10

BLUFF

Everything had changed when Bullitt returned to Moscow in early 1934 after a trip to Washington. “The honeymoon atmosphere had evaporated completely before I arrived,” he wrote in a letter to Roosevelt.¹ In an effort to save face, he said he had anticipated this turn of events, though he evidently had not. In March 1934 Bullitt reported the unexpected détente in Soviet-Japanese relations to the State Department: “In December the Soviet Government was so fearful of an immediate attack by Japan that cooperation with us was eager and immediate. The Soviet Government is now convinced that Japan will not attack and we are therefore simply one among the capitalist nations.” As a result, the ambassador was having “the greatest difficulty in getting anything done” in Moscow.² A joke began circling around the embassy: “The Japanese have let us down badly.”³ Bullitt formulated a general rule: “The Russians’ love for us at any moment will be exactly [in] proportion to their fear of Japan.”⁴

Years earlier Roosevelt and Bullitt had made a bet about where the next war would break out, wagering “one red apple.” Roosevelt picked Europe and Bullitt picked the Far East. In the spring of 1935 Bullitt reminded the president of this old bet, noting with his usual flattery that Roosevelt had been right again. Austria was about to explode, while the Far East was then “momentarily quiet.”⁵ Still, the coming war with Japan was Bullitt’s central concern in Moscow. Whose war would it be? Bullitt knew how weak the Soviet Union’s immense eastern borders were. Russian naval forces in the Pacific were miniscule. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 resulted in the destruction of the Russian navy, the humiliating peace that Theodore Roosevelt brokered in Portsmouth, and mass protests all over Russia that foreshadowed the collapse of the Romanov empire.

In a July 1934 dispatch to the State Department, Bullitt told his side of the story. “The fear which still obsesses all the leaders of the Soviet Government is that of a war on two fronts.” According to this script, the war would start in the East and continue unpredictably. “Every member of the government is convinced that if Japan should attack the Soviet Union in the East, Poland would, at a favorable moment, attack in the West.” Although there was no formal agreement between Poland and Japan, Bullitt referred to the words of the Polish leader, Józef Piłsudski, who said that a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union would give Poland a chance that comes but once in a thousand years. Moreover, Bullitt wrote that Hitler was aware of the Polish-Japanese plans and that the Soviet government was aware of Hitler’s cooperation with the Poles. In December 1934 Nazi foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath told the American ambassador to Berlin, William Dodd, that “Japan would invade Russia in case of war and that the result would be chaos in Russia”; Dodd was “surprised” by these words.⁶ Bullitt’s good friend in Moscow, the French ambassador Charles Alphand, told him that the forthcoming Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance would relieve the tensions in the Far East.⁷ Concluded in May 1935 this pact failed to have much of a global impact, however. Soviet-American rapprochement would have done more, and peace in the Pacific was clearly in the interests of the two countries. But unlike Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, FDR did not want to engage America in complex multilateral talks.

Bullitt was right that the Bolsheviks were worried about a possible war with Japan, but he underestimated their self-preservation skills. Precisely because of its fear of Japan, the Soviet government was planning a major diplomatic retreat. Already in May 1933 Litvinov had made a secret proposal to the Japanese government about selling the disputed Chinese Eastern Railway, a strategic asset in any future war in the Far East. As in Brest-Litovsk in 1919, the Bolsheviks withdrew from positions that their predecessors had successfully defended; after the Russo-Japanese talks in 1905—and mostly because of American help in these talks—the Chinese Eastern Railway remained a Russian, and later a joint Soviet-Chinese, property. Selling the strategically important railway, with adjacent territory, towns, and industries, to Japan was a dramatic undertaking. The railway was about one thousand kilometers long, and about seventy thousand Russians lived in the rail corridor. Soviet and Japanese diplomats kept the talks secret until the sale was announced in March 1935. Russian engineers and their families were deported to Siberia; by 1937 the NKVD had shot twenty-eight thousand of them.⁸

Bullitt’s counterpart, the Russian ambassador to Washington Alexander Troyanovsky, started his career as an officer in the Russo-Japanese War. Praising Troyanovsky in his letters to Roosevelt, Bullitt believed that like those proverbial generals who are always prepared to fight the last war, Stalin’s diplomats would do everything to avoid the worst defeat of their recent past. In his very first telegrams from Washington in January 1934, Troyanovsky repeatedly asked the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs about the negotiations with Japan and the decision about the Chinese Eastern Railway. Like Bullitt, Troyanovsky understood that Soviet-Japanese tensions would define American-Soviet relations. But Troyanovsky knew what Bullitt did not know: key to the Soviet-Japanese relations was the Chinese Eastern Railway. During Troyanovsky’s first meeting with Roosevelt in February, the president started the conversation by asking the ambassador about the Japanese position toward Russia. Assuring Troyanovsky that American intentions in the Pacific were peaceful, Roosevelt warned him about the strength of the Japanese navy. Troyanovsky did not mention the negotiations about of the Chinese Eastern Railway.⁹ Bullitt learned about the secret talks between the USSR and Japan in July 1934 from Boris Stomoniakov, the Bulgarian revolutionary who was the Bolshevik deputy commissar for foreign affairs (he was arrested and executed in 1938). But Stomoniakov also told Bullitt that the Japanese would not attack the Soviet Union because they feared the power of Soviet aviation. To prove this point, Stomoniakov “insisted” (wrote Bullitt, with some irony) that the Japanese people had some racial defect in their “ear channels” that damaged their sense of equilibrium and “made it physically impossible for the Japanese to develop aviators of the highest ability.”¹⁰ Feeling the Soviet-Japanese détente and interviewing his counterparts in Moscow about it, Bullitt underappreciated the real explanation, the forthcoming sale of a huge and strategically important territory. Even a year later, the Soviet consul in San Francisco told the commissariat that “many Americans” disbelieved the rumors about the forthcoming sale of the Chinese Eastern Railway; they thought that Soviet diplomats were trying to buy time by dragging on talks with Japan.¹¹

After two years of negotiations, the Soviet Union sold the Chinese Eastern Railway and dramatically changed the situation in the Far East. Of course, Stalin and Litvinov did not know how successfully they had redirected their old enemy, Japan, against their new friend, the United States. However, they understood the importance of their secret negotiations with Japan. Stalin’s request for the colossal purchase of old American rails was forgotten, as was Bullitt’s idea of sending a group of American navy vessels to Vladivostok for a friendly visit. The sale of the Chinese Eastern Railway was presented as a major victory for Soviet diplomacy; it could be the reason that, when the whole of Litvinov’s commissariat was purged and his deputies were executed on the eve of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Litvinov was allowed to survive. Redirecting Japanese aggression toward the United States, the Soviets cherished their new peace with Japan even though this peace was interrupted by several border conflicts in 1938–1939. Even when the Second World War was at its peak, the Soviet Union preserved diplomatic relations with Japan and remained neutral with respect to Japanese-American hostilities.

Soviet-American diplomatic relations were first established in anticipation of a coming war in the northern Pacific, and they shaped in a different way when war seemed unlikely. In this new situation, the Soviets refused to discuss the settlement of Russian debts, even though that had been a condition for establishing diplomatic relations between the two nations. Revising its decision, the Moscow City Council agreed to give to the US Embassy not the fifteen acres of the Sparrow Hills that Bullitt had requested but a low and marshy part of them instead. Bullitt was outraged, along with the State Department officials. According to their calculations, the American embassy in Moscow needed 280 office rooms and 220 residential rooms, while in fact, it had 72 rooms for all purposes.¹² Eventually, Congress transferred the funds it had allocated for the construction of Monticello in Moscow, Bullitt’s ambitious project, to the embassies in Central America. In April 1934 Roosevelt signed the isolationist Johnson Act, which prohibited the government and private banks from granting loans to nations that failed to pay their wartime debts (Finland was the only country that had paid them). Bullitt’s position in talks with the Soviet leaders deteriorated sharply. On his part Litvinov could no longer hope—and promise the Kremlin—that they would persuade the American ambassador to grant a loan to the Soviets. Disappointed, Litvinov accused Bullitt of a “tendency to blackmail.”¹³

Bullitt developed a new narrative that spring. According to the story he repeated to various Soviet officials, the resolution of Soviet-Japanese tensions was the result of newly established Soviet-American diplomatic relations. Bullitt’s negotiations in Moscow, he said, had alarmed Japanese leaders and pacified them. He started spreading this story before he learned about the negotiations about the Chinese Eastern Railway, but he did not stop after he learned of it. The first time that Bullitt tested this narrative was during a visit to one of the top Soviet diplomats in Moscow, Ivan Divilkovsky, on March 7, 1934. Divilkovsky was a relatively young French-speaking diplomat who was then the general secretary of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs; his memos reveal that Divilkovsky and Bullitt understood each other well. Bullitt told Divilkovsky about “a significant reduction of tensions in Soviet-Japanese affairs,” and his Soviet interlocutor agreed. According to Divilkovsky’s memo, Bullitt said, “ostensibly, the Japanese were convinced that during his first visit to Moscow [as the ambassador in December 1933], he reached with us an agreement that the United States would provide us with military aid in the case of conflict with Japan.”¹⁴ Divilkovsky’s language in this memo shows that he did not believe Bullitt’s story.

On March 13, Bullitt repeated the same line to the deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Nikolai Krestinsky. The former ambassador to Germany (1922–1930), Krestinksy was an old Bolshevik who would be executed in 1938 as a leader of a supposed Trotskyite organization in Moscow. “Bullitt said that the Japanese have developed an explanation for his recent visit to and quick departure from Moscow. They believe that he and the Soviet government agreed on some kind of treaty that was directed against Japan, and that this treaty was so important and secret that he could not trust it to the telegraph and had to go to report the news personally to the President.”¹⁵ Krestinsky asked what further consequences these events would bring. Bullitt told him, “the Americans did nothing to refute these suspicions of the Japanese. They chose to let them [the Japanese] think that we have agreed about something. Let it be a situation that constrains them.”¹⁶

The next day, Bullitt discussed the same issues with Litvinov, who only three months earlier had anticipated an imminent Japanese attack. Again, Bullitt told Litvinov that Japan would not attack that spring because it was concerned about a possible intervention by America. Clearly, Bullitt wanted Litvinov to understand that peace in the Far East was, essentially, the result of American diplomatic efforts. But the Soviet commissar, who had been fully involved in the negotiations about the Chinese Eastern Railway, did not take the bait. “Bullitt said nothing interesting but the fact that America will not come out with its own initiatives,” he wrote to Troyanovsky.¹⁷ On March 26, Bullitt repeated his message to deputy commissar, Grigorii Sokolnikov (previously the head of the Bolshevik delegation in Brest-Litovsk, Sokolnikov would be arrested as a Trotskyite leader and murdered in 1939): “the Japanese are confident that I brought from Moscow to Washington the terms of our secret [American-Soviet] deal against Japan and discussed them with Roosevelt.” However, Sokolnikov wrote in his memo, Bullitt added that, in fact, America had “no intentions of going to war with Japan.”¹⁸

Having no assurance from the president that the United States would help Russia if war broke out with Japan, Bullitt realized that all he could do in this respect was a diplomatic maneuver that amounted to a bluff. With limited means, he needed to show that his bluff was credible. In March 1934 Bullitt suggested to Walton Moore, assistant secretary of state, that Moore could “intimate” to the Soviet diplomats that, if they did not want the service of the American Import-Export Bank, this facility would be offered to the Japanese. “A mere hint in this direction will, I believe, produce agreeable results,” Bullitt wrote.¹⁹ With Divilkovsky, he discussed the forthcoming Second Naval Disarmament Conference in London; Bullitt wanted to attend it and was hoping the Soviets would take part in this event alongside the United States, European powers, and Japan. The problem was that the Soviet navy was too small to qualify for the conference. Acknowledging the situation, Divilkovsky told Bullitt that the Soviet Union could not compete with Japan in building dreadnoughts. In response Bullitt proposed “half-seriously” that the Soviet government “publish a monstrous program of naval development,” which would secure its place among the great oceanic powers.²⁰ Bullitt could not offer any actual aid for the project, so he tried to act by stirring up publicity.

Bullitt correctly identified the Japanese threat to the USSR as the key issue in his negotiations with the Soviets. The threat continued for years to come, but the perception of it was changing. In December 1933 Litvinov told him that “everyone” expected a Japanese attack on Vladivostok.²¹ Several months later, in April 1934, Bullitt wrote Roosevelt that “the Russians are convinced that Japan will not attack this spring or summer,” and that was the reason that their “underlying hostility” was palpable “through the veneer of intimate friendship.”²² Still, the perceived threat was diminishing, and Litvinov believed this to be his major success in office. Whether or not Bullitt understood the reason for this change in the Bolsheviks’ mind, he still hoped that this development would not damage his interests in Moscow. In October 1934 he told Roosevelt about a “most belligerent” conversation he had with Litvinov, who “still under-estimates completely the influence that the United States can have in preserving peace in the Far East.” To his relief, Bullitt had a better understanding with Bolshevik military leaders, who wanted to beef up their garrisons in the Far East. “Fortunately Voroshilov is putting a great deal of energy into this job” of preserving peace in the Pacific, Bullitt wrote to Moore.²³

In March 1934 Litvinov fell ill and received Bullitt in hospital. Bullitt wanted to discuss the project on Sparrow Hills and the payment of the old debts, but Litvinov wanted new loans. Bullitt could not promise them, and Litvinov chose to ignore Bullitt’s hints about Japan. Both sides were irritated, and Litvinov referred Bullitt to the head of the Protocol section of the commissariat, Dmitrii Florinsky. After two stressful conversations on March 25 and 26, 1934, Florinsky wrote a memo in which he recorded their discussion with some irony. Florinsky said that the previous agreement about the land on Sparrow Hills was the “greatest and extremely sad misunderstanding” and blamed Troyanovsky for this misunderstanding; there was a certain typo in the document signed by Troyanovsky, he said, and this typo was the cause of misunderstanding. His apologies, Florinsky noted, put Bullitt “into a state of extreme exaltation, which he barely tried to conceal”; his face turned red and his tone became “ruthless.” Bullitt said that it would be impossible to build the American embassy on the remaining seven acres because the president and Congress had already approved the project, which was slated to reproduce “the best examples of American architecture” (he meant Monticello). Bullitt had discussed the plan for the new embassy with everyone from Stalin to Roosevelt; he “categorically refused” to accept the new and diminished offer. Florinsky responded “that there are troubles that could always happen, that could be neither predicted nor avoided. This is what happened with the misprinted order. One should courageously look at the failures as they are. One cannot ignore the facts.” Understandably, this made Bullitt even more furious. He stated that the United States would either build the embassy beautifully and according to the approved plan or not build it at all. Finally, Bullitt changed the subject to Japan. Again, he “confidentially” told Florinsky that the Japanese government believed that during his visit to Moscow in December, Bullitt had signed a secret pact with the Soviet government that obliged the United States to enter the war should hostilities emerge between Japan and the Soviet Union. Bullitt insinuated that this was secret information he had learned directly from the Japanese. Surprised by Bullitt’s unexpected sincerity, Florinsky informed his superiors about this conversation in detail.²⁴

It so happened that we know more about Florinsky than we know about Bullitt’s other counterparts in Moscow. A relatively sophisticated person who started his career as Litvinov’s secretary, Florinsky was the son of the former head of Kiev University. The Bolsheviks had shot his father. When the British consul in Leningrad asked Florinsky how he could work with them after this, Florinsky asked in response, “if one’s father was run over by a tram should one cease to ride trams?”²⁵ However, the Soviet Terror was not a tram. On October 5, 1934, Florinsky was playing bridge with Irene Wiley, the wife of the Counselor of the American Embassy, when he was called to the telephone; he came back smiling and said that he would soon return and resume the game. Irene never saw him again. Florinsky was accused of organizing a homosexual ring within the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. Presumably threatened or tortured, he outed many Moscow homosexuals—most of them within the commissariat—who were also arrested. After serving five years in the notorious Solovetsky camp, Florinsky was tried again, this time for espionage, and executed.²⁶

In August 1934 Bullitt greeted his friend, French financier Jean Monnet, at Spaso House, the new home of the American embassy in Moscow. Monnet had just come from China, where he was advising the government of Chiang Kai-shek on financial reform. Curious and energetic, Monnet shared with Bullitt his “creatively intimate picture of China and Japan.” On Monnet’s suggestion, Bullitt decided to go to Japan. “I was very anxious to fly to Vladivostok but decided that it was foolhardy and shall, therefore, take the train.” When the trip was at risk of being delayed, he shared his impatience with Evgenii Rubinin, an official with the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. In a memo Rubinin wrote that Bullitt had “connected some ambitious plans with this trip to the Far East.”²⁷ Rubinin was probably right: Bullitt’s ambitious plans were definitely connected to the “secret pact” between the United States and the USSR, Bullitt’s own invention.

In September 1934 in Washington Bullitt met his old friend Boris Skvirsky, a Soviet diplomat who had been instrumental in establishing diplomatic relations with the United States. Skvirsky in a memo recorded what Bullitt told him: “Decisive for the establishment of relations was the situation in the Far East and the efforts to avoid the war between the Soviet Union and Japan. The recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States played a major role because it cooled down the Japanese, who thought that in the case of war, the United States would help the Soviet Union.” Bullitt told Skvirsky that once the political situation changed and a Japanese attack seemed less probable, the Soviet Union had started making “impossible demands” on the United States.²⁸ Later, Bullitt told Skvirsky that, because of the dangerous situation in the Far East, “the Americans consciously chose such a political course that the Japanese would believe that the USSR and the U.S. are much closer than they actually are.” Even if that was not true, said Bullitt, it would create the illusion of stability, which was a “desirable” and even “necessary” element of Soviet-American relations. Skvirsky reported that this was not the first time Bullitt told him his story about misleading the Japanese.²⁹ When Soviet Ambassador Troyanovsky reported to Litvinov about the souring of Soviet-American relations, he blamed Bullitt’s mythmaking. Troyanovsky said that the improvement of Soviet relations with Japan had “seriously disappointed some Americans, who made their bets on our forthcoming war with Japan and on the fact that America would dictate to us the conditions of its aid.”³⁰

When Bullitt visited Vyacheslav Molotov, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, in October 1934, they both expressed much concern about the state of Soviet-American relations. As Rubinin, who was present at the meeting, wrote in his memo, “Bullitt apologized in advance for his excessively rude comparison, and then said that Soviet-American relations are like a small and very weak flower, and that it is not good to pee on it. Comrade Molotov responded that the Soviet Union had been always absolutely polite. Then he agreed that Mr. Ambassador’s observation applied to both sides equally.”³¹

Bullitt left Moscow on October 10, 1934, traveled across the Trans-Siberian Railway, and arrived in Japan two weeks later. He noted that the double tracks ended well to the west of Vladivostok and decided that this would be the point where the Red Army expected to meet the Japanese: he was still anticipating a Japanese attack. He had talks with the emperor and with senior Japanese officials, but he was disappointed: “All these conversations were so polite and formal in nature that they contained nothing of interest,” he wrote.³² Judging from what he chose to share with Roosevelt, he was most interested in the conversation with the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo about the Japanese navy. It was much stronger than the American fleet, Bullitt reported to Roosevelt. From Tokyo, Bullitt traveled on to China, where he had long and sincere talks with Chiang Kai-shek, which were interpreted by the Chinese leader’s beautiful, Wesleyan University–educated wife. Bullitt admired Chiang Kai-shek: “his foresight and wisdom have rarely been surpassed in the annals of statesmanship.” The two men spoke mostly about the Japanese threat to China. The Chinese leader correctly predicted that Japan would attack China in 1937. He said he would never make peace with the Japanese and would eventually defeat them. He also said, however, that China would face its greatest difficulties after the Japanese defeat.³³ Bullitt concluded that the United States and the Soviet Union should have worked together to create a strong, independent China that could be their ally against the real and imminent Japanese threat. It was still unclear whether the Japanese threat would be directed against the Soviet Union, the United States, China, or a combination of those. This uncertainty created space for diplomatic maneuvering.

Bullitt’s leaks about the imagined secret Soviet-American alliance annoyed the Bolshevik leadership because they could alarm the Japanese and destroy the Soviets’ expected deal with them. In November 1934 Litvinov told the Council of People’s Commissars that Bullitt was “determined to frighten us” and suggested that his overtures be firmly rejected.³⁴ In the classified report on the state of Soviet-American relations in 1935, the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs expressed satisfaction with the “sobering” of the Roosevelt administration that followed “the collapse of their serious hopes and bets on the forthcoming war between the Soviet Union and Japan.” The commissariat personally blamed Bullitt for “heating those hopes up.” It was Bullitt, the report said, who had consistently informed Roosevelt and European diplomatic circles that Japan would attack Vladivostok.³⁵

Litvinov presented the sale of the Chinese Eastern Railway as his personal diplomatic victory. Indeed, that deal shifted the focus of Japan’s military preparations away from the USSR and toward the United States. In November 1935 Bullitt dined with Litvinov and reported to the State Department that the commissar “felt sure Japan planned the domination of China, but would not attack the Soviet Union.”³⁶ Feeling as if they were on top of the game, Bullitt’s interlocutors in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs perceived him as being “confused,” “pessimistic,” and “depressed.” In November 1935 Bullitt told Troyanovsky that their “joint failure in developing American-Soviet friendship was the biggest failure in the diplomatic history of recent years.”³⁷

As Bullitt understood it, if Japan was an actual threat to the Soviet Union and the United States, and if the Red Army could fight hard against this threat, then playing on tensions between the Soviet Union and Japan would be of central interest to the American government. Conversely, the Soviet-Japanese détente increased the risk of the Japanese attack against the United States. Again, Bullitt was right, but he had to play his card against all odds. In January 1936 the Soviet agent who oversaw Martha Dodd, a Soviet spy and the daughter of the American ambassador in Berlin, wrote to his superiors in Moscow: “She told me about Bullitt’s swinish behavior during his sojourn in Berlin. According to her, Bullitt severely scolded the USSR in the American Embassy, arguing that in the next few months the Japanese would capture Vladivostok and the Russians would do nothing about it.”³⁸ In April 1936 Bullitt wrote to the Secretary of State: “The only actual threat to the Soviet Union is the Japanese.” Praising the strength of the Red Army, he criticized Soviet diplomacy and propaganda. “All Litvinov’s propaganda trumpetings to the contrary, the Soviet government knows very well that Germany can not be in a position to make war on the Soviet Union for many years.” In Bullitt’s opinion the Soviet Army was not ready for offensive operations, because the country’s railways were “still inadequate” and there were “literally no highways in the entire Soviet Union.” However, “on the defensive, the Red Army would fight hard, well and long.”³⁹ The State Department did not listen to his advice and failed to support Bullitt’s game. In December 1937 Bullitt told Roosevelt in a letter from Paris, “I still believe, as I have for several years, that conflict between Japan and Russia is inevitable.”⁴⁰ After the Second World War, Bullitt personally accused the president of having failed in the Far East. Roosevelt, he said, “inaugurated unwisely the policy of appeasing Japan which led us by devious paths to the disaster at Pearl Harbor.”⁴¹

Bullitt’s strategy was to play off the American-Soviet-Japanese diplomatic triangle, and he pursued it to the very end of his term in Moscow. But, while trying hard to manipulate the future, he made serious mistakes in the present. From the start, the ambassador knew that Soviet-American rapprochement depended upon the Japanese threat to both nations. He saw that the degree of Soviet hospitality to America tracked the ebbs and flows of this threat, as it was perceived from Moscow. Acting in the interest of American security, he tried to make himself a part of the big game in the Far East. Clearly Bullitt thought that if he could convince Soviet leaders that he could either stop or defer Japanese aggression, he could get them to agree to the construction of Monticello on Sparrow Hills. Major agreements in trade, security, and armaments could then follow. If he could secure a rapprochement with Russia without breaching the limits that Roosevelt set for him, that is, without promising actual military or economic aid, it would strengthen American positions in the Pacific and also boost Bullitt’s political career in Washington.

In reality there were two problems with Bullitt’s strategy. First, Japan did not in fact wish to attack Vladivostok, setting its sights on Pearl Harbor instead. Second, the Soviets had their sources in Japan, and they were excellent. Bullitt was developing his bluff precisely when the best of the Soviet spies, Richard Sorge, had settled in Tokyo. From September 1933 Sorge was informing the Kremlin about the Japanese and, later, German plans and intentions; he correctly informed the Kremlin about the German invasion in 1941. He was also a former librarian of the famous Institute for Social Research, the cradle of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, a polyglot, and a womanizer. He was Bullitt’s rival even though the American ambassador never heard his name.⁴²

Bullitt wrote to his patron and friend in the State Department, Walton Moore: “The next twenty years will be as filled with horror, I believe, as any that the world has traversed, and we shall need not one FDR but a succession of Presidents of his quality to keep us out of the shambles.”⁴³ Bullitt’s ambitions were frustrated on both sides. His detailed and challenging letters to Roosevelt make up a volume, but it is not clear how much of what he wrote Roosevelt was ever actually read or appreciated. The president’s responses were encouraging but random, short, and mostly ironic—“trivial,” as Kennan characterized them.⁴⁴ In Moscow Bullitt’s plan to communicate with the top leadership failed; he was reduced to ordinary contacts with officials of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, whom he detested. “It is difficult to conduct conversations with the Soviet Foreign Office because in that institution the lie is normal and the truth abnormal.”⁴⁵

Soviet diplomats in Washington started a personal vendetta against Bullitt. In early 1936 Troyanovsky informed the Kremlin of Bullitt’s ambition to run for president in 1940, or at least to be appointed secretary of state. Troyanovsky commented that any such appointment would not favor Soviet interests.⁴⁶ In May 1936 Konstantin Umansky, new acting head of the Soviet mission to Washington who also coordinated espionage in America, suggested that the time was ripe to commence “invisible efforts” against Bullitt. Specifically, he proposed to launch a personal campaign against Bullitt in American newspapers, which, he said, for the Soviet embassy “would not be a hard thing to do.” Umansky also plotted ways to “increase the appetite” of Bullitt’s rivals in the Democratic Party.⁴⁷ Bullitt knew about Umansky’s intentions; when the Kremlin sent Umansky to Washington Bullitt warned the State Department that Umansky was a “Bolshevik intriguer of the lowest kind” who would try to interfere with the presidential campaign.⁴⁸

Surrounded by spies, Bullitt detested them and shunned espionage, which he considered to be a European thing. Preaching such American values as “efficiency, sincerity, and straightforwardness,” he was proud of American diplomacy. There was no government in the world, Bullitt wrote, that “was so fully informed with regard to relations between Stalin and Hitler as the American government,” and US diplomats achieved this success “without an expenditure of one cent for spies or agents.”⁴⁹ The first American ambassador to the Soviet Union wrote to his boss, Secretary of State Cordell Hull: “We should never send a spy to the Soviet Union.” These were his own terms of the trade, and he was confident of their superiority. He did not think about his own bluff when he beautifully wrote, “There is no weapon at once so disarming and effective in relations with the communists as sheer honesty. They know very little about it.”⁵⁰