 26, 1961, box 22, Welles papers, FDRL.  Back.


Notes:

 

Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1937-1943