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Sumner Welles: FDR's Global Strategist

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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.

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.

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.