Sumner Welles: FDR's Global Strategist [Hardcover]

Benjamin Welles (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312174403 | ISBN-13: 978-0312174408 | Publication Date: November 15, 1997 | Edition: 1st

In 1915, Sumner Welles, the son of an aristocratic family, began to work for the US State Department. Welles quickly showed an aptitude for the delicate job of international negotiation. His early successes in Japan later brought him to the attention of FDR who brought him into his administration as Under-Secretary of State. While Welles provided FDR with invaluable information about Europe and Japan, his main achievement was the development of US relations with Latin America. His bright career, however, was not to last. In 1940, FDR and his cabinet traveled to the funeral of William Bankhead, Speaker of the House. Welles traveled with them and, on the return journey, he propositioned a black Pullman car porter, allowing an aspect of his life that was heretofore hidden, to emerge. The scandal was made public and Welles resigned in 1943, thereby ending his career. This life of Sumner Welles is candidly written, for the first time, by his son, Benjamin Welles. Anyone interested in the accomplishments of this great man, the history of his time and the presidency of FDR, will want to read this beautifully written book.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles was one of the rising stars of FDR's administration. The president viewed Welles as indispensable, referring to him as "the only man in the State Department who really knew what was going on." And yet, at the height of World War II, he was forced to resign, as scheming colleagues (including Secretary Cordell Hull) spread rumors about Welles's alleged sexual solicitation of a male train porter in 1940.

Something happened on that train; Roosevelt believed that the rumors were true, but, valuing Welles's expertise, he refused to cut his lifelong friend loose until the situation became politically impossible to ignore. This biography, written by Welles's eldest son, is understandably circumspect, concluding that a combination of exhaustion, wartime stress, and heavy drinking "let the bisexual nature latent in his nature burst their bonds." After his retreat into private life, Welles fell into the clutches of his valet, "a psychopathic bisexual ... whose hard drinking and turbulent influence hastened Welles's rush to self-destruction." (Shades of Harold Pinter!) Drawing extensively upon his father's papers, the author does an admirable job of rehabilitating Welles's reputation as a brilliant executor of American foreign policy, and skillfully portrays the cutthroat competition among members of the Roosevelt team, a competition in which he finally could not bring himself to take part.

From Library Journal

Sumner Welles was Franklin Roosevelt's principal foreign policy adviser until Secretary of State Cordell Hull forced his resignation in 1943 over a homosexual episode. Best known for the Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America, Welles also helped draft the Atlantic Charter and was involved in wartime diplomacy on many other fronts. Two things are notable about this biography of Welles: it is the first, and it is written by his son, who draws on his own recollections and had access to Welles's papers while he interviewed friends and associates of his father. Although the book contributes to what is known of Welles's personal life, its style is not so engaging that general readers will take note. His diplomatic career is already well known to scholars, and only specialists will need the details filled in by this book. Most libraries will be served well enough by Irwin Gellman's Secret Affairs (LJ 5/1/95) and by the many other studies of FDR's foreign policy.?Robert F. Nardini, North Chichester, N.H.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 437 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (November 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312174403
• ISBN-13: 978-0312174408
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #246,823 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars History through the eyes of family ties., April 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Sumner Welles: FDR's Global Strategist (Hardcover)

When I picked up this book, I didn't even kow who Sumner Welles was (don't ask how I ended up reading this one). I found that this book provided an excellent description of Welles contribution to foreign policy in the US during the Rooselvelt administration. All of Welles' official accomplishments were clearly described and outlined. Where I found difficulty with this book was when it went into detail about Welles' personal life. It was clear that the author (Welles' son) was trying to be very objective about his father's life. However the book fluctuates between being very objective about Welles -- mostly on the more controversial aspects -- and revealing too much detail about small seemingly inconsequential events about which the author seems to have included simply because he was there. This book also has a tendency to apply villain or saint status to everyone but Welles. Roosevelt could do no wrong, and Hull, Bullitt, and van Hamme were all selfish evil men who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted. I doubt that in reality, things were that black and white. However, coming in knowing very little about these people, I was very interested in learning about the influence Welles had in World affairs during WWII and the discord that seems to have existed in the US government during this time.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sorrows of Gin, July 6, 2008

By 

MARGOT SHEEHAN (Gotham City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sumner Welles: FDR's Global Strategist (Hardcover)

I don't know how Benjamin Welles managed to turn out such a fine and revealing biography of his father, but it must have been a prolonged and painful ordeal, even if (as seems likely) he didn't really know the man all that well.

Sumner Welles is best remembered as a minor player in the FDR administration, a career diplomat and Under-Secretary of State who specialized in Latin America and authored the "Good Neighbor Policy" of that era. Without re-checking the references I can't quite tell you what the "Good Neighbor Policy" was (was that the cartoon parrot selling razor blades?). Neither can most people, even though the phrase recurs in Broadway lyrics and other pop culture.

Therein lies the major tragedy of Sumner Welles's career: he did something grand-sounding but vague, and probably without lasting import; and he did it with respect to a part of the world which is vast in size and monumental in its inconsequentiality.

There is a second reason to remember Welles, the lurid story of his ouster from the State Department. The upper-crust, imperially slim and bespoke-tailored Welles was a total lush, tight as a drum by lunchtime. Although it prematurely aged him (he looked 60 before he was 50) the booze did not affect his daytime job performance. He had no trouble walking a straight line, with homburg and silver-tipped cane, as he went forth to meet and greet foreign dignitaries who were just as tipsy. (Care for another drink, Ambassador?) He'd been dousing himself heavily since his Harvard days and knew how to hold it.

He'd also been a libertine since his youth. If he saw a woman or a man he wanted to hop into the sack with, he had no moral qualms about making a proposition. This is how it was done in those days, at least in the louche diplomatic circles of Buenos Aires and Havana.

As time went on, he developed peculiar sexual tastes that became apparent when the night was very long and he was very very drunk. Famously, he propositioned negro train porters. He did this not just once, but repeatedly during his years as Undersecretary. Eventually everyone from the Brotherhood of Sleeping-Car Porters to J. Edgar Hoover to the upper reaches of DC and diplomatic society were aware of the problem and FDR put a special security detail to accompany Welles and keep him out of trouble.

Welles's boss, the sickly but long-serving Cordell Hull, despised Welles and struggled for years to get rid of him. He repeatedly complained to Roosevelt. But FDR was an old friend of Welles's, regarded him as the most capable man at State, and moreover a useful counterbalance to a more obnoxious and ambitious libertine by the name of Bill Bullitt.

Bullitt was Welles's rival to succeed Hull as Secretary of State. In order to kick Welles out of the running, he made sure that the story of the Pullman porters got spread far and wide. Bullitt already had a reputation as a flighty, unstable personality, and his campaign against Welles had the result of sinking not only Welles's career but his own.

After his ouster, Welles wrote books and toured, stayed drunk, lost a wife and remarried, almost froze to death in a ditch where he lost some fingers and toes, and was the subject of a famous 1955 cover story in Confidential (easy to find in the age of Google). Bill Bullitt didn't fare much better.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Save Your Money & Sanity, May 14, 2010

By 

Don Reed "Don" (Cliffside Park NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sumner Welles: FDR's Global Strategist (Hardcover)

Sumner Welles: FDR's Global Strategist, Benjamin Welles; St. Martin's Press (1997)


"Yes, the Welles book has been a vast disappointment. I was hoping that, it would get better; but with the exception of his experiences in 1939 (WWII start), no such luck. It's been such a dismaying experience; my usual enthusiasm for summarizing margin notes is AWOL.

"As you've pointed out about the Churchills, the son writing a commendable biography of the father is not necessarily an impossible task.

"What I suspect really sank Ben Welles's penmanship, so to speak, was his long career at the Times - during which time the paper's officious style of journalism was the literary equivalent of Styrofoam. More of the same all too often inundates `Sumner Welles: FDR's Global Strategies' (also desirable: a better title).

"But Welles's editor - never identified - did the most damage. Example: He/she left uncorrected a sentence larded with no less than SEVEN commas (p. 31, bottom; `The capital, Nairobi...'). This is the result of a hapless author, as droll drill sergeants put it, trying to get 10 pounds of sand into a 3-lb. bag...

"Regards..."

Unfortunately, the book has some research value & - at least for the time being - will be retained. But by the time I finished looking at his footnotes, my patience with this shabby product (originally priced at $35.00-in 1997!) was exhausted. A serious review/indictment of SW, contemplated, was cancelled.

Post Note: Book pulped (09/04/10). Looking at the margin notes - the dozens of sharp exclamations of disbelief about the badly written-&-edited manuscript, horrible photos & captions, the utter impossibility of keeping track of what year in which many events happened (i.e., p. 365, Welles's probable suicide attempt, which may or may not have occurred in the early hours of December 26, 1948 - originally guessed to be 1947), etc...if the above condemnation isn't strongly worded enough, it is certainly not because inept biographer Ben Welles should have received the benefits of any doubts.

Some pages were saved. These include the bibliography - which is where I found out about Cornelia Otis Skinner's Elegant Wits & Grand Horizontals, which in turn later led to reading her excellent biography of Sarah Bernhardt. Having read SW ended up as not an entire waste of time, after all.