Sumner Welles

...Throughout his adult life, especially when distressed, Welles followed a pattern of deep depression, heavy drinking, and late-night carousing with dubious male companions...

...For Welles's gifts as a student of foreign affairs, and diplomatic bureaucrat, were impressive...

...For Welles was a tortured man...

...The irony, of course, is a lesson in power: For all his achievements, and manifest influence, we are plainly distracted by Welles's tormented life...

...Martin's I 437 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Philip Terzian I f Sumner Welles had never existed, Gore Vidal would have had to invent him...

...Obviously, a man who is accurately described as "FDR's global strategist" deserves thorough scrutiny and fair recognition: The difference between America's role in the world when Welles joined the Roosevelt administration in 1933, and when he left it in 1943, is profound...

...Yet all this was thrown away when Welles, in heedless fashion, discarded his first wife for another: Calvin Coolidge summarily dismissed him from federal service...

...W elles had joined the Diplomatic Service in 1915 and, after choosing to specialize in Latin America, made himself indispensable in the settlement of crises in Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic...

...By any measure, Welles should be better known than he is, and more closely studied...

...For ten of Franklin D. Roosevelt's twelve years in the White House, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles was his principal adviser, confidant, and tactician on foreign affairs, and diplomatic jack-of-all-trades...

...dependence on his gay Belgian butler, a hard-drinking, two-fisted figure from a Pinter play...

...The secretary, Cordell Hull, was indolent, ignorant, suspicious of Roosevelt, and chiefly interested in promoting free trade...

...You amused me.'" His ostentatiously dignified attire was literally funereal: His mother had died when he was a freshman at Harvard, and he wore a black tie for mourning to the end of his life...

...and slowly, and presumably laboriously, wrote...

...Welles's voice, wrote Acheson, "was pitched much lower than would seem natural...

...Welles's conviction that the ticklish sensibilities of our southern neighbors ought to supersede U.S...

...Was alcohol intended to tranquilize pain or fortify the spirit...

...This could not have been an easy book for Benjamin Welles to write...

...Welles was sensitive, dissipated, deeply neurotic, physically delicate, occasionally suicidal, relentlessly alcoholic, and when drunk, unable to control his homosexual impulses...

...No account of the transition is complete without Sumner Welles...

...Even the British were impressed by his rigid demeanor, excessive formality, glacial reserve, and withering manner...

...But he was estranged from official Washington, devoid of contacts, barred from councils of state, bored, restless, dissipated, and longed for death...

...But as assistant secretary, and later under secretary, of state, he came into his own...

...Welles happily filled the vacuum: While Hull ran the shop, Welles was in constant consultation with the White House, accumulating power and earning the lasting resentment of Hull...

...For the next few years he churned out foreign policy potboilers, lectured, wrote a syndicated column, and broadcast on the radio...

...As a schoolboy, Welles was distinctly estranged from his hearty fellow students, an aspiring aesthete devoted to his mother and a younger Grotonian who later went to Paris to study art...

...From Welles's perspective, this took the form of pre-Pearl Harbor alliances with Britain —he helped draft the Atlantic Charter—and a United Nations that would function as an extension of American power...

...Now that his filial duties are completed, Sumner Welles's history is finally accessible —a generation late...

...The American Spectator • June .r 9 9 8...

...and when he died in 1961, his elder son, the author of this book, was entrusted with writing his father's biography...

...Did his wanton behavior have sexual roots...

...Bullitt exhorted FDR to fire Welles as a security risk, briefed senators hostile to Roosevelt, and kept a sympathetic Hull apprised of developments Finally, in August 1943, Hull bestirred himself: He told Roosevelt that, unless Welles were dismissed, he would resign...

...Heseems to believe that his father was bisexual—whatever that may mean—and that the homosexual side of Welles's nature did not emerge until middle life...

...But we live in a very different era from the world Welles inhabited, and at the end of the twentieth century, it is Welles's private life, as much as his public career, which diverts our attention...

...Struck down in middle life, Welles never recovered...

...Fearful of scandal, and mindful of Hull's prestige on Capitol Hill, Roosevelt asked for Welles's resignation...

...Nobody can know, and the son tries hard to understand his father...

...Once again, and finally, his demons intervened...

...That none of this was known to the general public, and that he remained in the senior ranks of government as long as he did, is a tribute to Roosevelt's dependence on Welles, and the culture of discretion in Washington—now, obviously, quite dead...

...But there are reasons for this puzzling state of affairs...

...When Roosevelt became president in 1933, Welles was initially dispatched to Cuba to sort out affairs, pasting together a "reform" regime that was swiftly superseded by the Grau San Martin–Batista dictatorship...

...and the conflict between his public achievement and private tribulation was relentless, ultimately yielding disaster...

...Welles's three turbulent marriages to heiresses —the richest of whom was eight years his senior—were decidedly dispassionate...

...Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, a sharp judge of public servants, wrote that "I recognized, at once, [Welles's] exceptional ability, his poise and force of character...

...There the matter lay until details of the incident became known to former Ambassador William C. Bullitt, who harbored a resolute animus against Welles...

...national interests in the region still echoes down the decades, and about as successfully then as now...

...The incident was investigated, and confirmed, by J. Edgar Hoover, who made the sensible observation to Roosevelt that no decisive evidence was extant, and that44 The conflict between his public achievement and private tribulation was relentless...

...His government service ended abruptly, at the age of 5o...

...Given the choice between getting the facts about crises in Honduras, or knowing the man who apologized for laughing, who would take Honduras...

...Interesting ideas, but we will never know what influence Welles might have wielded for the balance of the war...

...Benjamin Welles faces all this uncomfortable evidence with equanimity, but a certain credulity as well...

...When he died, at the age of 69, John F. Kennedy was in the White House and Sumner Welles was a remnant of the distant past...

...This was partly due to the weight of social connections —as a Groton schoolboy Welles had been a page at FDR's wedding—but largely because of Welles's incisive mind, decisive nature and relentless habits of work...

...Welles's life raises a series of tantalizing questions...

...Welles's supreme achievement was the Good Neighbor policy — FDR's version of hemispheric harmony—and one of the melancholy pleasures of this detailed account is to recognize how constant, and wearily familiar, are the manifold sorrows of inter-American relations...

...Dean Acheson, who was no slouch in the realm of deportment, described Welles in his memoirs as "formal to the point of stiffness....Once, when a remark of my wife's made him laugh, he quickly caught himself and said, `Pardon me...

...All this makes for very sad, and startling, reading...

...Part of the problem is that Welles has suffered the fate of most eminent men in public life: Four decades after his death, he is largely forgotten by the public and ignored by scholars...

...How could someone so capable be so reckless...

...For thirty-seven years Benjamin Welles, a veteran foreign correspondent for the New York Times, guarded Welles's papers, talked to participants PHILIP TERZIAN writes a column from Washington for the Providence Journal...

...How could any gothic novelist resist...

...For all the requisite ingredients are there: the American empire, steamy Latin capitals, the WASP ascendancy, New Deal Washington, plenty of alcohol, bureaucratic intrigue, political vendettas—and, of course, homosexuality...

...Roosevelt had no illusions about Hitler, Mussolini, or the Japanese, and by the late 1930's was eager for the United States to play a decisive role in world affairs...

...Welles's drunken behavior suggested a "mental" disturbance rather than criminal intent...

...In old age, he was reduced to emotional (and physical...

...This seems unlikely...

...Welles adapted to the leisurely life, but did not remain idle: He stayed in touch with old colleagues, wrote a two-volume history of the Dominican Republic, gave lots of money to the Democratic Party, and cultivated his old friend, 72 June 1998 • The American Spectator FDR...

...Indeed, it's a little surprising that Welles has never appeared in one of Vidal's historical melodramas...

...At the age of 29 he was chief of the Latin American division in the Department of State...

...In September 1940, returning by train from the funeral of Speaker of the House William Bankhead in Alabama, an intoxicated Welles propositioned some Pullman porters, and complaints were registered with the railroad officials...

...The moment Welles graduated from Harvard he escaped to Paris to join his good friend...

...To their credit, however, both Roosevelt and Welles ultimately grasped the difference between appeasing Latin America and getting to yes with Germany and Italy...

...Needless to say, the interior of this formidable exterior was a mess...