Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (151 page)

It was no coincidence that the Senate took up the Connally resolution when it did. Two weeks earlier Hull had traveled to Moscow to meet with his British, Russian, and Chinese counterparts. The quartet of foreign ministers produced a declaration affirming the unconditional surrender policy and proclaiming “the necessity of establishing at the earliest practicable date a general international organization, based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security.” Hull’s connections on Capitol Hill made it easy for Connally to copy the operative paragraph from the Moscow declaration into his own resolution and for the eighty-five senators to vote in favor. Hull came out an internationalist hero, and Roosevelt got exactly what he wanted, without having to ask for it.

R
OOSEVELT’S LEADERSHIP
style didn’t always produce such happy results. Henry Stimson sometimes wished he had never come out of retirement. The war secretary filled his diary with such characterizations of Roosevelt as “the poorest administrator I have ever worked under” and “soft-hearted towards incompetent appointees.” In certain instances Roosevelt held the reins too tightly. “He wants to do it all himself,” Stimson wrote after he couldn’t get an answer out of the White House on a critical matter. Often the president ignored existing channels of authority. “Today the President has constituted an almost innumerable number of new administrative posts, putting at the head of them a lot of inexperienced men appointed largely for personal grounds and who report on their duties directly to the President and have constant and easy access to him.”

There was, of course, a method to Roosevelt’s madness. As during the days before the war, he insisted that he not become a prisoner of the bureaucracy, which, if given its preferences, might have handed him decisions ready-made. He knew that the risk of imprisonment increased during wartime, as the military expected a deference mere political appointees weren’t shown. Yet he considered it even more important to maintain control during wartime. Generals and admirals rarely like to admit that war is a political act, but Roosevelt never forgot it. The war had begun in politics—in the politics of fascism, communism, and democracy—and it would end in politics.

Yet the Roosevelt style exacted a cost. His habit of employing personal envoys irritated Hull, even insulted him. The secretary of state tolerated Hopkins, but only barely, and that because Hopkins worked for the president rather than for the State Department and because Hopkins seemed likely to die any day. Sumner Welles, by contrast, was more than Hull could stand.

Hull disliked Welles personally and despised him professionally. The undersecretary’s Groton-Harvard background was as different from Hull’s as a man’s could be. Hull thought Welles looked down on him, and he wasn’t wrong. Hull suspected Welles of undermining him and coveting his job, and he had a point there too.

Roosevelt reassured Hull by saying he didn’t want to invest the missions he sent Welles on with the importance they would inevitably acquire if undertaken by the secretary of state. Welles could work more quietly. But the reassurance rarely lasted, and Hull eventually concluded that Roosevelt simply didn’t trust him to handle delicate matters. Hull came close at times to demanding that the president choose between him and Welles, but he always pulled back, typically after Roosevelt said or did something to indicate that he was blowing things out of proportion.

Hull lay in wait for the moment Welles would stumble. One such moment had seemed to occur in September 1940. William Bankhead, lately the speaker of the House, had just died, and Roosevelt, wishing to shore up his southern flank, led a group of administration officials to the funeral in Jasper, Alabama. Hull was sick, and Welles assumed his place on the presidential train with Roosevelt, Vice President Wallace, assorted cabinet secretaries, and Supreme Court justice Hugo Black. The journey from Washington took twenty hours, most of them hot, and the funeral service itself filled another stifling two. Roosevelt and the rest of the entourage returned to the train for the trip back to Washington.

The president and most of the others retired early that evening, exhausted from the heat and the commotion of the journey. But Welles stayed up, talking and drinking. He kept drinking even after there was no one left to talk to. Finally, far into the morning of the third day out from the capital, he rang for a porter and requested coffee.

When the coffee arrived in Welles’s private compartment, the undersecretary was quite drunk. So said the porter later, and so Welles concurred. The porter also said that Welles had propositioned him: had offered him money for sexual relations. The porter rejected Welles’s advances and left, shortly telling some of his fellow employees what had happened. Their supervisor heard and informed the railroad’s onboard security chief, who told the head of the Secret Service detail assigned to the president. The Secret Service man investigated sufficiently to convince himself of the truth of the porter’s tale but then clamped down, insisting that no one say anything, least of all to the press.

The lid held tight, through the 1940 presidential election, only six weeks later, and for another two years after that. But a story like this was impossible to contain forever, especially once rumors wafted to those with an interest in seeing Welles destroyed.

Cordell Hull wasn’t the only one who resented Welles. William Bullitt harbored a bitterness still deeper. Bullitt was temperamental, even mercurial. He had served in the Wilson administration but, taking personal affront at a perceived slight, turned against the president to abet the opponents of the League of Nations. He went on to write a bilious account of Wilson’s presidency. Roosevelt, for political reasons, had made Bullitt ambassador to France, but after France fell Bullitt had little to do but complain about how little he had to do. A more decisive, bolder, or simply straightforward chief executive would have let Bullitt go, but Roosevelt judged it better to have Bullitt inside the stockade shooting out than outside shooting in. Simply disarming him didn’t seem possible. Wilson had tried, and Bullitt had gone over to the opposition. Roosevelt remembered and refused to repeat Wilson’s mistake.

Bullitt might well have wanted to take on Roosevelt, but lacking any obvious grounds for doing so, he settled for going after Welles. He disagreed with Welles on various policy issues, but his animus grew personal, as most things did for Bullitt—and as many things did involving Welles, the golden boy of the administration. Bullitt learned of the night on the train, and he began whispering about it around the capital. Drew Pearson, whose “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column specialized in just such gossip, heard the Welles tale but sat on it pending confirmation. Bullitt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth had once been an item; Bullitt made sure the story got to Alice, who had aged without maturing and who detested everything about the New Deal, including its author and his wife—her own kin. Alice added her voice to the anti-Welles murmuring.

If the story had simply been that Welles had made homosexual advances, it might not have threatened the curtain of silence that typically shrouded such matters in Washington in that era. Likewise, if the country had not been at war, Welles’s secret could have been safe. But the homosexuality of a diplomat during wartime was presumed to create a security risk, in that the diplomat, with access to confidential information, might be blackmailed. Cordell Hull didn’t have to hate Welles to worry that the national interest could be compromised by Welles’s continued employment at the State Department. That he
did
hate Welles simply made it easier to indulge Bullitt in Bullitt’s vendetta.

Roosevelt tried to separate himself from the whole business as long as he could. He considered Welles something of a protégé, and he enjoyed Welles’s company more than that of Hull. He also considered Welles far more capable than Hull. As for Bullitt, he had never trusted him though he sometimes found him useful.

But when Roosevelt heard that Bullitt was spreading stories about Welles, he grew incensed. Bullitt was visiting the Oval Office on State Department business; Roosevelt saw him coming and halted him at the door. “William Bullitt, stand where you are,” he said. The president’s next words were variously recorded. “You’ve tried to destroy a fellow human being; get out of here and never come back,” one version asserted. Another account was more dramatic. “Saint Peter is at the gate,” Roosevelt was said to have declared. “Along comes Sumner Welles, who admits to human error. Saint Peter grants him entrance. Then comes William Bullitt. Saint Peter says: ‘William Bullitt, you have betrayed a fellow human being. You can go
down there
!’”

Yet as much as he hated to do it, Roosevelt knew he had to cut Welles off. In August 1943, with the capital gossip growing more lurid, Welles received a call. “The President asked me to see him,” Welles wrote his wife the next day. “He said that he had never been angrier in his life at the situation in the State Department, which has now reached an impossible climax.” Roosevelt blamed Bullitt directly, for spreading “poison,” and Hull indirectly, for not reining Bullitt in and for speaking out of turn. “While I don’t think he does it deliberately,” Roosevelt told Welles, apparently giving the secretary some benefit of the doubt, “Hull complains about you to every senator and newspaperman he talks to.”

Welles answered that if Hull had ever asked for his resignation, he would have tendered it at once. “My devotion and affection for the President was the issue,” Welles wrote his wife. “I would never embarrass him, particularly in wartime. I would resign at once.” And indeed he offered to resign, on the spot.

Roosevelt rejected the offer. “I have known you since you were a little boy, before you went to Groton,” he said. “I have seen you develop into what you now are. I need you for the country. After all, whom have I got? Harry Hopkins is a sick man. I thought he would die when he joined me last week. We are just moving into the first critical stages of peace talks. You know more about that than anyone, and you can be of more value than anyone.”

Welles said he was touched by the president’s loyalty, but he didn’t see how he could continue to work with Hull, who clearly didn’t want him around. He repeated his resignation offer.

Roosevelt again rejected it. Welles responded that he would think the matter over and give the president a decision the following Monday.

That weekend, though, Welles’s body broke down. The strain of the situation contributed to a heart attack that didn’t kill him but allowed Roosevelt to accept his resignation without appearing to yield to Bullitt and the scandalmongers. The president never forgave Bullitt. He subsequently suggested that the ambassador might have a future in the politics of Philadelphia, his home city. Bullitt took the hint and announced for mayor. Roosevelt quietly sent a message to the Democratic bosses in Pennsylvania: “Cut his throat.”

T
HE FIVE WEEKS
of Roosevelt’s journey to Cairo and Teheran constituted the longest stretch of his presidency away from the White House. He came home weary but exhilarated. “I do not remember ever seeing the President look more satisfied and pleased than he did that morning,” Sam Rosenman wrote of Roosevelt’s first day back in the office. “He believed intensely that he had accomplished what he had set out to do—to bring Russia into cooperation with the Western powers in a formidable organization for the maintenance of peace—and he was glad…. He was indeed the ‘champ’ who had come back with the prize.”