13

SAVING PARIS

In August 1936 Bullitt was finally appointed US ambassador to France. He loved the country, enjoyed speaking its language, and considered Paris his second home. He also liked the city’s perfect contrast with Moscow. Bullitt had known great figures of French politics for a long time, and they knew him. His special combination of formal manners and creative energy attracted the French. He knew that during his service in Paris, European history would move with unusual speed, and the ambassadorship was his chance to change it for the better. What was happening in France was “tragically interesting,” he wrote Roosevelt in December 1936.¹ The French expected financial and military support from the new American ambassador, who did not miss opportunities to emphasize his special relationship with Roosevelt. Using newly installed transatlantic cables, Bullitt was able to call Roosevelt directly; he also wrote him long telegrams and very long letters. He did not trust European communication lines, which he believed could be hacked by multiple interested parties, and organized a courier service that delivered ciphered mail from one American embassy in Europe to another.

Robert Murphy, counselor of embassy in Paris and later assistant secretary of state, wrote about his service with Bullitt with much enthusiasm, calling him “a brilliant man with a profound knowledge of Europe and its history. He was convinced that the European conflict would directly threaten the United States, so he felt his own role in the approaching tragedy was bound to be important. . . . He felt he had a tacit mandate from Roosevelt to act as his eyes and ears in Europe. . . . He had a great influence upon French policy.” Murphy added that Bullitt’s relationship to the president was “remarkably intimate.” When Bullitt was in Paris, he and Roosevelt often talked at length by trans-Atlantic telephone and “threshed out matters of policy with no correspondence to record their discussions,” Murphy wrote.² In his role as the key ambassador of the United States in Europe, Roosevelt’s “eyes and ears in Europe,” Bullitt also relied on his writing skills. A former journalist, he was able to communicate complex ideas via quick, witty formulae that could catch the attention of his busy reader.

One of the most influential members of the Roosevelt administration, Harold Ickes, saw Bullitt in May 1938 in Washington and then visited him in June in Paris. They talked about the future. Bullitt told Ickes that Italy would find Ethiopia a burden; Franco was bound to win in Spain; Hitler’s timing had been perfect and he would have his way with Czechoslovakia, acting in a manner that neither Russia nor France could stop it; Japan would win battles in China but lose the war. Bullitt also told Ickes that the civilized world was undergoing one of its great upheavals, and he felt strongly that the United States should keep out of European embroilments. Overestimating the French, Bullitt thought the war would last for twenty years and totally destroy Paris. He hoped that the United States would remain free and strong and assume the burden of rebuilding whatever was left of Western civilization in the aftermath of the war.³ For the moment, Bullitt’s predictions were surprisingly correct. In July, however, Roosevelt told Ickes that he found Bullitt’s reports to be “too pessimistic.”⁴

In Paris, Bullitt and his daughter, Anna, occupied the official residence on Avenue d’Iéna, overlooking the Trocadero and Eiffel Tower. The home had a large dining room suitable for receptions, a small library, and an excellent wine cellar. High-ranking guests appreciated Bullitt’s knowledge of French wines, which he liked to combine with exotic Russian snacks, usually caviar. Bullitt also kept his own apartment near the Champs Elysées, which was something like a studio with an extra room for his Chinese servant. Rumor had it that he used the space to entertain his high-society girlfriends. In 1936 Cissy Patterson visited her old friend in Paris.⁵ In September 1939 the ever-jealous LeHand wrote Bullitt that she heard from a mutual friend in Paris that Bullitt had “secretly married” a certain countess. “I know I shall strangle that woman when I see her—war or no war!”⁶

At some point Bullitt rented a small chateau in Chantilly, near Paris. The mansion was close to a waterfall, the park was beautiful, and Bullitt enjoyed the river where he could paddle an American-style canoe. He kept a stable at Chantilly, and some of the best French races took place nearby. In Chantilly he felt “like a participant in the last days of Pompeii,” he confessed in a letter to Roosevelt; on his part, the president wrote that Bullitt’s next choice would probably be Versailles.⁷ Ickes described Bullitt’s home in Chantilly as a “perfectly charming old chateau, with ten thousand acres of wood with beautiful streams.”⁸ He enjoyed staying with Bullitt so much he was surprised to hear that, despite the charms of Paris, the ambassador wished to move back to the States and wanted a job in Washington. “When Bullitt comes to this country, he brings a large supply of fresh caviar and Champagne. I always enjoy talking with Bill Bullitt. He thinks that the chances of war in Europe this spring are 50/50,” Ickes wrote in 1939.⁹

The ambassador had much success in Paris. Since the Paris Conference, Bullitt had befriended Prime Ministers Daladier, Blum, and Reynaud who changed places with surprising speed. Bullitt was closest with the Socialist leader Leon Blum, who became prime minister shortly before Bullitt arrived in Paris. Blum publicly announced that he planned to do for France what Roosevelt had done for America, and Bullitt did not miss the chance to inform Roosevelt about Blum’s aspiration. Together, Bullitt and Blum happily agreed that France was “as definitely on the Left as the United States was on the Left in 1933.” As for Blum’s opponents, “the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie are just as dumb here as their opposite numbers in the United States,” Bullitt wrote.¹⁰ For him, Blum personified his long-standing idea that a moderate, non-communist Left was the only viable counterweight to Soviet Bolshevism and German National Socialism.

But Blum was in a coalition with French Communists; answering to Moscow, they could “raise hell” in France at any time. France had signed a treaty of mutual assistance with the USSR, but Bullitt told the French that the Kremlin would ignore its obligations. The war in Spain was in the news, and the Spanish ambassador told Bullitt that the Republican air force consisted of Soviet fighter planes manned by Soviet pilots. However, Bullitt did not believe the Soviet air force could help Czechoslovakia. In a report to Roosevelt, he wrote that Czechoslovakia was “the next item on Hitler’s menu” after Spain, and that France and Russia would breach their obligations and fail to act.¹¹ He also warned the State Department that, if Italy entered a military coalition with Germany, “the result would be tragic not only for France and England but for every country in the world including the United States.”¹² Bullitt wanted Roosevelt to contact the pope in hopes of stopping Mussolini. He did not want to appease the Italian dictator: “to believe that the government of the United States will ever be able to cooperate with Mussolini is as dangerous to the future of America as would have been the belief that our government could cooperate with Al Capone.”¹³

This was a good prediction, but Bullitt made poor ones as well. When the Nazis started their invasion of Belgium, Holland, and France, Bullitt sent a warning to Roosevelt saying that in order to escape defeat, the British could install the government led by the pro-Nazi Oswald Mosley. That would mean that the British navy would fight against the United States, and Bullitt advised Roosevelt to convince the British to transfer their navy to Canada to defend the dominion that might have been a refuge for the British Crown. There were other “hypotheses that we often discuss but never put on paper”: Bullitt cherished whispering them into Roosevelt’s ear.¹⁴ He insisted that Roosevelt should send the Atlantic Fleet to the Mediterranean in order to warn Mussolini against opening hostilities; Roosevelt refused to follow this advice, which would probably have sent the United States into war at a very early moment. Roosevelt’s ambassador at large, Norman Davis, wrote to the secretary of state: “While Bullitt is a very brilliant and able man in so many ways, . . . he has been quietly conveying the impression that he is the spokesman for the President in Europe. . . . We always seem to have some prima donna trying to play a personal role, which can be done only to the detriment of the United States.”¹⁵

From Poland to France, the endangered nations of Europe needed America’s help. But with President Roosevelt claiming neutrality, Bullitt had nothing to offer the French but rhetoric. “We ought to make it clear that the United States, like God, helps those who help themselves,” Bullitt told the president.¹⁶ He believed Germany would inevitably increase in strength. There was no legitimate reason to prevent Germany’s economic development, which it derived from its increasing trade and influence in Romania, Poland, and the Balkans. What was needed, according to Bullitt, was the decoupling of Germany’s economic dominance from its political power on the continent. “I do not believe that political domination must necessarily follow economic domination,” he wrote. Bullitt saw Hitler’s demands to revise the Treaty of Versailles as legitimate; he had predicted the treaty’s detrimental impact two dozen years earlier. In his view Germany should have gotten a chance to develop Central Europe and the Balkans economically, but it should be politically limited by a new system of treaties that would limit armaments and produce “a general revival of a feeling of European unity.” Bullitt knew his ideas were ambitious; they were also characteristically precocious. “It sounds like a large order. It is a large order,” he wrote Roosevelt. The civil war in Spain forced people to “realize that there is such a thing as European civilization,” built upon “very old civilized principles,” Bullitt argued. “There is beginning to be a feeling that if the nations of Western Europe do not hang together, they will hang separately.”¹⁷

Increasingly frustrated, Bullitt often drew in his dispatches a disturbing analogy between Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, which failed to convince Roosevelt because the president did not share Bullitt’s critical attitude toward Wilson. Remembering the First World War, Bullitt hoped that America would avoid direct involvement in the new catastrophic war in Europe. Remembering Versailles, he hoped that if the war were to happen, America would win both the war and the peace, which for Bullitt meant an entirely new arrangement for Europe. In his letters to Roosevelt, he continuously emphasized that America shared responsibility for European peace, which for him meant European unity. It was up to the United States to turn German strength toward “constructive rather than destructive purposes.” The secret was, again, in promoting “a general effort to make the giving of those concessions to Germany a part of a general plan of unification for Europe.”¹⁸

Roosevelt’s closest adviser on international affairs in Washington, Sumner Welles, played with the idea of an international peace conference in Europe, which would allow Roosevelt to meet with the European leaders. Dispatched to Europe in early 1940, Welles traveled for six weeks and suggested the possibility of American mediation to Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Daladier. However, they all refused to accept this American help. Bullitt believed, of course, that he would cope with the problem better than Welles. When Welles was in Paris, Ambassador Bullitt was conspicuously absent. The State Department sent Kennan to guide Welles through Italy and Germany, but Welles was not interested in courting his expertise, and the two barely spoke.¹⁹ According to Bullitt, Welles “eulogized Mussolini” in Paris and spread the idea that Hitler’s army was undefeatable; Bullitt’s friends were bewildered, and he conveyed their incredulity to Roosevelt.²⁰ Indeed, Welles once confided to a fellow New Dealer that he thought the Duce “was the greatest man that he ever met.”²¹ But even in Rome, his talks led to nothing. Welles complained that “the vitriolic tongue of Bill Bullitt” colored the coverage of his mission in the European newspapers.²²

The idea of European unification was increasingly present in Bullitt’s dispatches from Paris before the war. In 1936 Ambassador Bullitt said a European war “will mean such horrible suffering that it will end in general revolution, and that the only winners would be Stalin and company.”²³ The way to promote peace, he advised Roosevelt, was to emphasize “some basis for understanding between the French and the Germans.” While the Russians, British, and Italians were all opposed to French-German reconciliation, it was in the interest of the United States, along with Poland and the smaller states of Europe, to promote such a reconciliation. Bullitt and Blum agreed on this strategy in December 1936. Blum emphasized that American support would be crucial for any attempt at reconciliation with Germany, but Bullitt saw further. In his dispatches from Paris between 1937 and 1938, Bullitt advocated the idea that the only chance for peace was “some scheme which will be little short of the proposal for the unification of Europe.” He defined this unification as a system of financial controls, limitations of armaments, and international trusts that would deliver raw materials from the former colonies. Supported by the United States, a united Europe would compensate Germany for the unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles and prevent the impending war by eliminating its driving forces.²⁴ Bullitt warned that Soviet Russia and fascist Italy would do everything to kill such a proposal. He was not sure about the British position, and urged Roosevelt to influence the British diplomats so that they would be more favorable to his project of pan-European, anti-Soviet reconciliation. He was opposed, however, to his old friend and incoming British ambassador to the United States Philip Kerr’s plan, which proposed appeasing Hitler by letting him dominate Central and Eastern Europe all the way to the Soviet border. Bullitt informed Roosevelt that his French friends were united against Kerr’s proposal, but it would only strengthen Hitler and lead to an early war. Again, Bullitt was right; Kerr abandoned his plan after Germany occupied Czechoslovakia.

Bullitt’s influence in France was unusual for a foreigner. He attended the meetings of the French cabinet so frequently that the press named him a minister without portfolio. Some accused Bullitt of sympathizing with Hitler, which was a poorly drawn conclusion from his well-publicized hatred of Stalin. “The democracies should refuse to choose between either of alternatives—communism and fascism,” Bullitt wrote in 1936.²⁵ He was probably right: under the circumstances, it was impossible and unnecessary for European powers to decide between two dictators who were determined to divide the continent. But the policy implications of this stance were unclear. The situation changed erratically during the fateful months that culminated in the Munich agreement and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It is possible that more activist and flexible American diplomacy could have pulled the Nazis into negotiations and prevented the German-Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. At this point, however, Roosevelt was unprepared for such a strategy, and the two “princes of darkness,” Stalin and Hitler, outmaneuvered him in Europe. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was the price the United States would later pay for this failure.

Bullitt’s counterpart in Berlin, Ambassador William Dodd, dealt with Nazi leaders in a tougher, more straightforward way. A brilliant historian, Dodd sent the State Department gloomy but accurate reports of the dismal developments in Germany. His dispatches influenced Roosevelt, and Bullitt grew jealous. He told Roosevelt that Dodd’s open hostility to the Nazi regime was inappropriate for his position as a diplomat, ignoring the fact that his tone in Moscow had been no less challenging than Dodd’s position in Berlin. Bullitt suggested that Roosevelt might want to replace Dodd with his friend Hugh Wilson, a career diplomat, and Roosevelt followed this advice in 1938. The tragedy of history was that both of them were right, Dodd about Hitler and Bullitt about Stalin. The irony of history, however, was that Dodd’s daughter had become a Soviet spy. Living with her father in the ambassadorial residence in Berlin, twenty-five-year-old southern belle Martha Dodd fell in love with Boris Vinogradov, secretary of the Soviet embassy who also happened to be an officer in the NKVD. Vinogradov recruited Martha, and she provided him and several other Soviet agents with documents from her father’s desk. Their romance lasted until Vinogradov’s withdrawal to Russia, where his colleagues executed him in 1938. Martha returned to America and continued to spy for the Soviets. She married the New York millionaire Alfred Stern, recruited him, and in 1956 they both fled from American prosecution, finding asylum in Moscow and later in Havana. Bullitt visited Ambassador Dodd and his daughter every time he was in Berlin, but he probably did not suspect Martha’s espionage; still, his distrust of his colleague’s diplomacy proved well founded.

Bullitt also offered the president advice on domestic affairs. The dismal experience of the Soviet Union did not dissuade him from supporting economic equality and redistribution. In the 1930s he was a loyal New Dealer: driving the country “toward a fairer distribution of the national income,” Bullitt wrote, was the only way of saving it from class warfare and the “eventual crash of all that we care about in America.”²⁶ For him, Roosevelt’s new appointments to the State Department had to meet two “absolute requirements”: they had to be New Dealers, and they also had to know the difference between Budapest and Bucharest.²⁷

Promoting the French-German rapprochement on the cusp of the Munich agreement, Bullitt warned Roosevelt in May 1937 that as long as Hitler was interested in a friendly understanding with Great Britain he would abstain from annexing Austria. However, the moment Hitler found out that “the British have been playing him for a sucker, I think he will act—probably via a revolt of the Nazi[s] within Austria.”²⁸ In November 1937 Bullitt visited Goering in Berlin. In his report Bullitt compared the Nazi leader with “the hind end of an elephant,” but nevertheless paid close attention to the instructive details in Goering’s words. Goering told Bullitt that Germany was determined to correct the errors of the Versailles treaty by annexing Austria and the Czech Sudetenland. But he also said that the National Socialists had no intention of occupying or annexing Ukraine. From Bullitt, Roosevelt and the State Department learned of the Nazis’ plans four months prior to the annexation of Austria and ten months before the Munich agreement. Even Sumner Welles, a longtime opponent of Bullitt in the State Department, appreciated his insights.²⁹ It was in Welles’s best interest to circulate Bullitt’s dispatch to the American embassies in Europe and Asia; even so, American and European diplomats later repeatedly referred to Hitler’s actions in 1938 as “unexpected.”

In September 1938 Prime Minister Daladier told Bullitt that Hitler would accept nothing except the “absolute humiliation of every nation on earth.” The chance for peace was one in a thousand, Daladier said. Still, he believed that Germany would eventually lose the war and France would win it. The Bolsheviks were the only ones who stood to gain anything, Daladier told Bullitt, as they could then install Communist regimes throughout Europe. “Cossacks will rule Europe,” Napoleon had said on the island of St. Helena. Bullitt agreed with Daladier: Napoleon’s saying was about to come true.³⁰

The talks in Munich were “an immense diplomatic defeat for France and England,” Bullitt wrote, and his sympathies belonged entirely to France. Horrified by the results of Munich, Bullitt sent a telegram to Roosevelt immediately after he learned about them from Daladier. “The war would be long and terrible, but whatever the cost in the end France would win,” Bullitt wrote to the State Department.³¹ Later, he told a friend that before Munich, the United States would have had no trouble coming to an agreement with Russia. After Munich, Russia began negotiations with Berlin and raised its price.³² On October 13, 1938, Bullitt briefed Roosevelt in Washington about the outcome of the Munich agreement. Drawing on the French leaders’ impressions of Hitler, Bullitt convinced Roosevelt that the Nazi leader was a maniac and that meaningful negotiations with him were impossible, a view Roosevelt neglected to apply to other dictators, such as Stalin and Mussolini. Bullitt also told Roosevelt about the supremacy of Germany’s air force, a permanent theme in their subsequent correspondence.³³

In Paris in the summer of 1938, Bullitt hosted the sons of his old friend and rival, Joseph Kennedy, then the American ambassador in London. The Kennedy brothers planned an extensive European tour, and for some reason they were particularly interested in traveling to Russia. In Bullitt’s letter to John Kennedy, the ambassador proposed a three-week journey for the boys to Berlin, Warsaw, Kaunas, Tallinn, and finally Moscow. John and Robert Kennedy arrived in Paris in June and stayed as the guests of the ambassador until the Munich crisis, at which point they were forced to change their plans. War in Europe could start at any moment. In a timely fashion, the New Yorker published a profile of Bullitt. Worthy of Woland, the wording was not entirely flattering: “Headstrong, spoiled, spectacular, something of a nabob, and a good showman.”³⁴

In Paris, Bullitt cultivated a friendship with two relatively young Frenchmen, financier Jean Monnet and politician Guy La Chambre, and both relationships produced extraordinary results. Monnet first met Bullitt at the Paris Peace Conference and then worked in the League of Nations; soon, he returned to the family business, the cognac trade. Then he moved on to international finance and helped to stabilize the Polish and French currencies. In the mid-1930s Monnet lived and worked in China, helping Chiang Kai-shek finance his railways. This international experience helped him become a founding father of the European Union, but not until much later in his career.

In 1929 Monnet met the artist Silvia Giannini. The financier was almost twenty years older than she was, but that did not spoil their love. Giannini was married, and her husband would not grant her a divorce. They carried on an affair for five years and found a happy resolution when Monnet came to Moscow in August 1934. It was then that Bullitt and Monnet developed a fantastic plan, which they carried out three months later. In November Monnet returned to Moscow from Shanghai, and Silvia arrived there from Switzerland. In the capital of the victorious proletariat, they devoted two days to the most incredible wedding. Silvia took Soviet citizenship, divorced Giannini in his absence, and married Monnet. The French ambassador in Moscow, Charles Alphand, took part in organizing the event along with Bullitt, and one might imagine that Andreychin was also helpful. This is how on November 13, 1934, the future creator of the European Union was married in Moscow.³⁵ A personality as effective in international affairs as he was secretive in his personal life, Monnet later traveled to Washington to help realize Bullitt’s idea to supply the French with American airplanes even though America was still neutral and could not legally do so. Bullitt recommended him to Roosevelt, and Monnet thus started to network with leading American politicians. Eventually, he managed to accomplish what others could not: he united Europe, and American support was crucial for the task.³⁶

Over the course of his service in France, Bullitt ceaselessly heard, spoke, and wrote about airplanes. His friend Guy La Chambre became the French minister of aviation in spring 1938. In conversations with La Chambre and French pilots, Bullitt came to understand the relationship between technology and politics, which gave a new boost to his vision for a united Europe. Aviation, he wrote, was a “new element” that changed the rules of European security: an airplane could cross European borders and destroy different states in just an hour. “The modern bombing plane has confronted Europe with an alternative of unification and destruction.” Both the lessons of the First World War and the development of new technologies, especially aviation, “made Europe an absurdity,” Bullitt wrote. The old Europe of mosaic borders, nostalgic empires, and revisionist nation-states would be no more. “These dinky little European states can not live in an airplane civilization. . . . Today they have an alternative of submerging their national hatreds and national prides sufficiently to unify the continent or of destroying themselves completely and handing Europe over to the Bolsheviks.”³⁷ When the French knew that German bombers could destroy Paris in twenty-four hours and the Germans knew the French could destroy the Ruhr the same day, war seemed impossible.

The real situation on the ground and in the skies was quite different. La Chambre told Bullitt that France and Germany had enough bombers to destroy each other’s capitals, but Germany had a much bigger fleet of fighters to protect itself. Moreover, its advantage was increasing every month. In those crucial years, Germany was manufacturing more planes per month than France and England combined. On August 9, 1938, Bullitt gave a dinner to honor Charles Lindbergh, the American celebrity aviator with vaguely pro-Nazi sympathies. In the presence of La Chambre, Lindbergh produced wildly exaggerated numbers of Germany’s annual production of military airplanes, which in his estimate outnumbered French, British, and Soviet forces combined. Bullitt reported these numbers to Roosevelt with the obvious purpose of getting American military support for France and England, a purpose that they finally, though belatedly, realized in 1940.³⁸

La Chambre sought massive deliveries of American airplanes, but Roosevelt had already signed the Neutrality Act, which prohibited the sale of weapons to warring parties in Europe. Bullitt was constantly writing Roosevelt that France could only protect itself if America supplied it with airplanes. With his usual creativity, Bullitt suggested a way the president might bypass the Neutrality Act. If the American planes were built in Canada, paid for by the French, and only assembled with the help of American patents, equipment, and components, they could be sold legally. The assembled aircraft would be delivered from Canada directly to France. Elaborated together with La Chambre, the operation was run by Monnet, whom Bullitt said he trusted “as a brother.”³⁹ In October 1938 Roosevelt received Monnet and approved the idea of using Canadian factories to circumvent the Neutrality Act. In January 1939 the president ordered his cabinet to realize this unusual plan, even though some members attempted to sabotage the cause. Bullitt, who flew in to Washington for the occasion, insisted that France would receive not only the obsolete Curtiss fighter but also the latest plane, the still-classified Douglas bomber. On January 16, 1939, Roosevelt ordered a demonstration of the Douglas for two French experts, whom Monnet had flown in for that purpose. Tragically, the plane crashed during the test flight; the American pilot was killed, and the French colonel on board was badly hurt.⁴⁰

Bullitt pushed for revisions to the Neutrality Act, calling its advocates in Congress “the Hitler allies.” He told Roosevelt that if the act remained in force, France and Britain would lose the coming war, and America would have to fight Hitler in the Western hemisphere. If, however, America supplied its European allies with weapons, there was a chance that France and England could win without the help of American soldiers. Unfortunately, most of the American airplanes arrived in France too late to help in the fight, though some were in place when Germany attacked France. Piloted by the French, the American Curtiss planes were “definitely superior” to the German Messerschmitts, Bullitt proudly reported.⁴¹ Later, in September 1939, Bullitt lobbied for making Monnet the representative of both the French and British governments for purchases in the United States.⁴² It was the start of Monnet’s stellar career, which eventually materialized Bullitt’s project of the postwar integration of Europe on the base of the American support. As one historian formulated the secret of Monnet’s success, it rested on his “special role as flow regulator along the American aid pipeline.”⁴³

Despite all the troubles and pleasures of prewar Paris, Bullitt remained seriously concerned with Soviet events. Along with other diplomats he received plenty of information about purges, arrests, and executions in the Soviet Union. Apart from greedy sympathizers like Joseph Davies, American and European envoys in Moscow had no illusions about these events. However, their superiors in Washington, London, or Paris found it difficult and even dangerous to acknowledge what was going on. Bullitt developed his own theory of Soviet terror that was as forward-looking as his other geopolitical ideas. He did not think Stalin was crazy at all; for Bullitt, he was the perfect tyrant—a ruthless but rational dictator. According to Bullitt, Stalin’s only domestic goal was to remain in power at any cost, and his only international goal was to expand his influence as far as he could, until he met credible resistance. There was so much discontent brewing in the Soviet Union that Stalin decided to eliminate any possible opposition leaders. The worse things became in Soviet agriculture, industry, and military development, the greater the internal suppression of political discontent.

In March 1939 Bullitt sent to Roosevelt a detailed and hugely important report about a top Nazi meeting. Otto von Habsburg, the last crown prince of Austria-Hungary, gave Bullitt his account of the meeting, painting a clear picture of Hitler’s intentions. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the prince said, Poland would follow. In 1940 and 1941 Germany planned to settle its accounts with France and England, which would probably mean the German occupation of their possessions in South America. Using these colonies as a base, Germany then planned to attack the United States and exterminate its “Jewish democracy.” Writing personally to Roosevelt, Bullitt expressed full confidence in the authenticity of the document.⁴⁴ In August 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact. The vocabulary of American diplomacy was soon enriched by the concept of the “totalitarian state,” which was used to refer to both Russia and Germany. From Paris Bullitt watched how his old friend and skillful opponent, Maxim Litvinov, lost his chair in the commissariat to one of the vicious fathers of the Soviet terror, Viacheslav Molotov. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had brought about the realization of Bullitt’s most fearsome predictions. His friend Anthony Biddle was then the American ambassador to Poland; together, they awaited the new division of Poland between the two predatory states. America remained neutral, so when the Germans intercepted correspondence between Bullitt and Biddle they used it to accuse the American diplomats of anti-German sentiment. After the occupation of Warsaw, Biddle remained the American ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile; residing in Paris, he continued to work with Bullitt on Polish problems. Both men were particularly interested in the mysterious fate of thousands of Polish officers who disappeared after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. In 1943 Biddle informed the American government about the full scale of the Soviet massacre in a location that became known as Katyn.

In the meantime Roosevelt was still enjoying Bullitt’s jokes. In 1939 he told Ickes about a telephone conversation in which Bullitt had said, “Mr. President, of course the English foreign office is listening to our conversation and we will have to be careful about what we say. You and I know that they are a bunch of pusillanimous, double-crossing, tricky people. . . . And undoubtedly the French foreign office is listening too. . . . You know that bunch too, they are just as bad as the English.” Roosevelt replied, “Well, Bill, I agree with everything you have said.” He was evidently delighted with this episode.⁴⁵

In Paris Bullitt met Walter Krivitsky, one of the first and perhaps most important in the long chain of NKVD “defectors,” former Russian intelligence agents who fled to the West and provided detailed information about Stalin’s methods, perpetrators, and victims. Krivitsky first joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and enjoyed an excellent career that culminated, twenty years later, in a covert posting in The Hague. A polyglot Galician Jew posing as an antiques dealer, Krivitsky coordinated Soviet intelligence throughout Western Europe. When purges of the Soviet army and NKVD began, Krivitsky and his colleagues were in danger; some were recalled to Moscow and never returned. In September 1937 Krivitsky’s friend and colleague Ignace Reiss refused to return to the USSR. He was soon killed in a Swiss village, leaving behind an open letter to Stalin that appeared in European newspapers. Having learned from Reiss’s mistake, Krivitsky did not hide in a remote canton but instead asked the French government and the American ambassador in France for help. Bullitt helped Krivitsky receive police protection and publish his story in the Paris newspapers; he also issued him an American visa and bought him a ticket to New York. Upon his arrival in the United States, Krivitsky got into trouble with immigration authorities, and Bullitt once again interfered. Krivitsky’s book, In Stalin’s Secret Service, caused a sensation in 1939. The signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact confirmed Krivitsky’s predictions. He testified in Congress and then worked with the British Secret Service; it was because of his help that MI5 eventually broke the spy ring of the “Cambridge Five.” In February 1941 Krivitsky was found dead in a Washington hotel. American police believed the cause of death was suicide, but few doubted that Krivitsky was killed by Soviet agents.

Based on the information he obtained from Krivitsky, Bullitt initiated an investigation against Alger Hiss, a State Department official close to Undersecretary Welles. When Bullitt informed the State Department and wrote to Roosevelt that Hiss was a Soviet spy, he pointed to evidence from Daladier and the French counter-intelligence. The State Department did not respond to this information, and Hiss continued his career. In 1944 Hiss was responsible for the institutional development of the future United Nations. Later, he was one of the key participants in the Yalta Conference, where he was officially responsible for the Middle and Far East but also prepared crucial documents on Poland that met the Soviet demands. In 1948 Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy and the editor of Time magazine, exposed Hiss in his testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. When Hiss was finally put on trial in the winter of 1949, the proceedings boosted public awareness about Soviet espionage and helped the careers of Congressman Richard Nixon and Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1952 Bullitt testified to Congress about the Hiss case; he was sure that Hiss was a spy. Convicted for perjury, Hiss served about four years in prison but died in his home. Since then, most experts believe that Hiss was a Soviet agent in the State Department throughout the fateful years from 1939 until 1947. Bullitt had been right again. The damage that Hiss’s activities inflicted upon Europe, America, and the United Nations has still not been entirely appreciated; many related documents remain classified.

In 1950 the leading liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published an essay in Look magazine titled “What Made Them Turn Red,” which characterized John Reed, Bullitt, and Hiss as members of the same political family. Enraged, Bullitt wrote a letter to Look accusing Schlesinger of “an attempt to whitewash various Soviet agents by use of my good name.” Bullitt insisted that both of his postings in Russia were part of his lifelong strategy to reduce the Soviet threat. Again, he appealed to the memory of Reed: “In 1921, I learned the truth about the last months of John Reed in the Soviet Union and his complete disillusionment. Reed was my friend. His widow became my wife. My alleged ‘glowing faith in the Soviet Union’ is an invention of your author, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.”⁴⁶

Bullitt also supported the defection of Victor Kravchenko, the Soviet Army captain who served in Washington for the procurement of war materials under Lend-Lease. In conversation with David Dallin, the Belarusian Menshevik who became the American economist (and coauthor, with Boris Nikolaevsky, of the remarkable book Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, published in 1947), Kravchenko spoke of his intention to remain in the United States. Dallin introduced Kravchenko to Bullitt who brought the defector to his childhood friend Francis Biddle, attorney general of the United States. In 1944 Kravchenko asked for political asylum. Soviet authorities demanded his extradition, and former ambassador Joseph Davies asked Roosevelt to agree to their request. However, the FBI was interested in Kravchenko, Roosevelt stayed firm, and Kravchenko remained in America. His 1946 book, I Chose Freedom, told the world about Soviet collectivization, terror, and the Gulag. Interestingly, Eugene Lyons, the left-wing journalist who in the mid-1930s in Moscow was Bullitt’s friend and Bulgakov’s translator, helped Kravchenko write his book in English. In 1949 the French Communist Party accused Kravchenko of defamation but lost the case in court. Forced to live in the United States under an assumed name, Kravchenko was found dead in his Manhattan apartment in 1966; as usual, the police deemed it a suicide.

At 2:50 in the morning of September 1, 1939, Bullitt woke Roosevelt up with a telephone call. Ringing from Paris he informed the president that German planes had bombed Warsaw and several German divisions had crossed the Polish border. “It started,” said Roosevelt. “God help us!” His secretary LeHand wrote Bullitt: “Everything is so horrible—apparently Hitler meant what he said about this ‘bloody’ war. It still seems like a nightmare from which I will soon awaken.”⁴⁷

Bullitt knew the war would become a world war. Seven days later, he wrote a letter to Roosevelt asking to be recalled from his post and given a place in the cabinet. He suggested Anthony Biddle to replace him in the Parisian embassy: “Tony is just as eager to get to work in Paris as I am to get to work in the United States, and I can promise you with my customary modesty that from my experience here, I know now more about how to get ready for war than anyone except yourself,” Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt. To start, Bullitt proposed “colossal purchases” of the best American aircraft—“at least ten thousand planes and fifteen thousand engines—none of which exist.” Without their superiority in the air, Bullitt wrote, France and Great Britain would lose the war. “The only road to salvation lies through a quadrupled production of planes in the United States.”⁴⁸ In organizing this production Bullitt saw his new role. “I honestly believe that I may be able to be of much more use in America during the next two years.”⁴⁹ He wanted to be secretary of war, or possibly secretary of the navy. But Roosevelt appointed two Republicans to positions, shaping a coalition cabinet. Bullitt remained in Paris asking Roosevelt, again and again, to send aircraft to France. In December 1939 Bullitt relayed to Washington the words of Daladier, who said the Germans would advance through Holland and Belgium. Their famous maneuver to bypass the Maginot Line was not actually such a surprise.

In November 1939 the Soviet Union attacked Finland. Over oysters with top diplomats in the League of Nations, Bullitt decided to launch an initiative to exclude the USSR from the league. Even the Finnish minister of foreign affairs did not believe the proposal would get the majority of votes in the league, but Bullitt urged him to present the proposal and convinced the French to support it. On December 14, 1939, the league expelled the Soviet Union. In March 1940 Bullitt took part in a scandalous exchange with Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador in London. After a meeting at the White House, Kennedy told reporters that Germany would soon win the war, while France and the United Kingdom would “go to hell.” Bullitt accused Kennedy of disloyalty to the president and advised him to “shut up.” In February 1940 Ickes saw Bullitt in Washington. “To my surprise, Bullitt does not want to go back to Paris. He would like a big job here. . . . So I said that I will tell the President that he [should] make Bullitt Secretary of War. This would suit Bill,” Ickes wrote in his diary.⁵⁰ A liberal and an ambitious New Dealer, Ickes liked Bullitt: “Bill is one of the most intelligent and talented people whom I know,” he wrote.⁵¹ He did suggest Bullitt for the position, but once more an appointment failed to materialize.

Bullitt was always in a rush, and Roosevelt was always late. The president was neither a philosopher nor a prophet, but the child and leader of his democratic age, and he was bound by many forces. Primary among them were Congress, public opinion, and lingering memories of the First World War. In May 1940 Nazi troops attacked France. Only after German tanks and bombs bypassed French fortifications, which Washington considered to be state-of-the-art defenses, did Roosevelt realize Bullitt was right: the defeat of the European allies would mean the domination of “totalitarian states” over Europe, a war in the Atlantic and a threat of German invasion of America. The American army was not prepared for war, but the navy had an excellent fleet, largely based in Hawaii. This fleet should have protected America from German cruisers. But what if, after conquering France and England, the Nazis took possession of European fleets and led their newly combined armada across the Atlantic? In May 1940 Roosevelt asked Bullitt to convince the French government to move its fleet from the Mediterranean Sea to Africa and the West Indies to ensure the Germans could not capture it. Bullitt was also instructed to start similar conversations with the British. In fact, after France surrendered, the French sailors sank several ships, while some fled to England and Egypt, and the British navy destroyed others. However, Bullitt successfully negotiated with the French government the evacuation of its gold reserves to America.

Ironically, Bullitt did not bring up the possibility of a Japanese attack on the United States, though the Far East was his favorite area to prophesize about. Even in December 1937 he wrote Roosevelt from Paris to say that a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union was likely, and that the prospect of a Japanese attack on the United States was nonsense. He advised the president to draw Japan into an arms race in the Pacific, thereby draining its resources and making it less likely to attack China; but of course China had already been attacked and would be attacked many times more.⁵²

Almost daily, Bullitt’s embassy cabled the State Department about bombings in central Paris. On June 3, 1940, Bullitt was attending a luncheon at the French Ministry of Aviation when a bomb fell through the ceiling less than ten feet from his head. The bomb failed to explode and Bullitt was unharmed. On another occasion the ambassador was drinking sherry with guests when an air raid began; according to an embassy cable it involved 155 bombers. Bullitt and his guests left the embassy to inspect the damage nearby and then returned to their glasses.⁵³ The embassy had a wine cellar that, though “not in the least bombproof,” was used during the attacks; Bullitt decorated it with Turkish and Bokharan rugs, so it was “the last word in Oriental style and comfort.” As he wrote to the president, “Our motto is: ‘We don’t mind being killed, but we won’t be annoyed.’” During the bombings Bullitt wrote fascinating letters to Roosevelt, skillfully mixing requests and gossip. Most modest among his requests to the president was the shipment of twelve machine guns to help defend the embassy, and this was granted. During the war Bullitt often became impatient in conversation with his bosses. “You cannot tolerate today the incompetence of any individual[s] or organizations which [are] preventing supplies from reaching dying French men, women and children,” he wrote to the secretary of state.⁵⁴

The Germans were approaching Paris faster than anyone had expected. Secretary of State Hull asked Bullitt to help his friend Prime Minister Paul Reynaud to evacuate the government, the navy, and the remains of the army to North Africa. The staff of all foreign embassies left the city. On June 9, 1940, Roosevelt ordered Bullitt to leave the city and follow the French government, wherever it went.

Bullitt refused to leave Paris, telling Roosevelt of his decision in the most dramatic letter of his career. “This may be the last letter that I shall have a chance to send you before the communications are cut. . . . No American ambassador in Paris has ever run away from anything, and I think that is the best tradition that we have. . . . I shall do my best to save as many lives as possible and to keep the flag flying,” he wrote. Indeed, American ambassadors had remained in Paris during the French Revolution, the Prussian occupation of 1870, and the German offensive of 1914.⁵⁵

Comparing the German offensive with the Franco-Prussian War, the French government expected the Communist uprising to begin before the Germans even entered Paris. It was poor foresight, but Bullitt bought this logic and passed it along to Roosevelt on April 30. “The moment the French government leaves Paris the Communists of the industrial suburbs will seize the city, and will be permitted to murder, loot and burn for several days before the Germans come in,” he telegrammed the president. “After the first shock and disorder, a stern, cruel but orderly German regime will be installed.” The United States was still a neutral country, but Bullitt expected he would nevertheless be arrested or forcibly isolated by the invading army. The German regime “will in one way or another prevent me from having contacts with anyone,” he wrote. Still, he briefed Roosevelt about the potential escape routes through Italy, Finland, and even Siberia. He still hoped to get a position in Roosevelt’s administration. “If the calm of death descends on Paris I should like to be in very active life trying to prepare the USA for Hitler’s attack on the Americas that I consider absolutely certain.” Bullitt’s fantasy was that while he was busy fighting for law and order in the Parisian underground, Roosevelt would proclaim him a hero, make him secretary of state, and demand the Germans release him out of respect for the office. “I think the wisest course for you would be simply to announce my appointment, and inform the German government that you desire my return to the United States to be facilitated.” Finally, he composed something like a provisionary farewell: “In case I should get blown up before I see you again, . . . I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your friendship.”⁵⁶

The president and the State Department responded with a series of cables ordering Bullitt to evacuate the embassy. He refused, and after deliberations, on June 11, 1940, Roosevelt telegraphed Bullitt to offer his support wherever he was. Roosevelt’s words betray his unease: “No authority can be given to you to act as a representative of the French government or local government, but, again, being on the spot, you will, as a red-blooded American, do what you can to save human life.” Responding to this extraordinary permission, Bullitt wrote that he had never run away from danger: “If I should leave Paris now I would be no longer myself.”⁵⁷ Antony Biddle, Bullitt’s friend and ambassador to Poland, followed the French government as acting envoy of the United States.

On June 12, two days before the German entry into the capital, the French government asked Bullitt to become acting mayor of Paris, as they put it. The government had left Paris in a panic, declaring it an “open city,” but Bullitt insisted that the police and fire departments should remain. That same day, he attended a service at Notre Dame; people saw him weeping as he prayed. There was no Communist uprising, but while German troops were entering Paris they were shot at in the proletarian district of Saint-Denis. The commander of the 10th Army, General von Küchler, who had recently leveled Rotterdam, ordered his artillery and aviation units to bomb the city. Bullitt was able to contact his colleague in Berlin, Ambassador Hugh Wilson, who insisted the Germans respect the “open city” status. Paris was not shelled.

On June 14, 1940, a column of German troops entered a deserted Paris. They chose Hotel Crillon for their headquarters; decades earlier, it had housed the American delegation during the Paris Peace Conference. Bullitt sent two of his attachés there in full military uniform. They presented themselves at the entrance to the Crillon and were directed to von Küchler’s office. Having been treated to the best cognac the hotel had, the attachés called Bullitt and connected him to Küchler. They arranged a meeting, at which they discussed the safety of the embassy and property of Americans in Paris; there were still twenty-five hundred American citizens in the city. Küchler invited Bullitt and his two attachés to the German military parade, which was held the same day at Place de la Concorde. The Americans did not accept this honor. The embassy issued hundreds of certificates guaranteeing the safety of the homes and businesses belonging to Americans in Paris, and the Germans respected these certificates.

On June 16, the incredibly swift Jean Monnet produced a startling proposal for French-British union, which would entail joint defense, foreign, and financial policies. Having negotiated the details of the project, De Gaulle and (after some hesitation) Churchill signed on to the idea. “The two governments declare that France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations but one.” Marshal Pétain buried the plan, arguing that, given the circumstances, a union with Great Britain would be like marrying a corpse.⁵⁸ Two days after leaving Paris, the Reynaud government fell and Pétain became prime minister. After some intrigue, he prevented the French cabinet and Senate from departing to the residences that had been prepared for the government-in-exile in Morocco. Instead, the government moved to Vichy.

Bullitt’s role in these events was often discussed in counterfactual terms. Secretary of State Hull thought that, if Bullitt had only left with the government to Bordeaux, he could have prevented the debacle of Vichy. De Gaulle wrote the same thing in his memoirs, suggesting that, if Bullitt had been in Bordeaux at the critical moment when the Reynaud government fell, he could have done more for France than what he did in Paris. Robert Murphy, a career diplomat and adviser to the US embassy, argued that Bullitt saved Paris by influencing Reynaud’s decision to declare Paris an “open city” and evacuate the army while leaving the police and fire brigades in place. Kennan also considered Bullitt’s decision to stay in Paris as his “great service”: in persuading the Parisian police to remain in the city, Bullitt helped the city survive. Paris would have been doomed if Bullitt had not dissuaded the French Cabinet from pursuing its original plan to fight the Nazis street by street, house by house.

Bullitt left Paris for Vichy two weeks later, on June 30, for meetings with Pétain and his ministers. “Their physical and moral defeat has been so absolute that they have accepted completely for France the fate of becoming a province of Nazi Germany,” he wrote to the secretary of state. The British would soon suffer the same fate, President Lebrun told him, and then it would be the turn of the United States. “It seems that you wish to become Germany’s favorite province,” Bullitt told Admiral Darlan. “The simple people of the country are as fine as they have ever been. The upper classes have failed completely,” he wrote Hull about the failure of France.⁵⁹

One American, Charles Glass, recalled seeing Bullitt in Vichy. Impeccably dressed, Bullitt emerged from a black limousine and “looked so dashing and neat, just like the hero in the million-dollar picture, compared with all those who ogled him,” Glass wrote.⁶⁰ The American ambassador attended a meeting of the National Assembly on July 10, when it gathered in a theater to confirm that the government should not go to North Africa to fight against the Nazis but should instead stay in Vichy and cooperate with the Germans. “The death of the French Republic was drab, undignified, and painful,” Bullitt wrote. France had become a “new fascist state,” and Bullitt proposed severing diplomatic relations. “The last scene of the tragedy . . . was well placed in a theater.”⁶¹ On July 15, 1940, Bullitt traveled to Lisbon and from there flew home to the States.

Upon his return Bullitt found himself in the same dubious position that had become familiar to him since his resignation in 1918. With good reason, he considered himself a war hero, the man who saved Paris. But his enemies knew he was an official who did not execute orders from his superiors. In August 1940, Bullitt gave a speech to the Philosophical Society in Philadelphia—the same venue where another ambassador, Thomas Jefferson, had delivered his famous speech telling America about the French Revolution. Playing a little historical game, Bullitt sent a draft of his speech to Roosevelt and signed the cover letter “Thomas Jefferson,” addressing Roosevelt as “George Washington.”⁶²

America was in danger, finding itself in the same situation that France had been in a year ago, he said. Dictators were always convinced that democracies would respond much too late, Bullitt argued. For the United States, the defeat of the British fleet would have the same effect as the bypassing of the Maginot Line had for France. If America did not go to war, war would come to America. According to Bullitt’s calculations, if Germany conquered Great Britain the total strength of their combined navies would be five times larger than the American fleet. In Philadelphia, Bullitt called for the mobilization of the industrial sector for the war effort and demanded military conscription. “Bullitt’s speech was simply terrific spoken in a kind of white passion. . . . There is naturally an isolationist outcry of ‘warmonger, near-traitor! etc.,’” Isaiah Berlin said of his address.⁶³

Roosevelt and Sumner Welles approved the speech, and it made a splash. Bullitt, however, felt betrayed. Roosevelt had promised to give a follow-up speech that would further develop Bullitt’s arguments, but the president did no such thing. The isolationists in Congress were stronger than ever. Still, in September, Roosevelt decided to send fifty old warships to England in exchange for the use of naval bases in three British colonies, a modest scheme that would grow into the colossal Land-Lease deal a few years later. Signed in September 1940 and prepared largely by Bullitt, this destroyers-for-bases deal was a milestone in the US policy.⁶⁴

In November Bullitt resigned, and Roosevelt accepted his resignation in January 1941. The president offered him the place of the ambassador in London, a strategic position for the moment. Again, “Bill Buddha” wanted more.