FRANCE: Twelve-Year Ambassador

“That spectacular American,” as laudatory Paris papers have dubbed William Christian Bullitt, drove in his limousine into the courtyard of the Elysee Palace last week, took the salute of a battalion of the French Garde Républicaine, and presented to cordial President Albert Lebrun his credentials as U. S. Ambassador. For twelve years popular and Bohemian “Bill” Bullitt has maintained a studio in Paris, and he put his heart into telling M. Lebrun: “I come to France not as a stranger but as one who for many years has known the magnificent achieve ments of French civilization.”

It was therefore ludicrous that the royalist press of Paris should greet the new Ambassador with stormy reminders of the fact that he was once married to a lady who was once married to John Reed, a U. S. Communist buried in a niche of the Kremlin at Moscow, and with the surprising observation that Mr. Bullitt’s late mother was a half-Jewess whose maiden name was Louisa Gross Horwitz. Imperturbably commented Cousin Logan Bullitt last week in Philadelphia: “I have always had a very definite impression that Bill’s mother was part Jewish.”

Addressing the American Club of Paris, Ambassador Bullitt paid a tribute to his predecessor, the late Ambassador Jesse Isidor Straus who, as was disclosed in the U. S. fortnight ago (TIME, Oct. 19), cut all charitable bequests out of his will, pointedly observing that “the increased estate taxes upon the estates of decedents are devoted in large part to Governmental social programs.” Probably unaware of this, Ambassador Bullitt lauded Ambassador Straus thus : “He was a man of wealth, but knowing what his country needed, he accepted new financial burdens gladly and stood at the opposite pole from those possessors of wealth who sit in their clubs mouthing hatred because their income taxes and their inheritance taxes are larger !”

Famed “Little Anne Bullitt,” who in Moscow kept a cat named Revolutzia while her father was Ambassador there, has now grown up into an almost young lady (see cut), ripe to apprehend the magnificent achievements of French civilization and appreciate the Lucullan dinners of her gourmet father in Paris. Anne was born in Paris in 1924.