In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Indeed, in the years to come Eleanor Roosevelt was to carve out for herself a role unique in American history. She was more than accessible to the public; constantly on the road, she went out to the country, seeing for herself and listening to what others had to say. Her reluctance to compromise principle, her goodness, her sympathy, and her almost palpable desire to help won her a position of independent moral authority. She had an activist character; when she saw or heard of something wrong, her reaction was to do something about it.

  Of course, opponents of her politics made fun of her drabness and awkwardness. Even they, however, described her as a “do-gooder,” though they did not intend that to be praise.

  One of Eleanor’s intimate friends in 1933, as for many years past, was Lorena Hickok, a top Associated Press journalist who had become an investigative field reporter for FDR’s social services chief, Harry Hopkins. Franklin’s close relationship was with his secretary, Marguerite (“Missy”) LeHand, with whom Franklin had lived for years. Franklin and Missy were lovers in most senses and perhaps all.

  Nonetheless, there were others in Missy’s life: men who could offer her marriage. One such relation seems to have ended badly in late 1932. It was a few months later that Missy met handsome, charming, wealthy, womanizing Bill Bullitt.

  Bullitt had a lifelong tendency, whether in the White House, the Kremlin, or any one of the seats of government in Europe, to blunder into situations of whose political currents, emotional eddies, and treacherous depths he was quite unaware. With his quickness in jumping to a conclusion, his sense of drama, and his firm conviction that he was the smartest person in any room, he was often mistaken in believing that he knew what game was being played.

  Seemingly ignorant of the Roosevelts’ marital arrangements and apparently under the impression that Missy was unattached, he seriously flirted with her, perhaps seduced her, and possibly gave her to understand that he was thinking of marrying her. FDR smiled on the relationship, as he had on the previous relationship that had ended badly. This called for explanation, but Bullitt seemed not to know that it did. For the decade to come, Bullitt, in his foreign policy career, was to rely entirely on FDR’s friendship and support; it seems never to have occurred to him that he might have endangered that friendship by interfering with the President’s relationship with what may have been his mistress.

  Roosevelt’s attitude was puzzling to his wife, even though she knew him to be broad-minded. But it seemed less puzzling after the announcement that Bullitt was to go away. Eleanor wrote Lorena Hickok on the day of the announcement that “Bullitt goes as Ambassador. I wonder if that is why F.D.R. has been so content to let Missy play with him! She’ll have another embassy to visit next summer.…” Another explanation was that Roosevelt wanted Missy to discover how unreliable other men—men other than himself—were.

  So the appointment of the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union inspired emotions less tepid, and excited comments less conventional, than was usual with such official assignments. Attended, even within his own family, by mixed wishes for his success (“BULLITT’S UNCLE SAYS SOVIET DEAL DISGRACES UNITED STATES” was one newspaper headline), Bullitt embarked December 1, 1933, on his latest mission to Moscow.

  Crossing the continent of Europe en route to his new post, Bullitt stopped for lunch with U.S. Ambassador William E. Dodd in Berlin. Dodd was a University of Chicago history professor whose appointment had been suggested by Colonel House. He had served as a German expert on the Inquiry team at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and had thought Bullitt’s resignation letter at the time “bombastic and unreasonable.” Like Undersecretary of State William Phillips, he believed that Bullitt’s conduct in 1919 had been a betrayal of Wilson, Lansing, and the State Department, and that it remained unforgivable.

  Bullitt went on his way to Russia, where he had to start from scratch in organizing an embassy. In retrospect it is clear that he was establishing the embryo of the foreign service that would wage the cold war. It was, in that sense, Bullitt rather than Dean Acheson who was present at the creation of post–Second World War American foreign policy. Bullitt understood that the embassy would need security arrangements that would not have been necessary in the pre-1914 world of polite diplomacy; he appointed as his security chief a young naval officer, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who would later become head of the CIA.

  It is said that their training under the regime of the State Department’s Kelley led Bullitt’s Moscow staff to take a hostile view of the Soviet Union. Certainly Loy Henderson, later a formidable figure in the State Department mandarinate, and future ambassadors to Russia George Kennan and Charles Bohlen were critical of the Stalin regime.

  Born in Milwaukee and schooled at Princeton, Kennan, who was to become an architect of American foreign policy in the 1940s, was twenty-nine years old at the time. As a candidate for appointment to the newly established American Foreign Service, he had appeared before an oral examining panel (it “utterly terrified me,” he later wrote) headed by the now formidable Joseph Grew. In 1928 he had been sent to Berlin and the Baltic republics to be trained as a Russian specialist.

  Bohlen, the same age, trained in the Baltic states at about the same time that Kennan did. The grandson of a senator who became the first U.S. ambassador to France,† he had the easy charm that comes with birth into wealth and society. His fun-loving nature was a contrast to that of the serious Kennan, who became his lifelong best friend.

  Kennan later described Bullitt, his new boss, as “a striking man: young, handsome, urbane, full of charm and enthusiasm, a product of Philadelphia society and Yale … and with a flamboyance of personality that is right out of F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

  “As the old American friend of new Russia,” wrote Janet Flanner (the “Genet” who was the New Yorker’s correspondent in Paris), Bullitt “was received with fantastic acclaim. When he rode in the streets he was cheered, at the Opera the Muscovites rose to shout his name.…” But it was Bullitt himself who told Flanner all this, in an interview that took place about five years later, and it gives some sense of the high drama in which he imagined himself to be playing a leading role.

  Bullitt was won over by the compliments showered upon him. Writing to Roosevelt, he quoted Mikhail Kalinin (who occupied the ceremonial position of president of the Soviet Union) as saying “that he and everyone else in Russia considered you completely out of the class of the leaders of capitalist states; that it was clear to them all that you really cared about the welfare of the laboring men and the farmers.…” Meanwhile, the Communist party press claimed to have discovered previously unknown statements by Lenin praising Bullitt: “Apparently he really liked me,” Bullitt marveled.

  On December 20, 1933, Kliment Voroshilov, supreme Soviet military commander, invited Bullitt to dinner at the Kremlin to meet the Soviet leaders. Explaining why his own qualities made him such a success in Moscow, Bullitt told FDR, “The men at the head of the Soviet Government are really intelligent, sophisticated, vigorous human beings and they cannot be persuaded to waste their time with the ordinary conventional diplomatist.” And they appreciated the intelligence of the aides he had chosen: “They were, for example, delighted by young Kennan who went in with me.”

  As Bullitt looked around the room, flatteringly filled in his honor with the important Soviet figures that other diplomats never got a chance to meet, Maksim Litvinov, the foreign minister, said: “This is the whole ‘gang’ that really runs things—the inside directorate.”

  After eating “every conceivable kind of caviar and crab and other Russian delicacy” with drinks, they sat down to an elaborate banquet punctuated by the frequent downing of vodka. The glasses of vodka had to be emptied—had to be drunk “bottoms up”—each time someone rose to offer a toast, Bullitt reported to Roosevelt, and “there were perhaps fifty toasts.… Everyone at the table got into the mood of a college fraternity banquet, and discretion was conspicuous by its absence. Litvinov whispered to me, ‘You told me you woul
dn’t stay here if you were going to be treated as an outsider. Do you realize that everyone at this table has completely forgotten that anyone is here except the members of the inner gang?’ ”

  After dinner, the party adjourned to a drawing room, and Stalin sat beside Bullitt for a long talk. “He said he hoped that I would feel myself completely at home in the Soviet Union,” Bullitt told Roosevelt, “that he and all the members of the Government had felt that I was a friend for so long, that they had such admiration for yourself and the things you were trying to do in America that they felt we could cooperate with the greatest intimacy.” Stalin “gave me the feeling that he was speaking honestly.… As I got up to leave, Stalin said to me, ‘I want you to understand that if you want to see me at any time, day or night, you have only to let me know and I will see you at once.’ ”

  As Bullitt noted, that was extraordinary, “as he has hitherto refused to see any Ambassador at any time.” And then “Stalin took my head in his two hands and gave me a large kiss! I swallowed my astonishment, and, when he turned up his face for a return kiss, I delivered it.”

  During the course of the evening, the Soviet leaders told Bullitt that Japan was likely to attack Russia; Stalin spoke of it as a certainty. Stalin said that in this connection Russia needed 250,000 tons of steel rails at once to complete a railroad line to the Pacific port of Vladivostok, and wanted help—which Bullitt promised to him—in expediting their purchase in the United States.

  THE FEAR OF Japanese imperial expansion had hung over Asian and international politics for years. It was therefore to take his place in the front lines, as it were, in dealing with the leading threat to world peace that Joseph Grew embarked for Japan in March 1932 as America’s new ambassador. Grew, whose career experience, aided by wealth and social position, had made him one of the leading mandarins of the Department of State, arrived in Japan to take up his post—only to find, within a matter of months, that his tenure as ambassador was in doubt.

  For the election of a Democratic President had drawn into question the continuation in office of Republican-era appointees. Even though the creation in the 1920s of a professional U.S. foreign service had brought lower-level jobs into nonpartisan civil service status, ambassadorships remained political appointments.

  Just as he had written Roosevelt to help save his job when Wilson was elected, Grew in 1932 contacted Roosevelt’s friends Undersecretary of State William Phillips and Colonel House for their help in keeping him in his job now that Roosevelt was elected. Grew questioned whether his old college clubmate had the courage to resist “party hacks” who would want to reward the party faithful with ambassadorial posts, and doubted whether Roosevelt (whom he had accused of “gutter” politics in 1920) had “genuine honesty of purpose”; but he wrote “Dear Frank” a letter of congratulations on winning the election, saying that “Groton, Harvard, and the Fly are immensely proud and they have good right to be.”

  In fact, Grew’s position never was in danger; and within a short time he began to appreciate the qualities of the new President. “Isn’t it fine the way the President is supporting the career diplomats?” he wrote happily to one of his peers. He uttered “a most fervent prayer for Frank’s success” when he read the inaugural address, and found the President’s methods thereafter “intensely refreshing.”

  Whether or not Grew was the ideal ambassador, Alice Grew was by birth and upbringing the ideal ambassador’s wife. She spoke Japanese, which her husband did not. The daughter of a Boston Cabot and a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin, Alice also was a great-grandniece of Commodore Matthew Perry, who had forcibly opened up Japan to the modern world in 1853–54. The ambassador might well have reflected how different 1933 would have been had Alice’s Uncle Matthew left Japan in self-imposed isolation, a feudal society cut off from the rest of mankind.

  As it was, the Grews arrived in Tokyo at a time of great tension in relations between Japan and the outside world. Japan had just quit the League of Nations rather than accept interference with her program of conquest in Manchuria. Grew recognized, as Willard Straight had done decades before, that if the United States was not prepared to back up words with deeds, its words would not be heeded; and his counsel to an America that disapproved of Japanese actions but was not prepared to do anything about it was, in essence, to keep quiet.

  In May 1933 Grew sent Secretary Hull a detailed appreciation of Japanese power. He wrote that “Japan probably has the most complete, well-balanced, coordinated and therefore powerful fighting machine in the world today. I do not refer to the army alone, but to the combination of sea, land and air forces, backed up as they are by enormous reserves of trained men, by industrial units coordinated with the fighting machine and by large reserves of supplies.… [T]aken as a whole the machine, I believe, is equal, if not superior, to that of any other nation.… Relative to the strength which could conceivably be brought against it, I consider Japan’s fighting machine immeasurably stronger than any other.… More than … the strength of its fighting machine, however, the thing which makes the Japanese nation actually so powerful and potentially so menacing, is the national morale and esprit de corps … which perhaps has not been equalled since the days when the Mongol hordes followed Genghis Khan.…”

  In September 1933 Grew reported to Washington that “eventual war between Japan and Soviet Russia is inevitable”—but not imminent. A question therefore arose as to what the United States ought to do in an effort to serve its own interests and those of world peace.

  When Maksim Litvinov was in Washington, he had asked the State Department for a U.S.-USSR alliance against Japan, and had been curtly turned down by Phillips. Along with Stalin and the other Russian leaders, Litvinov imagined that Bullitt exercised great influence over Roosevelt, and broached the subject anew with the new ambassador in Moscow. Bullitt tried to explain that such an alliance was out of the question, and that the United States intended to keep on good terms with Japan, to which Litvinov responded: “Anything that could be done to make the Japanese believe that the United States was ready to cooperate with Russia, even though there might be no basis for the belief, would be valuable.”

  That is part of what Roosevelt accomplished simply by recognizing the Soviet Union. In the political circumstances of the time, it was all that he could do, but it was enough to raise the possibility—of which policy makers in Japan would have to take account—of joint action by the United States and the Soviet Union should an expansionist Japan go too far. Whether in part because of that, or entirely for such other reasons as the Soviet military buildup in the Far East, Japan seemingly moderated her policies in the years immediately following the restoration of U.S. ties with Russia. Grew himself believed, as he wrote Secretary Hull February 8, 1934, that “our recognition of the Soviet Union has injected a restraining influence, probably of greater effect than any other single integral.”

  In turn, as Bullitt reported to Roosevelt, the Soviet leaders, having abandoned hope of winning an American alliance and no longer fearing an imminent Japanese attack, felt no further need to court Bullitt or the United States. “The Japanese have let us down badly,” Bullitt quoted a colleague as remarking wryly; and the “honeymoon atmosphere” in Moscow had “evaporated completely.”

  Although Bullitt thought it “almost impossible to imagine a situation which would cause us to have exceedingly bad relations with the Soviet Government for the simple reason that the two countries have no major conflicting interests,” he recognized that the Russians no longer gave priority to their relationship with the United States, and that as a result he himself was in for a dull few years in bleak, gray, cold, friendless Moscow.

  Bullitt was not a foreign service person by temperament; it was not in his nature to spend his life doing routine, day-to-day, nine-to-five chores. He was in his element only when reporting a scoop or scoring a coup. It was typical of his mode of operation that he strapped some of his earliest dispatches to the leg of the comedian Harpo Marx,
who had been performing in the Soviet Union and was returning to the United States. “ ‘Just forget you’re carrying it,’ said the ambassador. ‘Except,’ he added, ‘when you go in the shower.’ ” According to Marx’s autobiography, published a quarter-century later, the comedian worried constantly during his voyage, ducked or hid whenever he felt people were looking at him or following him, developed a limp from self-consciousness, and finally kept to his room. The packet of unopened letters was duly collected by two men who identified themselves as government agents when Marx’s ocean liner docked in New York. Marx never was told the nature of the secret papers he had carried.

  Maybe it was a hoax. Marx may have invented the story. Or it could have been a joke that Bullitt played on him. But it says something about the ambassador that he just might have done it.

  Bullitt was bored in Russia, and played truant. He traveled in Europe, in Asia, and sometimes back to America; he was away from the Moscow embassy literally half the time. He had gone to Russia with high ambitions but they had been frustrated.

  It seems unlikely that his President ever shared either the high hopes or the disappointment. Roosevelt, by recognizing the Soviet Union, had made a move on the diplomatic chessboard that somewhat improved America’s position in regard to Japan and perhaps even Germany. There is no reason to believe he expected anything more would come of it, and because of domestic political pressures and economic priorities, it was about all that he could do.