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Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles

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There are many things to like in this volume, particularly its profiles of six or eight largely forgotten luminaries of the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Unfortunately these pocket biographies, and the obscure crises that engaged them, are strung together very loosely, so that as a whole the book all but defies sustained reading. This is a volume to dip into at random for a few entertaining pages, and then to put aside when the author, bowing to chronological necessity, moves on to new personalities and vaguer problems.

In his foreword to the paperback edition, Irwin Gellman explains that he initially intended merely to tell about FDR's relations with Cordell Hull (Secretary of State) and Sumner Welles (Under-Secretary, and personal friend of FDR), but the scope of his research quickly outgrew his intentions. Major players kept turning up and demanding time on stage, and often there was scant biographical information available on these people. No one had ever written a biography of William C. Bullitt, for example, and the Sumner Welles papers were being jealously guarded by Welles's son for his own as-yet unpublished biography. And then there were folks like Assistant Secretary R. Walton Moore, the elderly eminence grise of State who died suddenly in 1941 and then was virtually forgotten. Finally, the tale of FDR's State Department could not be told without discussion of Presidential elections, particularly that of 1940. Cordell Hull himself expected to be the nominee (FDR had privately encouraged him, while privately going ahead with third-term ambitions), but James Farley and John Nance Garner also had their eyes on that prize. And so Gellman keeps digressing despite himself, then struggles to get back to the meat of the story.

The largest subplot is the long-running feud between Bullitt and Welles, both of whom hoped to succeed Hull as Secretary of State. Both had bristly egos and a talent for making themselves unpopular. Bullitt's antagonism toward Welles was probably ideological, but he was unable or unwilling to make it look like anything other than personal pique. As his trump card against Welles he tried to exploit a scandalous story then making the rounds of official Washington, a preposterously lurid tale about Pullman porters that was apparently true but which FDR was quite sick of hearing about. In playing this card, Bullitt destroyed both his own career and that of Welles.

By the start of the Truman administration, most of the New Deal-era State Department was gone or in disarray. A tragic outcome, in Welles's opinion, and Gellman is very much in his camp. Having lost all this expertise of the Roosevelt era, the argument goes, the new administration was now ham-handed in its diplomatic dealings with the Soviets and others. Personally I find this argument very thin. Welles's expertise extended mostly to Latin America, and his influence at State was mostly an ideologial one, within a "progressive" cadre that included Alger Hiss and Lawrence Duggan, both of whom were also forced out of the State Department. It was at Welles's recommendation that Hiss became the UN's first acting Secretary General. When in 1948 congressional investigators named Hiss and Duggan as Communists, Welles spoke sonorously in their defense. It is really hard to imagine that this circle could have remained at State, let alone maintain influence, after about 1944.

This book is valuable for its biliographical material, and as an introduction to some interesting characters worthy of deeper study. It all might have worked better if Gellman had broken up into five or six sections, each focusing on the career and motives of an individual.

Gellman passionately advances the notion that Hull's undersecretary, the notorious homosexual and wealthy Harvard man, Sumner Welles was responsible for everything usually credited to Hull, such as the founding of the United Nations. Welles was pro-Israel as is Gellman. Gellman dismisses Hull as being anti-semitic even though Hull's wife was of Jewish heritage.

A very biased account of an important period in American history which ignores all evidence counter to the author's position.