Books: The Welles Plan

THE TIME FOR DECISION—Sumner Welles—Harper ($3).

The name of Cordell Hull occurs just once in Sumner Welles’s book on the past, present & future of U.S. foreign policy. Inasmuch as former Undersecretary of State Welles quit his post because of basic differences between himself and Mr. Hull, such diplomatic restraint might argue a mealymouthed, chilly and platitudinously correct book. Surprisingly enough, Mr. Welles writes a sprightly prose, hits straight from the shoulder when he is discussing what he considers State Department mistakes, and plants himself flat-footedly on the issues which he holds to be important.

The narrative high point of Welles’s book is the long chapter describing his 1940 mission to Europe which was undertaken in the fragile hope that the “phony” war might somehow be halted before the real shooting began. Welles had no authority to commit the U.S. to war, but he managed discreetly to suggest that his country might change its isolationist mind if a Nazi victory seemed imminent. The portraiture in Welles’s European travelogue rings clear and true. The late Count Ciano is shown boldly expressing his contempt for German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and his antagonism toward Hitler. Mussolini astonished Welles by seeming inert, ponderous and static. His close-cropped hair was snow white. In repose, his face fell in rolls of flesh. When the Duce talked, he kept his eyes shut save for moments when he remembered his reputation for staring “dynamically.”

Badger’s Paws. Göring was simple and unaffected when he welcomed Welles to his garish home, Karinhall, in the flat North German birch and pine woods. But the U.S. diplomat could not keep his eyes off the tubby Nazi’s hands, which were “shaped like the digging paws of a badger.” On his right hand Göring wore an enormous ring set with six huge diamonds; on his left he wore an emerald at least an inch square. Göring’s hands were presumably more eloquent of German intentions than anything Welles heard either at Karinhall or in Berlin.

In France Welles experienced a sensation of general expectancy. President Albert Lebrun seemed to have lost his memory. From ex-Premiers Blum and Herriot, Welles derived only the feeling that France’s days were numbered. After his visit to Blum, Welles received 3,000 insulting letters from Frenchmen who resented his calling on a Jew.

Oddly enough, Welles was impressed with the “courage” and “determination” of Neville Chamberlain. Welles also has good words for Brazil’s President Getulio Vargas, and for the State Department’s policies toward Vichy and the late Admiral Darlan.

German Ku Klux Klan. What Author Welles says about his diplomatic past is more exciting but less relevant than what he says about the world’s uncertain future. The logical objection to schemes for dismembering Germany and internationalizing her communications and power developments is that “carpetbagging” inevitably breeds a Ku Klux Klan. But Welles argues that political constraint can be made palatable if Germany and Japan are allowed to trade on a relatively free basis with the outer world.

On the subject of world organization, Welles is a Wilsonian, which puts him in the anti-Walter Lippmann camp. Against Lippmann’s argument for regional groupings and alliances, Welles counterposes a revived League of Nations, a “Community of Power” with a central executive council, a centralized security and armaments commission, and international trusteeship of colonial peoples who are not ready for autonomy. In Welles’s proposed provisional council of the United Nations. the big nations (Russia, the United Kingdom, China and the U.S.) would get four votes out of a total of eleven. Yet Welles would base his international organization on regional as well as national representation, and he would have certain designated regions do their own policing. In all of this blueprint organizational work, readers may wonder where the ultimate power of coercion is to rest. Mr. Welles is above all a diplomatic technician; nevertheless, he admits that no international organization can survive unless it is supported by the opinion of free men & women throughout the world—which tosses the ball back to the moralists and the philosophers.