Secret Affairs
Gellman, Irwin F.
BOOK REVIEWS F or the critical seven years between 1937 and 1943, when the United States assumed world leadership, three strong-willed men set the nation's course in international affairs for the...
...The story begins with Sen...
...Though Irwin F. Gellman's engrossing Secret Affairs never asks this question directly, the book anyway tells a delicious tale of inside Washington politics and deception—and is a highly desirable corrective to the recent nostalgic rhetoric about World War 11 as the golden era of American leadership...
...In Gellman's hands, however, Hull comes off as a pious fraud who substituted "Whitney" for the Jewish "Witz" as his wife's maiden name in his Who's Who entry...
...Once the U.S...
...Though Gellman clearly favors Welles over Hull, he describes him as "pompous, self-righteous, moralistic and a rigid egomaniac" with "a low-controlled voice, which he cultivated to heighten the impression of pomposity...
...President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were national icons, with respect for the Secretary of State surpassing even the President's...
...Bullitt finally went to Roosevelt in July 1941 to alert him to Welles's homosexual activities...
...No longer could the eastern Ivy League-Wall Street clique lay unquestioned claim to the top portfolio at the State Department...
...So far as I am concerned, that is where you can go now...
...Still, Gellman has combined meticulous research with Washington gossip for a fascinating piece of history...
...William Bullitt, an FDR supporter and bitter rival, learned of Welles's escapades and, according to Gellman, an FBI report ordered by Roosevelt indicated that Bullitt was spreading the news about Welles...
...When Bullitt asked for the president's endorsement, the response was Rooseveltian in its sweep: "I want to say to you when you and Welles meet St...
...0 64 The American Spectator September 1995...
...G ellman provides original research about both Welles and Hull, but contributes nothing new about Roosevelt, who "guaranteed governmental discontinuity after his death" by failing to explain his policies to Vice President Truman or anyone else...
...SECRET AFFAIRS: FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, CORDELL HULL AND SUMNER WELLES Irwin F. Gellman The Johns Hopkins University Press /499 pages / $29.95 reviewed by ROBERT D. NOVAK 62 The American Spectator September 1995 Welles was not finally pushed out until 1943, when the allegations got to Sen...
...In Berlin, "Welles reflected on his 'very cordial' talk with Hitler and the favorable impression the dictator had made on him...
...In Rome, he called Mussolini 'The greatest man he ever met...
...But Hull kept the diagnosis secret, even from Roosevelt, and accepted the Cabinet post in hopes of becoming the presidential successor...
...Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, though more controversial, was widely esteemed as a world-class diplomat...
...What was the impact on Welles of covert Communists who were among his closest associates at State...
...entered the war, Welles dreamed up equally visionary plans for the peace, including a permanent United Nations police force...
...Hull did stir himself in his final days to kill Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau's scheme to transform postwar Germany into a deindustrialized "pastoral" state...
...Roosevelt asked him to be his running mate in 1940 and, incredibly, in 1944—the dying president trying to make the gravely ill secretary of state his successor...
...By 1942, Cordell Hull had also begun raising the homosexual issue with prominent figures—including James Byrnes, the former Supreme Court Justice who carried the honorific of "assistant president" as war mobilizer...
...When a Negro porter answered, the drunken Under Secretary offered him money to commit homosexual acts...
...Hull was able to leavethe capitol for weeks and even months without arousing suspicion—something inconceivable today...
...T he real danger to Welles's career, however, came from his homosexuality, which he increasingly was unable to keep a secret...
...Hull came to resent Welles's influence with the President and his authority at the State Department...
...Hull, with "virtually no qualifications in international affairs," had taken a physical examination in the summer of 1932 that showed tubercular lesions in both lungs...
...E ven without knowing that his Secretary of State had consumption, however, Roosevelt had intended for Hull to be a figurehead...
...Yet each was harboring dark secrets that the American people should have known but did not...
...he described Welles to Nelson Rockefeller as "that polecat in the next room...
...That observation is preposterous in light of what we know today about the invalid Roosevelt's egregious handing over of Eastern Europe to Stalin...
...Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist, a television commentator, and editor of the Evans and Novak Political Report...
...Roosevelt considered him for Vice President but instead named him Secretary of State...
...The president would be his own chief diplomat and, as international affairs became preeminent with the approach of World War II, Roosevelt relied increasingly on Sumner Welles—an aristocrat, fellow Groton alumnus, and former foreign service officer...
...Cordell Hull of Tennessee, a Washington fixture who had been the Democratic Party's national chairman and considered a run for president in 1928...
...When Welles embarked on his 1940 peace mission to Europe—a venture ordered by Roosevelt without consulting Hull, or even informing him in advance—the mission excited much anticipation of an abortive end to World War II...
...Peter, Sumner will probably go to heaven, but you will go to hell...
...Tall,lean, white-haired, and intensely dignified, he was respected even by conservatives who feared and hated Roosevelt...
...He thought the fact that his wife was half-Jewish would "keep him from the presidential nomination he so passionately desired...
...Gellman seems frozen in time as a '40s liberal when it comes to Communism, berating Bullitt for his warnings that Stalin would "eat like a cancer into Europe...
...Gellman repeats the now familiar story of the president's physical deterioration and the efforts made to conceal it, and hurries over his last months in office—with Welles and Hull both gone—in 13 pages...
...Instead of being grateful for this information, FDR gave this cool response: "There is truth in the allegations...
...The animosity escalated in December 1940, when columnist Drew Pearson reported that Welles, his friend and source, had intervened with Roosevelt to successfully block Hull's proposed credits to Franco'sfascist regime in Spain...
...Roosevelt agreed, and Welles was forced to resign in August 1943...
...Gellman makes clear that this was no isolated incident...
...He was a provincial being with strong likes and dislikes," Gellman writes, "a 19th Century man who had stepped into the 20th Century...
...No discussion of the policy impact The American Spectator September 1995 63 of Soviet agents such as Duggan and Alger Hiss is possible without recognizing the existence of the conspiracy...
...He was also probably the richest man in Roosevelt's administration, having married the heiress to the Pennsylvania Railroad, and moved into her Washington mansion, which is now the Cosmos Club...
...BOOK REVIEWS F or the critical seven years between 1937 and 1943, when the United States assumed world leadership, three strong-willed men set the nation's course in international affairs for the rest of the century...
...Maybe I was wrong in denying this part of the story, but Welles told me he was in the toughest spot of his entire professional career...
...The shaken attendant rejected this proposition, but his rebuff did not stop Welles from repeating his call several times...
...Gellman approvingly refers to Welles's proposals, opposed by Hull, for "policing the globe and caring for its inhabitants...
...Behind his saintly facade, Hull had "probably the foulest mouth in' the Cabinet" and was perhaps its most vicious bureaucratic infighter...
...Would this have been better or worse for the nation...
...Who among his associates knew about his secrets and how did they react to them...
...Proclaimed the greatest Secretary of State in history by Democratic leader James A. Farley, Hull never seized control during 12 years at State and devoted an inordinate effort to passing his Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act...
...Bullitt paid a final visit to Roosevelt shortly thereafter, when he was engaged in a hopeless run for mayor as a Democrat in then still solidly Republican Philadelphia...
...As described by Gellman, however, the trip attested more to Welles's energy than his wisdom...
...Welles was named Assistant Secretary of State in 1933, and promoted to Under Secretary—then the number two position in the department—in 1937...
...Bullitt's hopes of supplanting Welles as the President's chief foreign policy adviser were finished...
...The thoroughness with which Gellman deconstructs Hull, meanwhile, can be appreciated only by those of us old enough to recall Hull's overriding popularity...
...When Byrnes talked to the President about it, Roosevelt said: "I believe Hull's statement is correct...
...As Gellman writes, Hull's appointment "not only proclaimed the importance of the South in the New Deal coalition but also served to recognize the integral role of Democratic regulars in the party's victorious return to the White House...
...Hull had the good sense and patriotism to decline...
...But what surely would have tripped him up today was his increasing absenteeism as the tuberculosis worsened...
...Welles arrived in London with a hare-brained peace plan involving immediate destruction of offensive weapons and establishment of an international air force...
...He originally intended to write a biography only of Welles, and one remains needed to answer questions not asked here: How often didhis sexual behavior impinge on his official duties...
...Given the transparency of public life today, Roosevelt, Hull and Welles never could have kept their secrets...
...Still, Hull was a national hero Roosevelt felt he needed for his broad wartime coalition...
...Yalta gets just one page, on which Gellman concludes, "Despite his weakened physical condition, his health was not a major factor at the conference...
...On a September 1940 train ride from Alabama, where Welles had attended the funeral of House Speaker William Bankhead, he left the dining car for his sleeping quarters and, as Gellman writes, began "to ring his service bell...
...Lawrence Duggan, chief of the State Department's Latin American division, is described as Welles's mentor and alter ego, but nowhere is he identified as part of the active Soviet espionage apparatus at State...
...In the television age, Hull could hardly have maintained his image with a speech impediment that turned his pet project into the "wecipwocal twade agweements pwogwams...
...There has been no similarly venerated public figure in the past half century, and Hull was so highly regarded in the Democratic Party that he likely would have been nominated for president if Roosevelt had not sought a third term in 1940...
...Sumner Welles's chief crime towards common sense and humanity," said a memo by Sir Robert Vansittart, head of the British Foreign Office, "is that he has now gone so far as to want us to make peace with Hitler...
...Owen Brewster, a Maine conservative Republican who threatened a public exposé if he were not fired...
...Otherwise, his final foreign policy endeavors concentrated on an emotional vendetta against Charles de Gaulle...
...The White Plague, as it was known, usually meant the patient would be shipped off to a sanitarium...
...the cause of his departure was kept under wraps...
...Pearson made a retraction to save his friend, and Gellman discovered this 1941 note in the columnist's papers: "Actually Welles does go over Hull's head all of the time and did so in the case of the Spanish credit...
...Hull was resented by the President's inner circle, especially Eleanor Roosevelt, as hostile to the New Deal—partly inspired by his success in running New Dealers Raymond Moley, George Peek and, of course, Sumner Welles out of the State Department...
...The answers might well suggest that we were fortunate to emerge from World War II with only the loss of Faste' Europe...
...At a crucial moment in 1932, when the stop-Roosevelt movement was gaining strength, Hull endorsed FDR and brought him needed Southern strength...
...Hull was furious, and accused Welles of leaking...
...Only when none of the porters would accept his advances, did the buzzing finally stop...
...The spectacle of Hull "coughing up a good deal of blood" as he flew to Moscow in 1944 for a foreign ministers' conference went unreported...
Vol. 28 • September 1995 • No. 9
