FOREIGN RELATIONS: Diplomat’s Diplomat

(See Cover)

The Roosevelt Administration is trying to fight a War of Brains.

The theory is that if the War of Brains is waged skillfully, the U.S. entry into a shooting war can be postponed until the U.S. is ready, willing & able to fight a shooting war. If the U.S. could win the War of Brains, it might not have to enter a shooting war at all.

On the theory of the War of Brains the Administration has built the whole structure of its present policy: the Lend-Lease administration, all-out production for all friendly democracies at war, the program of economic and financial controls designed to throttle the Axis nations, the program of domestic price and priorities controls to maintain strength at home.

The War of Brains is an ancient American institution, streamlined to the nines by Adolf Hitler. So ingeniously did he wage this war that he won every one of the first battles of diplomacy, from the audacious occupation of the Rhineland down through Munich. The first time Hitler lost a diplomatic battle, he had to go to war. The U.S. brain war has been fought from an almost exactly reverse position. The U.S. has lost every diplomatic battle so far, except for Latin America.

In the U.S. the War of Brains is primarily the business of the State Department. And the task of U.S. diplomacy is to exhaust every possible means of avoiding a shooting war.

One big reason the U.S. is fighting a War of Brains is that this is the only kind of war it is at present equipped to fight. Of all defense-vital commodities, brain power is the only one fully in production.

In the War of Brains, as in any other war, the toughest wins. Today more career men have high posts in the State Department than at any other time in U.S. history. Franklin Roosevelt was the first President in many years to appoint a career man as an Ambassador (William Phillips to Rome). Another of his appointees, Sumner Welles, is one of the very few career men ever to become Under Secretary of State, and as matters now stand may eventually become Secretary.

Unknown Gentleman. This week Cordell Hull returned to Washington to resume his duties. He had been absent, in ill health, six weeks. But his return should not change matters greatly. Grave, saintly Mr. Hull, never an expert at paper-shuffling, has long left the actual administration of the Department to his chief aide, Sumner Welles. And Cordell Hull may choose not to retire. But even if Welles never becomes Secretary, he will still hold his present power: through Presidential choice, his own ability, background and natural stamina, he is the chief administrative officer of U.S. foreign policy. In the War of Brains, he is a field marshal.

Stories of a jealous division between Messrs. Hull & Welles are untrue, based only on the many honest disputations natural between two strongwilled, hard-headed men of ideas. Actually, the two team up superbly under the President. In policy arguments Hull presents a view shaped by years of devotion to a single ideal, freedom of trade, plus a sharp eye for political weather. Welles presents a view based on diplomatic technique, on a cultural approach, and on the relation of the problem to the Hemisphere.

Sumner Welles is naturally fitted to his work, tailored to it as accurately as his clothes are tailored to him. First and most important, he is tough-minded, with the quality of mental resilience that can absorb pressures and withstand shocks, a sort of intellectual defense-in-depth. He has a firm hold on every one of the diplomatic virtues: he is absolutely precise, imperturbable, accurate, honest, sophisticated, thorough, cultured, traveled, financially established. He has been through the mill; the only surprises left for Sumner Welles are those of destiny.

He has, too, all the best minor diplomatic attributes: he is glacially distinguished, is one of the few U.S. men who can carry a stick with assurance, is a linguist of idiomatic excellence, never forgets names, never leaves so-necessary little things undone. He has a rich, resonant voice which he can inflect to an almost mathematical exactitude of tone.

Groton to Havana. Benjamin Sumner Welles was born in New York City on Oct. 14, 1892, the son of Benjamin and Frances Swan Welles. The senior Welles was something more than well-to-do. There is a legend (apocryphal) about the infant Sumner: that as a child at play, he wore white gloves.

He was already a member of the little band of conscious aristocrats at Groton School. At Groton he learned another syllable of the word “impeccable.” What else he did there, no one can now recall. At Harvard he made no teams, was a member of no club. He is remembered principally as a fastidious dresser who wore stiff collars and a stickpin in his tie. He roomed with Horatio Nelson Slater, wealthy Bostonian, and in 1914 married Slater’s sister Esther, a brunette beauty.

At Harvard Welles studied economics, Iberian literature and culture. He deliberately prepared himself for the Foreign

Service, deliberately chose Latin America as the most important field, in a day when Pan-American posts were regarded as hopeless holes. The Department played its ancient jest on him: he was sent to Tokyo. In two years in Japan he conceived an abiding distrust and dislike of the Japanese, and in 24 years has seen no reason to change his views.

In 1917 he was sent to Buenos Aires, worked there two years, became fluent in Spanish. By 1921 he was Chief of the Latin-American Affairs Division in Washington, the youngest ever—28. But in 1925 Republican Calvin Coolidge made things so consistently uncomfortable for Democrat Sumner Welles that he resigned from the Service.

Then he wrote his one book, a ponderous, lifeless, two-volume work which was technically a history of Santo Domingo, actually a careful indictment of U.S. foreign policy in the Hemisphere. The title was Naboth’s Vineyard (Naboth was done out of his vineyard by King Ahab), and Welles struck out at Ahab-like Uncle Sam, at dollar diplomacy, at the use of military force to achieve diplomatically negotiable ends. He urged instead the stimulation of commercial ties, the interchange of experts, the sharing of the responsibility of keeping the Hemispheric peace. This was the germ of the Good Neighbor policy of Franklin Roosevelt.

In this interval Welles remarried, this time Mathilde Townsend, who had been the wife of Senator Peter Goelet Gerry of Rhode Island. He moved into a magnificent mansion at Oxon Hill, Maryland. Here he formed an ambition that still smolders: of all things, Sumner Welles would like to be Senator from Maryland.

In the first days of his New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt recalled the stiff, gangling young man who used to hang about his office during World War I days, and who in 1932 had contributed fatly to the Democratic campaign. Welles was made Assistant Secretary of State. On the night of April 11, five days after he had been confirmed, Welles took one paragraph out of the President’s first inaugural address, expanded it into the Good Neighbor policy. His reward: a delighted Roosevelt sent him packing to Cuba, where revolt was simmering.

In his first Ambassadorial post Welles tried out his ideas, working with extraordinary patience and tact. But in six months he was recalled to the U.S., his mission accounted a failure by the U.S. press. Three Cuban Administrations blew up, Welles had been hanged in effigy, blood had been shed. Both the nationalist revolutionaries and the dictator Governments had turned to Welles for help.

Scrupulously he had refused to use U.S.

force to solve the political impasse. He tried friendly mediation. (He once prevented a battle by icily ordering soldiers out of the lobby of the Hotel Nacional.) By consistently appealing to intelligence on each side he had averted much more bloodshed, but only dispassionate Cubans knew that, and there were not many of them.

But he had won a greater victory for Cuba, one for which he is now hailed: he had engineered the death of the reactionary Platt Amendment, greatest obstacle to progress in Cuba, and the hated symbol throughout Latin America of dollar diplomacy and U.S. military intervention in local affairs. The Platt Amendment was a U.S. statute which had been rammed into the Cuban Constitution, forever granting the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuba.

Abandonment of this, in May 1934, was the most convincing possible proof to Latin America of the good faith of their new Good Neighbor.

Down this new pathway Welles and U.S.

diplomacy have gone with a progressive success that almost no American fully appreciates. The series of five Hemisphere conferences—Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Lima, Panama and Havana—have resulted in a defensive alliance without diplomatic parallel in the world’s history; in effect, a Hemisphere League of Nations organized on practical lines.

Refrigerator. For years certain New Dealers and their columnist outlets have pictured Welles as an appeaser, a Munich-minded gentleman who plays high politics with the ruling castes. The continued wide circulation of this false picture is partly Welles’s fault. Long ago he should have learned: 1) to trust the press; 2) to unbend. The trouble begins with his appearance.

To newspapermen and the great unwashed public, Sumner Welles seems too impressive to be real. His 6 feet 3 inches is plumb-line-straight, ramrod-stiff. Physically, he almost always talks down to others, and even his voice seems oppressively impressive, like Cinemactor Basil Rathbone’s.

Onetime Columnists Joseph Alsop & Robert Kintner described Mr. Welles as looking like a man with a bit of bad fish caught in his mustache. Newshawk Blair Bolles said simply: “Mr. Welles is cold fish. He was brought up in … cold-fish ways . . . went to the cold-fish schools . . .

entered a cold-fish calling. His hero is a slightly warmed-over cold fish, Charles Evans Hughes. He is as reserved as a box at the opera. . . . Even his blond mustache looks cold.” A Central-American Minister described him as looking like a tall glass of distilled ice water.

Departmental little-wigs, leaving his office after a dressing down, often turn up their coat collars and feign a shiver. Sometimes the shiver is not feigned. Receiving a diplomatic protest or rebuff through Welles has been likened to being stabbed to the heart with an icicle.

Welles is a diplomat’s diplomat, as Mel Ott is a ballplayer’s ballplayer. But there have been other contributing causes to the popular misunderstanding of Sumner Welles. The Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 put him squarely on the spot. He threw his weight heavily on the side of Franco and the Fascists. For this he has never been forgiven. But his reasoning was clear.

Almost to a man the ruling classes and the Governments of Latin America were pro-Franco, pro-Catholic, even pro-Fascist, if that were necessary to kill Communism.

To keep for the U.S. the good will of Latin America, Welles opposed aiding the Loyalists in Spain, worked persistently toward a policy of Hemisphere neutrality.

He was successful. The New Deal’s natural sympathy toward a democratic Government in Spain was never permitted to reach the point of actual aid. The other Governments in the Hemisphere were comforted to find the U.S. aligned with them. This policy, the Department now admits privately, was a great aid to Hitler and Fascism. But the Hemisphere movement toward unity made great gains.

Next came Munich. Welles was in the thick of appeasement — but so was Frank lin Roosevelt. Welles sat in on all the councils, helped devise the pleading notes that the President sent to Mussolini, Hitler, Benes, Chamberlain, Daladier. But Welles had none of the illusions that haunted Chamberlain and Daladier. From Munich on, he was at the shoulder of Cordell Hull and the President in every move taken, and all the moves were against Naziism.

Welles did not give up diplomatically, any more than the President did; it was on the theory of let’s-take-one-last-look-around-before-the-explosion that Roosevelt sent Welles to Rome, Berlin, Paris and London in February 1940. “No proposals, no commitments,” was the order given Welles. He merely talked and listened. The fruit of his trip was at once a little thing and a big one: the final, absolute conviction that Adolf Hitler is an utter and complete liar.

Policy. The foreign policy of unarmed countries follows an exact pattern: assorted appeasements, big talk, empty threats, copious quotations from international law, appeals to reason. To this natural policy Welles has made a more practical addition: a search for friends. He is obsessed with the gigantic destiny of this Hemisphere; is sure in his soul that in this time of crisis, in a terrible century, when the seas shrink and the Hemisphere grows, the U.S. must find its own vast place in world affairs. Thus he has worked with furious suavity to grapple the 20 Latin American nations to the U.S. with hooks of steel, loops of gold, the ever more important interchange of ideas and responsibilities. He is now close to a major triumph.

Working persistently, learning patience and the wiles of politics from old Cordell Hull, who is rich in guile, Welles has carefully sketched in the background for the practical operation of the Hemisphere in a friendly alliance, unified of purpose. He admits that many of the problems seem insoluble today; he does not admit they will always be insoluble. Before him he has the example of Mr. Hull, who worked with single mind and infinite patience for 25 years to get his reciprocal-trade principle accepted by the world, saw it overthrown five years later by Adolf Hitler, yet has never for a moment thought of quitting.

South America today is a far different continent from even a year ago, when Hitler’s agents regarded it as the world’s softest touch. Within another year (estimates vary), the Hemisphere may be immunized against the Nazi infection. For this, Welles should get the major credit, but it is much more likely that he will merely appear, smiling wryly, in the background some day, while the President and others hang medals on one another for saving the Hemisphere.

The saving of the Far East is another matter. In the Orient the U.S. is not an unarmed nation; its naval muscles command from Japan a respect which Hitler does not grant the U.S. military muscles. Toward Japan Welles has had a clear policy of distrust. But again he has been an “appeaser,” because he has consistently favored trading with Japan until the U.S. is ready for any consequences. Last week he had come to the bottom of the diplomatic barrel. There were almost no diplomatic moves left unmade. The problem of the Japanese would sooner or later be turned over to the Navy and its Commander in Chief.

Welles regards all extremes as ridiculous. To him the problem of post-war peace is primarily diplomatic: arrange means whereby trade will flow freely throughout the world, establish by negotiation an international diplomacy based on the Good Neighbor policy, insure the domination of the world by the Western Hemisphere, and the quiet but definite domination of the Western Hemisphere by the U.S.

But Welles had little time to look toward such far horizons last week. He was busy. He denounced the Vichy Government for giving up territory unctuously to the Japanese but defending it bloodily against the British. He repudiated a suggestion by provincial-minded Isolationist Senator D. Worth Clark of Idaho that the U.S. should seize by military aggression all nations in this Hemisphere (see p. 24). He helped the President tighten the screws on the Japanese by banning oil shipments to Japan. He accepted from the Japanese apologies and the offer of indemnity for the apparently accidental bombing of the 14-year-old gunboat Tutuila, a 370-ton tub which the Navy has stationed on the Yangtze River at Chungking. He recognized for the U.S. the exiled London Government of Czechoslovakia. He accused the German Government of barefaced impudence in its note to Mexico threatening reprisals unless the Mexicans protested the U.S. economic black list of the Axis firms in Latin America. He formally advised Russian Ambassador Oumansky that the U.S. would supply the Soviet Union with military weapons “in its struggle against armed aggression.” As usual, he worked extremely hard and long hours, plowing his way through the plunging masses of cables from abroad.

Nine o’clock came each night before his car swung through Washington’s jammed traffic, crossed into Maryland to Oxon Hill, where the Secretary could enter the cool magnificence of his home. In the great Georgian house Welles dined briefly, buckled into his homework. Even in the thick, still heat of a Maryland summer night on the Potomac, Sumner Welles seemed cool. War or peace, he will remain so.