In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Riding the anti-Roosevelt wave, formidable new figures came to the Capitol to join the fray. A leading figure among them, whom FDR had seen in Paris in 1919, was Robert A. Taft. A fierce foe of government spending, Taft was elected to the Senate in 1938, and his name and outstanding intellect placed him immediately in the front ranks of Republican contenders for the presidency. On his second day in the Senate, Taft, who was deeply suspicious of foreigners and foreign entanglements, accused FDR of trying to involve the country in overseas conflicts in order to “take the minds of the people off their troubles at home.”

  Hounded by political enemies, Roosevelt must have felt immense relief in turning away from the apparently insoluble problems of the American economy and of American society, and taking the time to read the dispatches of his irrepressible ambassador to France.

  BULLITT, AS HIS LETTERS to Roosevelt show, found himself in full sympathy with the foreign policy of the French government. The government was led by the country’s first Socialist prime minister, Léon Blum, and it was sustained by a Popular Front in which a spectrum of parties of the Left were allied. Yet in the matter of the Spanish war, it would not support the elected leftist republican government in Madrid against a rightist military rebellion that began in the summer of 1936, just after Blum became premier and just before Bullitt arrived in Paris as ambassador. Within a week of the rebellion, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had agreed to dispatch war supplies to the Spanish Nationalists (as the rebels were called). Italian and German aviators and troops followed later; eventually Italy was to supply 50,000. Stalin replied by sending Soviet arms to the Loyalist forces of the increasingly leftist government of the republic. As time went on, leftist volunteers from various countries found their way into the ranks of the Loyalist army, notably in the International Brigades that were dominated by communists and in which Stalinists waged an interior civil war against Trotskyites.

  Blum’s France followed the line of Stanley Baldwin’s Britain: at all costs, the fighting in Spain must not be allowed to lead to a European war. In pursuance of that policy, Britain and France negotiated and signed an agreement with Italy, Germany, and Russia in which the signatory countries agreed not to intervene in the Spanish war: not to aid either side with troops or supplies. Britain and France mostly kept to their word, but Italy, Germany, and Russia cheated and continued to back their respective Spanish allies.

  Bullitt’s advice to his President was to stay out of harm’s way. The “odor which pervades every conversation I have in Paris whether with Frenchmen, Englishmen, Belgians, or Czechs,” he wrote on November 24, 1936, “is the emanation of a violent nervous desire to get us into the next war.” He added that “it will be difficult for me to make you realize the extent to which French Cabinet Ministers and representatives of all the countries of Europe in Paris talk as if they had within them the same phonograph record—playing the theme, ‘War is inevitable and Europe is doomed to destruction unless President Roosevelt intervenes.’ ” He found it impossible to get them to understand that there was nothing the President could do to help them.

  Bullitt reported on December 1, 1936, that he had emphasized to Premier Blum “the absolute determination of the United States to stay out not only of any wars on the continent of Europe but out of any engagements or commitments which might possibly lead to our involvement in wars.”

  The following month he wrote that “the only policy for us is to stay as far out of the mess as possible.” At the end of 1937 he commended to Roosevelt a book by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell that “holds out as the one hope of the world the possibility that the United States will stay out of the war … and will have, at the end of the holocaust, a civilization intact and of sufficient strength to pick up the pieces and put them together again.”

  Bullitt was openly anti-English, an attitude he claimed to derive from Revolutionary War ancestors. After a midnight conversation April 30, 1937, with Sir Eric Phipps—the British ambassador to Germany who became ambassador to France, and who “did not see the faintest possibility of coming to any agreement with Hitler” and believed in rearming as fast as possible—Bullitt reported to Secretary Hull that “the policy of Great Britain is still to keep the continent of Europe divided.” Cynically, he misinterpreted what Phipps told him, assuming that the true motive of the British government was to foment discord between Germany and her neighbors in order to play one side off against the other.

  Bullitt arrived at a program of his own for dealing with the simmering European crisis. His idea was to promote a reconciliation between France and Germany, who then could combine against the real threat to Europe: the Soviet Union.

  As for the Far East, Bullitt saw no grave problem there. He wrote Roosevelt that “the far-off bugaboo of complete Japanese domination of Asia and an eventual attack on us seems to me no basis whatsoever for present-day policy.”

  IN AUGUST 1936 the Japanese cabinet adopted a far-reaching program of national policy that called for Japanese hegemony in China, Southeast Asia, and the western Pacific. To frighten off possible Soviet interference with the carrying out of the program, Japan signed an Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany later that year. Apparently the cabinet did not expect interference by the United States.

  Earlier that year, the foreign news editor of the United Press wire service had written to and then met with President Roosevelt to propose a plan to improve relations between the United States and Japan. His idea was to establish a baseball world series between the two countries. Like everyone else who communicated with the President, he came away persuaded that Roosevelt agreed with him—had, indeed, “grasped the significance at once.” In September 1936 the editor set out for Japan, bearing with him a letter of introduction from FDR to American ambassador Grew.

  A minor and murky episode in July 1937 that led to an exchange of fire at midnight between Japanese and Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge in Wanping, near Peking, provided an excuse for Japan to initiate the invasion contemplated by her newly adopted national program. Although war was not declared by either side, the Japanese army took the offensive against the Chinese, driving south and west, and capturing the Chinese capital city of Nanking in December. The Japanese victors subjected Nanking to horrors that were calculated to terrorize all China.

  Governments around the world sent notes to Japan and China urging restraint, to no avail.

  Roosevelt was moved to make an eloquent speech that autumn in which, using phrases suggested by Harold Ickes, he compared aggression to a contagious disease and urged “quarantining” the aggressors. Though his words were seized upon hopefully by advocates of collective security, it transpired that the President had no specific program of action to propose.

  American passions had begun to run high about foreign events. In the continuing Far East crisis, Americans were sympathetic, as they always had been, to China. Looking in the other direction, across the Atlantic, Catholics in particular were aroused by Loyalist attacks on churches, priests, and nuns in Spain, while those on the Left increasingly were drawn to the cause of the Republic as against the military rebels and their Nazi and Fascist combat allies. Yet public opinion continued to be strongly isolationist; no matter who they were rooting for to win, Americans insisted they themselves would remain on the sidelines.

  In later years it would become apparent that Stalin had taken advantage of the Spanish war to liquidate the followers of Trotsky and other rival communist leaders, and to take control of the European Left. But at the time, especially to the young, it seemed as though the Soviet Union was the only organized force actively opposing Nazism and Fascism in the world. Some of the brightest spirits in the younger generation turned to, or at least sympathized with, Russia and the Communist party apparatus she controlled.

  Not untypical of the divide between the generations—in values and standards of behavior as well as in tastes and politics—was the situation in the American embassy in Berlin. Soon to be replaced by someone less op
enly critical of the Nazi regime,‡ Ambassador Dodd, who in 1936 predicted that by 1939 Germany would be able to “beat the whole of Europe in a war,” simply despaired. A deeply conservative person who admired the traditions of aristocratic Germany, he was offended by the raucousness of the Nazi regime. He retreated from the modern world into his studies of Wilson, Jefferson, and the gallant ways of the Old South.

  Meanwhile his daughter Martha, a socially and sexually active girl in her mid-twenties who in college had bedded her English literature professor, Robert Morss Lovett, and then perhaps Carl Sandburg, George Jean Nathan, and even Thornton Wilder when she worked as assistant literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, now took political activists as her lovers, too, in the delirium of Berlin. She was described by Thomas Wolfe, the author of Look Homeward, Angel, as “a little middle western flirt—with … a little ‘sure that will be swell’ sort of voice.” The novelist, suddenly one of the most famous writers in the world, was on a trip to Germany, where he was greatly admired.§ Intoxicated with fame, words, alcohol, sexual conquests, and acclaim, the giant of a man who did everything to excess was the greatest catch in town for a literary autograph hunter; and Wolfe told a friend that Martha was “like a butterfly hovering about my penis.”

  Reckless and indiscreet, Martha lurched with indiscriminate enthusiasm from Nazism to communism, carried on with spies of various nationalities, and eventually fell in love with a Russian diplomat who appears to have been the resident station chief of the Soviet secret service.

  Martha’s father confided his secrets to her. She read the embassy mail and typed the most confidential outgoing documents herself. A convicted spy for the Soviet Union testified in his (and her) trial in 1957 that it was originally at the request of her Russian lover, Boris Vinogradov, that she began turning over the embassy’s secrets and its files to the Soviet Union.

  In 1937 Martha and Boris composed a joint letter to Stalin asking his permission to marry. They received no response; but not long afterward, Vinogradov was recalled home and executed.

  Decades later Martha denied that it was for her lover’s sake that she had done what she had done; it was, she said, because it was the only way open to fight Nazism and Fascism at a time when America refused to join in the fight.

  THE ISOLATIONIST ASSUMPTION was that if the United States stayed out of things, it would be left alone. George S. Messersmith, a career diplomat who had served in Germany and Austria and who had just returned to Washington to serve as assistant secretary of state, challenged that view in a memo to Secretary Hull (October 11, 1937). He argued that “the United States are the ultimate object of attack of the powers grouped in this new system of force and lawlessness”—Germany, Italy, and Japan—so that it would be wiser for America to join the fray earlier rather than later. For otherwise, “when the time comes for them to deal with the United States …,” our “country will be practically alone for the rest will have been cleared out of the way.”

  * Vandenberg had been so convinced that the governor who owed him the appointment to the Senate was going to betray him by naming someone else, that when an official letter from the governor arrived, he threw it in the wastepaper basket unopened. Only three days later, driven by insistent reports of his appointment, did he lead his newspaper staff into the basement to search through bales of bundled trash to find what did indeed turn out to be his appointment to the Senate.

  † The promises made in obtaining U.S. recognition in 1933: to repay wartime debts to America and to stop subversion within the United States. Bullitt, having helped to negotiate these terms at the time, seemed to take it personally that the Russians reneged on them.

  ‡ Hugh R. Wilson, a career diplomat.

  § New details of his brief fling with Martha Dodd soon are to be supplied by Shareen Brysac, chronicler of the Berlin set in which Martha moved.

  43

  THE MARCH TOWARD WAR

  BERLIN. THE REICH CHANCELLERY on the Wilhelmstrasse. November 5, 1937, 4:15 p.m. The fuehrer, attended by only one aide, addressed the German foreign minister and four uniformed chiefs of the armed forces to reveal his plans for the future. Hitler began by asserting that the remarks he was about to make were so important that, “in the event of his death, they should be regarded as his last will and testament.”

  Apart from air force commander Goering, the men to whom he spoke were conservative professionals with roots in the prewar elite. They knew that Germany lacked the resources to wage a long war, and though unwilling to oppose their leader, at least openly, they worried that Hitler’s recklessness might embroil her in a war she might lose. Their nerves would have crumbled if Britain and France had stood firm when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland or when he openly ordered full rearmament.

  Now Hitler outlined an even more dangerous plan of action: a timetable of conquest calling for Germany to invade, occupy, and annex Austria and Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s point was that the industry, agriculture, and manpower of those countries then could be exploited by Germany, so strengthening her that she could go on to further conquests.

  The chiefs of the foreign office, the armed forces, the army, and the navy questioned whether Germany was ready for the major war that might ensue. Might this plan not lead Germany into another disaster of 1918–19 proportions?

  The fuehrer swept away not only the questions but also the questioners: within three months all were dismissed from their jobs, replaced by those who harbored neither doubts nor fears as to where Hitler was leading them. The Nazi revolution in Germany, as the journalist and historian William L. Shirer later commented, now was complete.

  THE NEW DEAL REVOLUTION in the United States was, if not complete, then at least far along. It had brought vast new powers to the federal government and therefore had attracted talented and ambitious people from all over the country to the nation’s capital. It was appropriate that Walter Lippmann should now be writing no longer from New York, but from Washington, D.C., as the sleepy and still provincial southern city verged on becoming an important center of world news.

  But it was accident rather than design that moved him there. Lippmann’s best friend had been Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, the magisterial publication of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Armstrong and his wife, Helen, shared Lippmann’s intellectual passions, interests, and concerns, so Lippmann had spent much time in their company, sometimes with his party-loving wife, Faye, but more often by himself.

  In 1937 Lippmann and Helen Armstrong became lovers, and they planned a secret tryst in Europe for that summer. A rationalist all his life, detached and cool, Lippmann, suddenly in the grip of his emotions, was driven to indiscretion. He wrote passionate letters to Helen, one of which fell into her husband’s hands. The violently bitter breakup of both marriages followed.

  Not even New York, America’s metropolis, was a big enough city to contain both luminaries of the American foreign policy establishment, who now no longer spoke to each other. Lippmann moved to Washington and, after both divorces became final, married Helen.

  LIPPMANN’S OLD FRIEND BULLITT, though accredited only to France, was acting as an American observer of the entire European scene—just as he had in Wilson administration days. He reported to Washington his conversations with leading European political personalities, including German officials to whom he alone seemed to have access. At the end of 1937, America’s roving ambassador to France spoke at length with the number two man in the Nazi regime, Hermann Goering, who purported to confide to him the full details of Hitler’s plans. Goering explained that there no longer was any conflict between France and Germany, because Germany had given up all thought of regaining Alsace-Lorraine. Germany was France’s friend and was ready to sign a full treaty of alliance with her. All that Germany wanted (Goering said, lying) was to unite with Austria and with the German-inhabited section of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, for “Germany had no desire to have territory in Europe except territory inhabited by Germans
.” Once Hitler had rounded out Germany by uniting Austria and the Sudetenland with her, he would call a halt; there would be no further conquests.

  Bullitt, who actively was promoting a Franco-German alliance, believed what he was told. So did the newly appointed undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles, who responded to him that “your conversation with Goering is one of the most important pieces of information which has reached the Department in many a month. I wish to the good Lord that during the past years we had been getting this type of information from Berlin.” For, like Bullitt, Welles considered Ambassador Dodd a failure for being so openly critical of the Nazis that he was denied access to them and intimacy with them. Welles had even taken steps to secure Dodd’s recall.

  Welles’s star was in the ascendant in Washington. Tall and handsome, he was a product of Groton and Harvard. His mother had been one of the best friends of Eleanor Roosevelt’s mother. Ten years younger than the President, Welles had been a page at his wedding and had been sponsored by Roosevelt for a State Department career. He had been FDR’s first ambassador to Cuba, and when his policy there led to disaster, he had been promoted (to assistant secretary of state) rather than dismissed. Though haughty and disdainful with others (and therefore widely disliked), Welles was on easy terms with FDR, with whom he shared an overweening pride of birth. From the time of his appointment as undersecretary in 1937, Welles dealt directly with the President instead of through his long-suffering nominal chief, Secretary Hull, whom FDR found admirable but boring.