I

Disentangling the sources of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s foreign policies has saddled historians with the impossible task of entering the president’s subtle and opaque mind. Some have looked to the ideological influences—Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, liberal, navalist, and so forth—at play on the younger Roosevelt as a means of interpreting his decisions. Others have emphasized additional external and internal factors and constraints upon him, choosing to explain his actions in political, operational, even psychological, rather than in more exclusively ideological, terms. But none has really succeeded in reconstructing a fully logical pattern of motivation or decision making.Footnote ¹

As formidable a leader and politician as Roosevelt was, particularly at manipulating his own executive bureaucracy, his mastery of policy is hard to defend in principle or in practice. Just as he excelled at playing one group of advisers off another and in sowing confusion and mistrust among them, he also vacillated among various positions in as much as he never identified himself or his foreign policy exclusively with any single school of thought or program. The intellectual and political allegiance to the Wilsonian traditions of world governance and institutionalism combined in Roosevelt with a predilection for great power alliances and personal diplomacy. Yet there was no uniquely “Rooseveltian” tradition; one regards the various elements of his foreign policy as forming the bedrock of a mid-twentieth-century liberal internationalism that was at once noble and hardheaded, but not entirely original.Footnote ²

If one finds it impossible to delve into the reaches of Roosevelt’s mind to locate its precise cast, one nevertheless must consider the milieu in which it worked. One of its critical elements involved the personal rivalries Roosevelt stoked, particularly a central one between the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and his nominal deputy, Sumner Welles. The Hull–Welles feud was especially ugly and divided the department badly against itself, with partisans on each side seeking regularly to undercut one another. Hull and his principal backers—the department’s counselor, R. Walton “Judge” Moore, an earlier rival for Welles’s job, and Moore’s close friend and son of his law school roommate, William Bullitt—succeeded eventually in forcing Welles’s resignation by the late summer of 1943.

There was more at stake here than personal rivalry. There was a war to be won, a postwar world to plan and an agenda—namely, Hull’s agenda of peace through free trade—to pursue. It all came together in the area of policy planning, which is an especially fruitful yet relatively underexplored side of the Roosevelt story. In the fall of 1939, the State Department began work on postwar planning even though the United States was still two years away from its formal entry into the war. By 1943 this process had expanded dramatically, having come to encompass strategic and operational aspects of the war itself. They included the various postwar territorial arrangements among the allies, the occupations, and of course the future United Nations and its constituent parts. However, the policy planning process itself and the web of relationships, both bureaucratic and personal, happening around it and involving the efforts of hundreds of people over the course of five years hardly figure in the better-known surveys of the latter topic.Footnote ³ This “immense machine of committees and subcommittees” with its “tyranny of words” obscured the quality of such relationships by the means of the very volume of their work, so apparently obsolete within months of its completion.Footnote ⁴ But, as Dwight Eisenhower often said (paraphrasing the elder von Moltke), plans mean nothing, but planning is everything. What can this experience tell us about the nature of American diplomacy during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II? What light can it shed on the world Roosevelt and his colleagues imagined would emerge after the war, and what they might have done to bring it about? What does it suggest about the enduring results? Finally, how much weight does it suggest that one should give to individual worldviews and personalities in the formulation of policy?

Sumner Welles, William Bullitt, and Leo Pasvolsky each were involved to one degree or another with the planning efforts, even though all three men, with the partial exception of Pasvolsky, were occupied mainly with the war. Their careers and lives overlapped in important ways. As undersecretary of state, Welles was the closest diplomatic adviser to President Roosevelt; he oversaw the planning committees and held more sway over foreign policy than anyone, including the Secretary, much to Hull’s mounting resentment.

Bullitt was the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union, subsequently ambassador to France, and one of the most ambitious men of his time. His diplomatic career ended shortly after France fell, in good part because of his “vile machinations” against Welles. Having failed to obtain supremacy in presidential advising, even in his own special bailiwick, Europe, he set out to destroy his rival by publicizing an incident in which an intoxicated Welles propositioned some Pullman-car porters during a trip to Alabama.Footnote ⁵ The defamation succeeded, but it gained Bullitt the permanent enmity of Roosevelt, who saw to it that Bullitt never again held a position of importance, even going so far as to undercut his campaign for the mayorship of Philadelphia in 1943.

Pasvolsky, an economist and trade specialist, made himself Hull’s favorite and became, following Welles’s departure, the principal manager of the planning efforts and primary engineer of the compromises that brought about the United Nations Charter.Footnote ⁶ Pasvolsky’s success derived from the fluid and dysfunctional nature of the policy planning process and of the State Department itself, which, in turn, came from such intense personality conflicts at the top. There were also Hull’s deteriorating health and long absences. Taken together, these factors have led most observers to conclude that the wartime State Department was badly inefficient and ineffective. While true in many respects, that condition also made possible some creative policy entrepreneurship at lower levels and, as we shall see, an important blending of visions for the postwar world.

The special artistry of Roosevelt allowed such visions to emerge by way of the conscious or subconscious cultivation of rivalries. In the cases of Welles and Bullitt, it went too far and both men, and probably the president, too, suffered badly. The deliberate ruin of Welles did not benefit anyone. But it may go too far to claim, as Bullitt’s one-time aide, later diplomat, Robert Murphy, did in his memoir, that the “bitterness … was a severe blow to American wartime policymaking. … If the President had kept the ardent support of these two positive personalities during his last two years, when his health declined disastrously, American postwar policies would have been shaped much more realistically.”Footnote ⁷ Their careers were cut short, but both Welles and Bullitt already had done a great deal to set into motion a struggle over the nature of the peace. The collective process of imagining it had as much influence on the postwar world as the later implementation of these, and other, plans because it shaped mental maps and channels of decision making across the government.

The juxtaposition that follows is not meant to prove that these three men were the exclusive or even primary architects of wartime and postwar American foreign policy. Others, like Henry Stimson, Harry Hopkins, Averell Harriman, and even Henry Wallace, had an even greater impact on day-to-day affairs. However, in contradistinction to those better-known figures, Welles, Bullitt, and Pasvolsky promoted a particular vision of world order that appeared to exclude the existence of any other. In doing so, they constructed a particular framework for conceptualizing the future with elements that would trickle down through the bureaucracy and then flow back up to the highest levels of the government. Together they provide a useful, representational point of contrast, both to one another and to Roosevelt’s own murky intellectual record, for understanding three approaches to peace that were at once rivals and coevals and that, in concert, established the conceptual framework for the postwar world.

To consider the three figures almost as intellectual archetypes, emblems, or even templates on which one may retrospectively retrace the bases of wartime thinking about the postwar period, then, furthers a recasting of the postwar period from one ordered by simple bipolarity to a more sophisticated combination of territorial and supra-territorial political relationships. It suggests, in other words, that the Cold War, which many historians still treat as a natural by-product of World War II or as the culmination of political and ideological conflicts dating back to World War I, was, in reality, an interim arrangement for the replacement of a nineteenth-century world order with something new and more intricate but still poorly understood in its provisional combination of compromise, power, and idealism. Each man was foil to the other in both intellectual disposition and career, but also the catalyst of a postwar order comprising regional arrangements based on negotiation, a balance of power based on Realpolitik, and a liberal political and economic system based on “universal” principles. The three biographies therefore distill an abstract debate and serve to bridge the influences of personality, worldview, and bureaucratic behavior on policy. Their combined portrait leads one to conclude that the midcentury globe genuinely was, in the apt phrase of historian David Reynolds, “one world divisible,” and that their contending regionalist, nationalist, and universalist visions were ultimately less exclusive than mutually reinforcing.

II

In 1936, William Bullitt was “going great guns” in Paris, an intimate of nearly every major French politician and a visible presence in Parisian society. His devotion to the French was so great in fact that he refused to abandon the American embassy once the French government fled four years later, and meanwhile got himself appointed temporary mayor of Paris so that he was on hand to transfer the city over to the invading Germans.Footnote ⁸ Bullitt’s theatricality, honed during his career as a Hollywood producer in the 1920s, stood him well in this instance but probably less so in Moscow, where he went as ambassador following diplomatic normalization in 1933. The Soviets thought little of his obsession with building an embassy that resembled Monticello or of the succession of ballerinas, polo horses, baseball coaches, and other assorted cultural emissaries Bullitt and his staff attracted there.Footnote ⁹ Indeed he had been known previously for his unorthodox views of the Soviet Union, having resigned from the State Department in 1919 in protest against Woodrow Wilson’s refusal to deal seriously with the Bolsheviks, urging that “policy [be placed] in the hands of men who can weigh evidence and see Russia as it is.”Footnote ¹⁰ Later testifying in Congress against ratification of the Versailles Treaty, Bullitt gained a reputation for speaking his mind whatever the consequences. As Franklin Roosevelt once put it, “The trouble with Bullitt is in the morning he will send me a telegram, ‘Everything is lovely,’ and then he will go out to have lunch with some French official, and I get a telegram that everything is going to hell.”Footnote ¹¹ Bullitt was, in other words, a vacillator. But he could also be extremely stubborn. Within a few months of arriving to Moscow, he came to oppose Stalin’s regime with the conviction of a disappointed suitor; henceforth his anti-Communism would verge on the fanatical. His biographers quote an unnamed relative: “‘He was intolerant.’ … He would develop passionate attachments to people but ‘when they would not come up to his impossible expectations, he would discard them.’”Footnote ¹²

Bullitt’s writings suggest more than the blind faith of an ideologue. His opposition to the Soviet Union had less to do with a hatred of Communist doctrine per se than with its connection to his fear of Soviet expansion and the threat it posed to American interests. That fear led Bullitt to urge an Anglo-French alliance with Poland in the expectation that war between Germany and either Britain or France would result in large part from Russian manipulation, a prediction he extended to the United States and Japan.Footnote ¹³ It did not abate during the war. In mid-1943, for example, he urged the establishment of a “British-American military line in Eastern Europe” behind which he imagined the establishment of “democratic governments” by way of “an appeal to the people of Europe.” The State Department’s John Hickerson, charged with reacting to Bullitt’s recommendation, pointed out that not only had his office been working on such an appeal for some months, but also he did not see much likelihood of success for Bullitt’s strategy, given recent attempts in North Africa and Sicily. He suggested to Secretary Hull that he “tell Mr. Bullitt that you consider his letter brilliantly written and that you agree with much of its content but that you do not feel that you can sign it.”Footnote ¹⁴

Bullitt’s antipathy toward the Soviet Union was probably responsible for his having been one of the last Americans in Europe to defend appeasement, virtually right up to the invasion of the Sudetenland, as well as his persistent overestimation of French military capabilities, one of the few subjects on which Bullitt’s perspicacity failed him.Footnote ¹⁵ It also accounted for hiw intolerance of, and later deeply bitter opposition to, Roosevelt’s attempts to foster a constructive relationship with Stalin, a policy for which Bullitt came to blame—and demonize—Welles. Bullitt’s few loyal friends, including Loy Henderson, James Forrestal, and George Kennan, pointed out that his estimations of Stalin had the advantage of being true. But that was beside the point—they were overtaken by poor political timing and a complicated reputation. To many of his contemporaries, Bullitt appeared too self-confident or self-interested to be trusted; his views of the Soviet ally were, to say the least, not helpful in wartime; his lack of a political base at home rendered him a weak candidate for the cabinet-level appointment he sought.Footnote ¹⁶ The result was an almost inevitable flight to the margins, which probably would have happened even if his assault upon Welles had not backfired so badly.

Although he had always wanted to be a diplomat and grew up with the advantages of his class and pedigree, Bullitt’s only real professional training was in journalism: hence, some would argue, his indiscretion and impetuosity. Sumner Welles, highly formal, dour, and judicious (at least in public), could not have been more different. Yet he and Bullitt had traveled in similar circles and were, initially, friendly toward each other.Footnote ¹⁷ Both came from privilege, although Welles had multiplied his wealth many times over through marriages, whereas Bullitt squandered much of his.Footnote ¹⁸ Both were close to Roosevelt, although Welles had known the president longer. (He was a page at the Roosevelt wedding in 1905.) And both were possessed with a self-assurance that bordered on arrogance alongside a measure of severe cruelty.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet there were two critical differences apart from personality. Whereas Bullitt’s background was in journalism and intelligence (his State Department appointment during World War I, by way of Colonel Edward House, was to head the Division of Current Intelligence Summaries in Paris), Sumner Welles had risen through the ranks of the foreign service. His family and social connections certainly aided his many promotions, but he nonetheless was a foreign service “insider” by the time Roosevelt appointed him undersecretary. Second, while Bullitt’s experience overseas had been mainly with Europe and his fondest affections were for France, Welles’s formative professional experiences and closest relationships were in Latin America.Footnote ²⁰ Welles had principally formulated the Good Neighbor Policy in the 1930s and made his reputation with political rescue operations in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Along with the British diplomat Alexander Cadogan, Welles had drafted the Atlantic Charter following a pattern similar to the one deployed for the Western hemisphere and, in doing so, set a collective security precedent. The Charter, which Bullitt never liked despite its inherent elements of Realpolitik, was the subject of one of his more condescending notes to Roosevelt, practically ordering him to resist any attempt by Churchill to amend the Charter later by way of territorial understandings with Stalin.Footnote ²¹ If Bullitt could see the value of vague or rhetorical principles, he never let on to it; rather, it seemed he had missed the point, casting Roosevelt in the role of the perpetual naïf. If Welles ever had such thoughts about his chief, he never betrayed them.

The inspiration behind the Charter and the Good Neighbor Policy was, like Welles’s own, more contingent than systematic. Its basis was less in an alternative future than in the present day or the immediate past. Welles’s own mind in this respect, if occasionally too quick for its own good, was remarkably both broad and precise.Footnote ²² He devised his hemispheric regionalism in deliberate contrast to the closed, regional blocs of the Nazis and Japanese and later, one could add, of the Soviets. It was, in other words, an amenable sphere of influence, a flexible and hegemonic structure, as opposed to an imperial one, open to new adherents so long as their external behavior met certain prescribed standards and their national interests were generally compatible with those of other members, preferably neighbors. By 1941, Welles had joined Walter Lippmann, Winston Churchill, and several others in urging an extension of hemispheric solidarity across the Atlantic to Europe to form a single, Atlantic community.Footnote ²³

Bullitt, though he later favored a form of European unity on strategic grounds, never expressed himself in such terms. His idea of the United States was a more traditional, European one, bound less to good neighborliness than to freedom of maneuver. Though not an Anglophile, Bullitt’s perception of the United States in the world could be considered Palmerstonian: he put less faith in structures or systems than in actors and motives. As he once wrote apropos a unilateral intervention against Hitler, “God and the United States help those who help themselves, and that while we can assist in the ways you and I have so often discussed, we can not play the part of deus ex machina.”Footnote ²⁴ In that sense, and in contrast with Welles, whose opportunism tended to be more strategic than tactical, he was an optimist, albeit an inconsistent one. Bullitt was one to press for a deal, a coup de main at the critical moment. His optimism about national potential came into perpetual conflict with his pessimism about human nature. Pessimism may have underwritten his savoir faire reputation, but it, along with his obsessive prognosticating and hatred of Stalin, made him something of a fatalist:

Bullitt’s depiction of his enemies was a combination of the biological and the eschatological: he referred to them often as amoebas. “To my mind, Mr. Hitler has already lost this war completely,” he wrote to the diplomat Alexander Kirk in September 1939. “The next stage will be the stage of finishing off Stalin Khan. … Hitler and Stalin are the twin representatives of Satanism, and I do not believe that they will prevail against the cohorts of the Lord.”Footnote ²⁶

Bullitt’s world appeared to him in triptych, with American (and he would add, French) liberalism standing astride imperialism and “social revolutionary.” “The true liberal, the true man of peace,” he wrote, “is also the best warrior.”Footnote ²⁷ This was just one of several apparent paradoxes in Bullitt’s program, but it made sense if one combined, as he and other Cold Warriors did, the geopolitical and ideological struggles at play around him. He spoke of the Soviet Union as nothing short of a “godless theocracy” . … “not only a state but also the headquarters of an international faith. … Like Islam during its first centuries of expansion, communism offers all men conversion or the sword. The words of Marx are its Koran.”Footnote ²⁸ Welles would not have used such language. For all that he was portrayed later as being soft on the Soviet Union, one could argue that he sought accommodation because he realized—or was determined to endorse and extend Roosevelt’s willingness to realize by late 1942—how important the Soviet Union would be to the postwar peace. He was not doctrinaire. Following the Soviet attack on Finland in 1939, for example, Welles was one of the most vocal proponents of breaking off relations.Footnote ²⁹

Moving between the worlds of the utopian and the arcane was Leo Pasvolsky, a Russian immigrant who arrived in the United States as a boy in 1905.Footnote ³⁰ Trained as an economist, he joined the State Department in 1934 as a tariff expert and rapidly won the confidence of Secretary Hull, who touted free trade so passionately that it seemed he had almost no other goals in office. In September 1939, Hull named Pasvolsky his “Special Assistant primarily to work on problems of peace,” which meant, in effect, the free trade agenda.Footnote ³¹ It was a position Pasvolsky was to hold, in one form or another, until the termination of the San Francisco Conference in 1945. With the backing of Hull and by tremendous stamina and persistence—or what the former State Department official and later historian Herbert Feis called a skillful combination of “patience, passivity and zeal”—Pasvolsky managed to carve out a solid place for himself in the official pecking order.Footnote ³²

Pasvolsky’s intellectual tendencies extended beyond the Gladstonian, or later Wilsonian, faith in international comity by way of free trade and open diplomacy. Unlike Welles and Bullitt, Pasvolsky was a structural thinker, yet his direction of the planning efforts did not appear to contemplate the future in territorial terms. His views of world order were almost entirely functional and recognized few permanent borders, let alone interests, besides those dictated by economic and political cooperation. If the Welles–Bullitt rivalry may be regarded in prototypical shorthand as the traditional one between the eighteenth and later nineteenth centuries in European diplomacy—harmonious concert versus armed rivalry—then Pasvolsky’s universalism straddled the twelfth and twentieth centuries. For him, interdependence meant more than free trade. It required “a system of international economic relations under which a country need not be concerned with the state of its balance of payments with each other country, but rather with the state of its balance of payments with the whole world.”Footnote ³³ Comity cohered more than it liberated. It was a kind of glue that fastened the political interests of disparate nations and eclipsed the passions that drove them to conflict. Pasvolsky’s goal was, simply, “to create a system of international political relations which would offer a reasonable hope for the presentation of peace with the least practicable diversion of economic effort to the maintenance of armed forces; and … to create economic conditions, domestically and internationally, which would permit the greatest feasible measure of economic stability, security, and progress.” In other words, it was Wilsonianism with a balance sheet.Footnote ³⁴

Pasvolsky only published a treatise on the Soviet economy and an unfinished history of the UN Charter. Diplomatic agents overseas reported few cables that he authored. Yet his memoranda—turgid, repetitive, and almost interminable—could defy the attention of even the most dedicated reader. Hull, who had spent some of his career in Tennessee county courthouses and in the congressional cloakrooms, probably did not read them, let alone follow their densely written arguments. To Pasvolsky, words mattered. The language of the UN Charter, with its alternation of precision and generality, was testament to his perfectionism.Footnote ³⁵ Still, his achievement, such that it was, rested mainly on the deliberative process his memoranda enacted and not on any single document. Holding a few simple ideas in perpetual disputation was the secret of Pasvolsky’s success. Whereas Welles relied on the thoughtful and methodical mastery of nuance and Bullitt upon the well-timed revelation or exhortation to action, Pasvolsky stuck to the rigorously commonplace and the prolonged unfolding of universal truths.

Even the physical juxtaposition of the three figures presented a curious picture. The similarities ended with their baldness. Welles, about six-feet-four, ramrod straight—in Hull’s malapropism, “that horizontal [sic] son of a bitch”—immaculately dressed, with a high forehead, deep eyes, and a thin moustache, towered over Pasvolsky, little more than five feet tall, “a round-eyed, round-tummied, little owl-like man … an ostrich egg with a billiard ball on top of it.” Hull called him “Friar Tuck.”Footnote ³⁶ Bullitt stood somewhere between the two: svelte and of medium height, clean-shaven, with a broad smile and a hard gaze. While Bullitt could be emotional, even volatile, Welles was, in Harold Ickes’s words, “a man of almost preternatural solemnity.”Footnote ³⁷ Pasvolsky’s disposition was that of a mechanistic hummingbird, “a brain that walked like a man.”

Neither the three nor their intellectual composite, one is tempted to argue, was greater than the sum of their parts. The combination of their postwar worldviews fell short of a synthesis, but it was a combination nonetheless and one that managed in little more than a decade to promote the United States as both an enforcer of regional balances of power and the leader of a global community, all more or less in the service of its own national interests. How did this happen? The inherent yet incomplete complementarity of these ideas provides a partial answer. Another comes from their means of transmission, that is, by way of the bureaucracy. These men were not bureaucrats in the strict sense: Pasvolsky was an academic servant and Bullitt was a diplomatic impresario. Welles, one could argue, most fit the category of political appointee. But the power of their ideas, as we are about to see, came by way of their resonance with the prevailing institutional and intellectual proclivities of the United States government, their primary audience.

III

The State Department under Cordell Hull was a disordered place. The commonplace of the day held that there were really four departments: one under Hull, one under Welles, one under Breckinridge Long, and one under Dean Acheson. Hull and Welles were barely on speaking terms. The regional and functional bureaus, as Acheson later described them, existed like medieval fiefdoms. Both Bullitt and Welles, for example, barely kept the department informed of their talks with the president or with foreign officials. Hull was never consulted about the Atlantic Charter and only found out about it after the fact.Footnote ³⁸ Pasvolsky’s postwar planning committees operated more or less autonomously, and included representatives of the bureaus on an ad hoc basis, which probably suited them well because many did not take the effort seriously. The average age of the staff was about forty.Footnote ³⁹

The lynchpin of the various fiefdoms was the “special adviser on political relations,” James Clement Dunn, who became chairman of a separate “committee on political planning” in late 1942.Footnote ⁴⁰ Dunn was an interesting figure. “Rich, snobbish, and flawlessly groomed, cultivated in social graces and backward in social thought,” Dunn was the son of a manual laborer from Newark.Footnote ⁴¹ He married an Armour (of the meatpacking family), and adopted the habits and attitudes of a patrician. He was Catholic and perceived to be Ultramontane, for which he was pilloried, most notably by the columnist Drew Pearson, a close confederate of Welles.Footnote ⁴² Dunn’s main assets were his sense of bureaucratic prerogative and his talent for social networking. He made himself dependable to Hull and later to Hull’s middling successor, Edward Stettinius, Jr.Footnote ⁴³ He also managed to remain on good terms with another bitter pair, Acheson and Assistant Secretary Adolf Berle, and kept up cordial ties with the White House and key embassies. Bullitt’s one-time aide in Moscow, the irreverent Charles Thayer, the brother-in-law of Roosevelt’s interpreter at Tehran and Yalta, Charles Bohlen, married one of Dunn’s daughters.

Dunn filtered and shepherded the work of the planning committees through the bureaucracy even though his own committee was nominally separate from Welles’s advisory group. He also oversaw the integration of the postwar plans with the work of the Allied conferences, occupation, and other forms of contingency efforts to include the centralization of political intelligence.Footnote ⁴⁴ This arrangement belied the formal separation of the two groups.Footnote ⁴⁵ Dunn and his deputy, the aforementioned Hickerson, were the planners’ principal ambassadors to the bureaucracy. They performed the role of weathervane, pointing it gradually away from Welles’s domination toward an orientation more in keeping with the one Bullitt advocated while preserving an adherence to Hull’s universalist line. They had the further advantage of being Hull loyalists, with Hickerson being closer to Acheson and Dunn to Long.

The pragmatism of these officers extended to their own expectations for the postwar period, with full cooperation with the British on postwar arrangements seeming as impractical as that with the Soviets appeared untenable. For them the potential for rivalry with the Soviets in particular was a fact of life calling for resigned adaptation rather than fanatical resistance. Hickerson later wrote, “We have a pretty clear idea of the Soviet objective in Eastern Europe. We knew the terms of their settlement with Finland. We knew that the three Baltic States have been re-incorporated … nothing which we can do can alter this. It is not a question of whether we like it; I personally don’t like it although I recognize that the Soviet Government has arguments on its side. The point is it has been done.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Pasvolsky also suggested three general options: isolation, partnership with Britain, or a “new conception of world organization.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The question for the planners was how to make the final two options work without raising the specter of the former. Dunn provided a critical link and a hint of what was to come in arguing for a free trade zone that would extend across the entire Northern and Western Hemispheres to the British and French colonial territories in Asia and Africa.Footnote ⁴⁸

Welles meanwhile continued to feed his own planning process. By mid-1942 he had overseen the establishment of several subcommittees, which included both Republicans and Democrats from Capitol Hill, academics like Isaiah Bowman, columnists like Anne O’Hare McCormick, New Dealers like Ben Cohen and David Niles, and foreign policy mavens like Norman Davis and Hamilton Fish Armstrong, whose own postwar planning committees at the Council on Foreign Relations had collaborated closely with those in the State Department since late 1939.Footnote ⁴⁹ In addition, an Inter-Departmental Committee on Post-War Foreign Policy was formed in April 1942 under the direction of Davis and Long, on which Bullitt sat as the representative of the Secretary of the Navy. Finally, more than three dozen private organizations were involved in postwar planning activities of one kind or another.Footnote ⁵⁰ The duplication of groups and duties suggested irrelevance; but there was more to it than met the eye.

Hull’s jealousy of Welles made itself evident in these plans where Welles insisted repeatedly that regional organizations be given chief jurisdiction over local problems in increasingly complex formulas that he took pains to insist did not contradict the tenets of universalism.Footnote ⁵¹ He argued for a middle solution between national sovereignty and world government by way of “regional systems, similar in general nature to the inter-American system” that would only in the ultimate case defer to the power of a “supreme universal authority.”Footnote ⁵² But he failed to square the circle in time. In May 1943, Hull struck. By then regionalism had come to be seen as a dangerous dilution of the power of the future United Nations. He ordered Pasvolsky to remove regional prerogatives from postwar plans and subsequently disbanded the planning subcommittees altogether. With regard to any diminution or segregation of universalist aims, he noted, “If you cut loose, then you have nothing but regional organizations,” to which Pasvolsky replied, “That is it. If we [in the Western Hemisphere] ask for that privilege, everyone else will.”Footnote ⁵³ Regionalism, at least for the moment, was defeated. In August, Welles resigned.

From this point forward, planning efforts continued under Pasvolsky’s exclusive direction. He would go on to manage the drafting teams at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco, where he spent considerable time negotiating—in Russian—with Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko.Footnote ⁵⁴ The rivalry between regionalists and universalists, however, still had some life left in it. Nelson Rockefeller took up the cause of the former in regard to Latin America. He proved tenacious, but ultimately Pasvolsky’s views prevailed when concessions to Rockefeller and his ally, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, were made in the form of Articles 47 and 51 of the UN Charter. A quiet forger of compromise was Dunn, who, half a year earlier, had also been the principal American drafter of the Declaration on Liberated Europe, another ostensibly regional document with universal application.Footnote ⁵⁵ Its critical passage stipulating free elections in Eastern Europe was directed of course as much at whom Bullitt called the “descendants of Genghis Khan,” that is, the Soviets, as it was against the Germans, even though Bullitt had applied the standard of self-determination to the Germans rather differently back in 1917: “When all is said and done, there is no getting around the fact that the demand for German democratization or for a representative form of government in Germany is essentially a meddling of the first rank in German internal affairs.Footnote ⁵⁶

Bullitt’s State Department career was largely over once he returned from occupied France in 1940. His principal ally besides Hull had been Judge Moore. But Moore died in February 1941, issuing a notorious deathbed instruction to destroy Welles. Bullitt had little use for the rest of the department, which he stated “contain[ed] many morons, fairies and neurotics,” not a few “Baptist veterinarians” and “feeble sons of distinguished fathers.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Roosevelt appointed him a roving ambassador to North Africa but did not give him either of the cabinet appointments he wanted (War or Navy) and, following his role in the Welles scandal, ceased nearly all contact with him. Once this relationship collapsed along with the utility of Bullitt’s own affair with the president’s principal secretary, Missy LeHand, following her stroke, he would continue to seek channels to the top. The diary of Admiral William Leahy, Roosevelt’s and later Harry Truman’s chief of staff, reveals almost biweekly private dinners with Bullitt in which the latter repeated consistently the line that the Soviet menace had to be stopped at all costs.Footnote ⁵⁸ But he would never again occupy a position of power. Following his quixotic campaign in Philadelphia, Bullitt volunteered to fight with the Free French, was injured badly in a road accident, made a dramatic stand on the balcony of the American embassy during the liberation of Paris, and then fell into resentful obscurity. He died there in 1967. The only member of the exalted Moscow embassy staff to attend his funeral back in Philadelphia was Loy Henderson, who noted, “It was a sad commentary that Bill severed friendly relations one by one with almost all his former associates. His bitterness was so deep that he could not tolerate the success of persons who at one time served under him and who did not fully agree with his ideas.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Yet Bullitt’s impact on postwar planning remained significant for the simple reason that he, more than anyone besides Hull, was responsible for ending Welles’s career and, with it, the intellectual support for regionalism and the bureaucratic backing for Roosevelt’s accommodation of the Soviet Union. Bullitt’s former subordinates in Moscow—Kennan, Henderson, Elbridge Durbrow, and others of similarly hawkish mien—rose steadily in the State Department and sustained his cynicism. Most, with the exception of Chip Bohlen, sounded convinced by 1944 that Stalin’s aims in Europe would never be consistent with those of the United States, or of most Europeans.Footnote ⁶⁰ Others, as Hickerson suggested above, appeared to take their word for it. To the extent that postwar cooperation with the Soviet Union happened at all, it was through the compromises forged by Pasvolsky at San Francisco.Footnote ⁶¹ They would barely survive Stalin’s consolidation of power in Eastern Europe and the vociferous censure of the Americans who knew his country best, especially Bullitt, who blamed Roosevelt’s ill health for an approach he regarded as nothing short of catastrophic.Footnote ⁶²

Now that both he and Welles had left the limelight and Pasvolsky would follow by the end of the war, the State Department emerged from organizational chaos to resume, under Secretaries Marshall and Acheson, its leading role in foreign policy. The relationship with the Soviets continued to deteriorate, and regional collective security would be resurrected with the Rio and North Atlantic Treaties of 1947 and 1949, respectively. The result was a divided world, to be sure, but one evidently more stable than the world of 1919.

To what extent did the department’s complicated and meandering planning process contribute to that outcome? Most of its prescriptions for world order fell short of the mark. Welles, Bullitt, and Pasvolsky did not so much perform independently as a kind of three-cornered hat for postwar policy but rather framed the inclinations of the most powerful members of the State Department—namely, Dunn and his fellow mandarins—who modified and synthesized them. That was a divided, even ambivalent modification, particularly on the subject of the Soviet Union; but, as Dunn and Hickerson each implied, one could sympathize with or even, in some cases, embrace, Bullitt’s diagnoses and still entertain the overall goals of Welles, Pasvolsky, and Roosevelt. The bureaucrats’ job was to harmonize them, which they did in preparing papers for the various postwar conferences of foreign ministers taking place between 1945 and 1948 and in subsequently laying the foundation for the Cold War defense of Europe. Their solution was to allow the first tendency to play out, then embrace the second, albeit cautiously. That meant a wary stance toward cooperation with the Soviet Union that ultimately would give way to reflexive tension. Declarative policy, meanwhile, continued to uphold the promises of universalism. It was not exactly what Pasvolsky ordered, but it was close, indeed closest, to what Dunn and his colleagues borrowed, translated, and promoted by way of the planning process. Actually, this was not too different from what Welles had once done for his boss, as recounted by Herbert Feis: “His reconstruction of Roosevelt’s views are best a remembrance of what he thought at the time FDR meant, colored by the interpretations he wanted to put on those views.”Footnote ⁶³

The above characterization refutes the stereotypical view of the State Department as an unoriginal and reactive institution until the so-called Cold War wise men gave it intellectual substance.Footnote ⁶⁴ People like Dunn rarely were the originators of ideas. But they did more than delay, reject, or circumvent; and they listened to many people besides their own colleagues overseas. They were masterfully intuitive agents of policy reification. Just as ideas needed politics, so too did bureaucrats need ideologues; and so the relationship between theory and praxis was, as is often the case, more reciprocal than linear, more conditional than causal. Bureaucratic constituencies formed around positions, even (or, one might say, especially) in cases where their principal promoters were bitter rivals. The bureaucrats’ job was to pick and choose among the contending programs in order to satisfy as many constituents as possible without losing sight of broader policy goals. Thus, in this instance, reciprocity produced an intellectual and practical amalgamation that readied foreign policy for the postwar period. Appearances aside, it spoke to the essence of a healthy bureaucracy.

IV

The question of world order long predates the careers of Welles, Bullitt, and Pasvolsky, not to mention the United Nations. The battles over the structure and function of that organization were really less existential than procedural, or simply political.Footnote ⁶⁵ But the essence of world order precedes its exercise and therefore deserves greater attention. The combination of Welles’s normative regionalism, Bullitt’s ideological nationalism, and Pasvolsky’s institutional universalism recast the prewar strategic posture of the United States—namely, the one handed down from the nineteenth century that entailed isolation from Europe, hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, and a balance of power in East Asia—into a composite that preserved the latter two elements alongside a commitment to Euro-Atlantic regional structures and institutions, as well as a system of free trade premised upon defense against the Soviet threat. Bullitt eventually saw its containment, Welles his Western community, and Pasvolsky the makings of his global norms and institutions. Taken together, they blended a static or traditional, territorial approach to world order with one that lay greater emphasis on interconnectedness and interdependence: Wilsonian in the sense that it advanced communities of shared interests and values, but also sensitive to the realities of power. Bullitt may have emphasized the latter’s continuities, while Welles and Pasvolsky put more faith in transformation, but each came in practice to rely on aspects of the other.

The three visions appear less mutually exclusive than their proponents might have liked. Now that their bureaucratic fate is known, a short recapitulation serves to underscore their interrelatedness. For example, Bullitt’s 1946 primer on geopolitics, The Great Globe Itself, advanced three means for the protection of American “vital interests”: the Monroe, Atlantic, and Open Door Doctrines. All three stipulated a “hands-off” approach to America’s principal strategic interests in the Western Hemisphere, the Atlantic, and China, respectively.Footnote ⁶⁶ Compare this to Welles’s well-known recipe for world organization: a world security council made up of two members from the Americas and Europe with one representative from East Asia, the British Commonwealth, and the Near East, with all agreeing to the “acceptance by the nations participating in it of certain clear-cut principles of international conduct, and upon their recognition of specific obligations, both regional and universal in character.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Bullitt might have said that was all very well, but it disregarded several “elementary facts,” namely:

The medium-term solution, in Bullitt’s view, was in the creation of a global, democratic federation, although for him the global was not synonymous with the universal: the United States may have global interests, but its particular values and interests were rooted in space and time. For Welles and Pasvolsky, interests were more malleable and less metaphysical. The territorial subcommittee of the advisory committee on which they sat based it on a two-part conception, with the “land with its people on it” combined with “the historical and present economic, social and political forces and activities at work within any area.”Footnote ⁶⁹ This was the basis for a more organic geopolitics. Bullitt’s concept of order, by contrast, rested on the permanence of spatial relationships among nations, although, strictly speaking, the two positions were not entirely inconsistent with each other. All three men classified ideology as a temporal phenomenon. However, whereas Bullitt cast its relationship to power as mutually dependent, urging defeat more often than conversion, Welles and Pasvolsky depicted spatial relationships as having both a causal and contingent connection to changes in mindset, notably those that had began to draw the people of the world closer together.

A book Welles edited in 1945, An Intelligent American’s Guide to the Peace, outlined it well. The sections are divided by region (“Europe, the British Commonwealth, the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, Near East and Mediterranean Orbit, Africa”) and subdivided by country, followed by a section on international organizations. Each national entry includes descriptive sections: “The Land and the People,” “The Nation’s Economy,” “History,” and “Stakes in the Peace.” Welles introduced the book with a plea to his fellow Americans to educate themselves about the needs of the world and hold their leaders accountable for resisting any resurgence of isolationism. He then concluded in terms that could have been written in direct response to Bullitt:

Neither man lived to see that psychological transformation take place by the end of the twentieth century. It did, but perhaps only partially, and only because no single vision was able to work independently of the others.

How might our three protagonists have regarded the end of the Cold War? Each man in his own way might have agreed with George Kennan, who testified in Congress around this time that the age of Woodrow Wilson was finally upon us. They may not have liked to admit that the Cold War made much of their mutual combination possible. Of the three, Welles probably would have revealed the greatest degree of ambivalence over the most recent incarnation of the new world order, there having been little that was triumphalist in his character. While eager to preserve the gains of yet another postwar peace, he would have remained preoccupied over the weakness of regional institutions outside Europe. For his part, Pasvolsky may have been delighted with the vastly greater economic interdependence of the world in the 1990s, while Bullitt, despite his pleasure in seeing the backs of the Soviets, would have been on the lookout for new enemies.

Yet all three might have found themselves faced with a new paradox: while each failed to see the mutual compatibility of one another’s worldviews, one that would require the unique bipolar order of the Cold War to become manifest, they probably would not have been surprised to find the reverse condition in place after 1989. In today’s world, the three orientations really do appear incompatible, and the United States has had to make difficult choices among national, regional, and global interests that are increasingly in conflict with one another. The persistent universalism of American ideology is one reason for the problem, but there are surely others, not least of which is the lack of an alternative global order.

These are speculations that take us beyond the contemporary significance of these three men. Set within his own historical context, each was his own true believer; and each took ideas very seriously yet remained sufficiently creative to withstand being tagged with the moniker of ideologue. Even Bullitt, the most blatantly ideological of the three, based his politics on the most self-consciously empirical assessment of the world as he saw it. Although the trio remained optimistic about the potential for American power, they differed starkly over what they deemed to be best for their country. Professional and personal rivalry ultimately gave way to obscurity. Still, their visions of world order mattered at the time, while their mutual antipathies—public as well as private—facilitated a good deal of valuable intellectual exchange within the bounds of officialdom that otherwise might not have occurred. From their clash came, remarkably, fifty years of relative peace.