The Bullitt Mission to Russia: Testimony Before the Committee on Foreign Relations United States
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The Bullitt Mission To Russia: Testimony Before The Committee On Foreign Relations (1919)
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William Christian Bullitt was an American diplomat. He was the first United States ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1933-1936 and United States Ambassador to France, 1936-1940.
Background
William Christian Bullitt was born on January 25, 1891 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of William Christian Bullitt, a lawyer who had become wealthy from investments in Virginia and West Virginia coal, and Louisa Gross Horwitz, the granddaughter of the medical pioneer Dr. Samuel Gross.
Education
Bullitt attended DeLancey preparatory school prior to enrolling at Yale, where he was a member of the class of 1912. (Owing to illness, he did not actually graduate until 1913. ) A year at Harvard Law School was cut short by his father's death; Bullitt returned to Philadelphia and joined the staff of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, soon rising to the position of associate editor.
Career
Bullitt went to Europe as a correspondent on Henry Ford's peace ship in 1915. The following year he traveled extensively, especially in Germany and Austria. Bullitt's knowledge of the Central Powers led to his appointment as chief of the Bureau of Central European Information in the State Department in 1917, where he interpreted events, including the Russian Revolution, and prepared reports for President Woodrow Wilson and his top aide, Colonel Edward M. House.
In December 1918 Bullitt went to Paris with Wilson's peace delegation as chief of the division of current intelligence. Early the next year he headed a secret mission to Moscow, apparently to explore with Lenin and other Soviet leaders the conditions under which they would agree to a peaceful settlement of the civil war in the Soviet Union, in which Allied troops were aiding the opponents of the Bolsheviks.
Lenin agreed to terms that included an in-place armistice, the evacuation of Allied troops, and Soviet recognition of the imperial Russian debt. These terms, however, were not well received in Paris. Both Wilson and British prime minister David Lloyd George were encountering a good deal of domestic political opposition over other issues at the conference.
Wilson was also distracted by a quarrel with Georges Clemenceau, the premier of France, over the disposition of the Saar region, and Colonel House was unwilling to antagonize the president further by pushing Bullitt's proposals.
Meanwhile, proponents of accommodation favored the more cautious plan sponsored by the explorer Fridtjof Nansen to give food to the Soviet Union in exchange for a less comprehensive peace agreement. Distressed over the failure of his mission and the content of the Treaty of Versailles, Bullitt resigned from the delegation and returned home.
In the fall of 1919, his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was an important factor in the failure of the treaty to win ratification. During the Republican ascendancy of the 1920's and early 1930's, Bullitt traveled much and entered the film industry as a story editor for Famous Players-Lasky Corporation.
In 1926 he published the novel It's Not Done, which satirized high society in Philadelphia. The book was notable for its frank treatment of sexual themes.
His appointment as the first ambassador to Moscow was announced immediately after the signing of the agreements. Bullitt received an enthusiastic welcome upon his arrival in the Soviet Union in December 1933. However, his ardor for the Soviet experiment cooled as he found himself isolated in Moscow and became ever more convinced that Stalin was not abiding by the terms of the Roosevelt-Litvinov Agreements. Bullitt began taking a harder line toward the Soviets.
While this stance was agreeable to his embassy staff, Roosevelt began to avoid Bullitt's advice on Soviet policy. The embassy, one of the first to deal seriously with security matters in a hostile locale, was, by all accounts, well run, but Bullitt's disillusionment with his service in Moscow gradually developed into a strident anti-Communism that he cultivated the rest of his life.
By 1936 Bullitt was happy to move to the post of ambassador to France. Roosevelt's disdain for Bullitt's advice from Moscow during his last months there had not affected the close personal relationship between the two men.
After the fall of Paris in the summer of 1940, Bullitt returned to the United States and joined the preparedness debate, advocating all-out aid short of war to Britain and France. A major speech in August was published as Report to the American People (1940).
From November 1940 until November 1941 Bullitt sought a responsible appointment from the president, but despite promises and hints, nothing came until he was sent to North Africa and the Middle East as an ambassador-at-large on a fact-finding mission. While he made detailed and cogent reports that helped the development of the North African campaign in 1942, Bullitt found his welcome at the White House wearing thin because of a controversy surrounding Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles.
As early as April 1941, Bullitt had urged the president to dismiss Welles, whom he thought weak and subject to blackmail because of alleged homosexual activities. Roosevelt did not fully share these feelings, and after 1942 Bullitt never received another appointment.
In May 1944 Bullitt joined the Free French forces as an infantry commandant attached to the staff of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny and served in France until the end of the war. He returned to the United States in July 1945 and spent the rest of his life in private business, occasionally writing articles or giving speeches that contained a strong dose of anti-Communism.
Bullitt was an early supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom he had met during World War I. Following Roosevelt's election as president in 1932, Bullitt was appointed a special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull and served as the executive officer of the American delegation at the London Monetary and Economic Conference of 1933. In the fall of that year Bullitt was deeply involved in the negotiation of the Roosevelt-Litvinov Agreements, which established diplomatic ties between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Later in life Bullitt switched his party affiliation to Republican, supported the presidential aspirations of Senator Robert A. Taft in 1952 and Vice-President Richard Nixon in 1960.
Views
Bullitt's fondness for the French led to some controversial allegations that he had promised American intervention on the side of France if war broke out in Europe, but published diplomatic correspondence suggests that the allegations were untrue.
Quotations:
On September 4, 1938, in the midst of the great crisis in Europe that was to culminate in the Munich Agreement, during the unveiling of a plaque in France honoring Franco-American friendship, Bullitt stated, "France and the United States were united in war and peace. "
Bullitt was strongly opposed to Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. He told House that the prospect made him "sick at heart because I feel that we are about to make one of the most tragic blunders in the history of mankind". Bullitt wrote in his diary that "I know a lot of men who have been to Russia since the Revolution began, and they have all suffered conversion. They are done with Emperors. They have exiled the Czar. Taken over the banks. .. As a nation they have become brotherly, open-hearted, free from convention and unafraid of life. "
On 17th May he wrote to President Woodrow Wilson, stating bitterly: "I am sorry that you did not fight our fight to the finish, and that you had so little faith in the millions of men, like myself, in every nation who had faith in you. "
Membership
At Yale, he was a member of Scroll and Key.
Personality
Bullitt was a bright, charming, and sophisticated individual who had an unusual talent for bringing people into his confidence. At the same time, however, he was impulsive, idealistic, and aggressively ambitious, and these qualities led to a premature retirement from public life that was not without bitterness.
Quotes from others about the person
Roosevelt's secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, quipped, "Bullitt practically sleeps with the French cabinet. "
George Kennan recalled: "His was outstandingly a buoyant disposition. He resolutely refused to permit the life around him to degenerate into dullness and dreariness of spirit, this insistence that life be at all times animated and interesting and moving ahead. "
George Kennan later commented: "I see Bill Bullitt, in retrospect, as a member of that remarkable group of Americans, born just before the turn of this century (it included such people as Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, John Reed, and Jim Forrestal - many of them his friends) for whom the First World War was the great electrifying experience of life. They were a striking generation, full of talent and exuberance, determined. .. to make life come alive. The mark they made on American culture will be there seems to have been a touch of the fate, if not the person, of the Great Gatsby. .. They knew achievement more often than they knew fulfillment; and the ends. .. tended to be frustrating, disappointed, and sometimes tragic. "
Walter Lippmann described him as one of "the sharpest of the American correspondents" and "his intuitions as to coming events. .. prove to be extraordinary accurate".
According to Mary V. Dearborn: "The power of this position - or perhaps its proximity to real power - acted on Bill almost as an intoxicant. Journalism was not a large enough sphere for him; he became impatient with writing editorials. .. Ironically, his reporting was more successful than ever - to the extent that rival papers hired a personal detective to follow him to see where he got his information. "
Justin Kaplan, the author of Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (1974): "Bullitt appointed as an unofficial member of the mission Lincoln Steffens, a known Bolshevik sympathizer and publicist. Bullitt's superiors might be outraged by the choice, but his reasoning at this point was unanswerable: he needed Steffens to vouch for him. American and British expeditory forces were fighting on the counter-revolutionary side in Russia; as far as Lenin's government was concerned the West had already declared war. .. The Russians trusted Steffens, knew that he was on their side and that he believed they were there to stay. .. As they left Paris, Bullitt and Steffens believed that they had been presented with a unique opportunity to make history by mediating between the West and the revolution. "
Justin Kaplan has argued that Bullitt was not an easy man to live with: "Bullitt was an emotional man, not always entirely rational. Indeed. .. Bullitt's faults were as excessive as his good qualities. Arrogance he possessed in great measure, as well as a sense of entitlement that went hand in hand with a belief in a levelling democracy. He was an impatient man, who, when he decided on a course of action, could not be swayed from it. He did not take advice well. "
Connections
On March 18, 1916, he married Ernesta Drinker; they had no children. He and his wife divorced in 1923, and he married the journalist Louise Bryant, the widow of John Reed, the same year. In 1930 Bullitt and his second wife were divorced, and he gained custody of their only child.