14
As the world was rushing toward a new war, conflicts worsened within the State Department. European and Russian experts found themselves at odds with the Latin American specialists who dominated the department. The Nazis were the enemy, but the Soviets were the problem. European experts at State saw the Soviet Union as a serious and potentially dangerous challenge, a murderous regime with unpredictable foreign policy objectives. Experts on the Americas saw the USSR as a distant but friendly country, viewing “Uncle Joe” (as the Americans called Stalin) as just another friendly dictator and potential ally. For a while Secretary of State Cordell Hull, a generalist, balanced the two groups. Still, he did not trust the Russian experts because what they said just did not make sense. In 1938 Hull summoned Kennan to find out what had happened to the American Communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union. Thousands of American citizens from Minnesota, New York, and Chicago had left the country to help build socialism in the USSR, where they disappeared without a trace. Kennan, who had seen some of these people in Moscow, knew perfectly well where they ended up: in the Soviet prisons, forced labor camps, and mass graves. But he could not explain that to the bewildered secretary of state. Hull would not believe that any group, even the Russian Communists, could act so irrationally as to eliminate their own supporters. To his despair Kennan saw that producing the facts was destroying Hull’s trust in him and his fellow experts.1 British diplomats who knew Russia well also felt isolated. Reader Bullard, the UK consul in Leningrad, wrote in his diary that he would have liked to devise a special punishment for people who induced others to move to Soviet Russia.2
The East European Division of the State Department was closed down when a distant cousin of Roosevelt’s, Sumner Welles, became deputy secretary of state. Robert F. Kelly, the head of the division, was a knowledgeable analyst of Soviet affairs who trained Kennan and Bohlen in Riga before Bullitt opened the embassy in Moscow. Most of his experts had previously worked at the American embassy in Moscow, where they had firsthand experience of Soviet socialism. Their anti-Stalinist reports were very different from Ambassador Davies’s enthusiastic dispatches.
It was 1937, the peak of terror in the Soviet Union and a crucial moment in European politics. Bullitt protested Welles’s appointment. Taking it personally, he interpreted it as a step forward in Welles’s fight against his friend Walton Moore, who oversaw the European affairs; but he also knew of the ideological differences between these two influential figures and their groups, which would define American foreign policy for years to come.3 An expert in Latin America, Welles purged Moore’s friends, the “Russian experts” and other free-minded intellectuals in the State Department. Bullitt suspected Welles of sympathizing with European dictators such as Mussolini.4 Welles also supported Roosevelt’s idea that the Soviet Union was a progressive state, and that personal friendship with Stalin would mitigate any difficulties with the Soviets. Kennan later wrote that the closure of the East European Division was the result of Soviet influence at the highest reaches of the government. With bitter irony Kennan expressed his surprise that Senator McCarthy did not reveal those who closed the East European Division. In his usually balanced memoirs, Kennan did not name these internal enemies whom he declared Soviet spies.
For the rest of their lives Bullitt’s and Kennan’s firsthand experience of “Russia’s degradation” under Stalin defined their political ideas and personal choices; in the 1940s, this experience made them different from their colleagues in Washington. Kennan wrote that, in Moscow, these “hammer-blow impressions, each more outrageous and heartrending than the other” had such an impact on his judgment that he felt at odds with official thinking in Washington “for at least a decade thereafter.”5 When Isaiah Berlin, an Oxford philosopher seconded to the British embassy in Washington, befriended Charles Bohlen, he found out that Bohlen was “still pretty touchy about Russia, like everyone who has sat there, particularly with Bullitt.”6 Cosmopolitan, competent, and endowed with the tragic sense of history, Bullitt and his fellow Russian experts did not fit into the new framework of international relations. While many American generals and admirals felt at home in the expanses of Europe, Africa, and the Pacific, many American diplomats continued to see the world as shaped by the Monroe Doctrine and the Good Neighbor Policy.
In May 1940, immediately after the German invasion of the Netherlands, Harry Hopkins became Roosevelt’s personal representative for European affairs. An experienced administrator, he had created the system of social support that was central to the New Deal, but he had no international experience whatsoever. Theoretically, Hopkins sympathized with socialist ideas and liked the Soviet Union. Bullitt wrote later, in 1948, about Hopkins’s “infinite ignorance in foreign affairs.” Hopkins based his decisions on wishful thinking—“a sheer ostrich infantilism,” as Bullitt wrote, which was “the most fatal vice in international affairs.” Still, these optimistic wishes were what American democracy needed at that moment. “All Americans wanted to believe that the Soviet Union was what Harry Hopkins said it was,” Bullitt wrote in Life magazine. His message was clear: in wartime politics, Hopkins had won the position Bullitt believed was his own.7
In October 1940 Ickes again suggested to Roosevelt that he should make Bullitt his secretary of state. “I cannot do that. He talked too much, and is too quick on the trigger,” said the president.8 Indeed, the differences between Bullitt, who thought Stalin and Hitler were “the twin princes of darkness,” and Hopkins, Welles, and Davies were serious and increasing. In April 1941, Bullitt published an extended essay, “What Next?” in Life magazine. It is a remarkable document of the forgotten political world that briefly emerged in the period between the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. France was defeated, the United States was neutral, the Soviet Union was Hitler’s ally, and Great Britain alone fought against the triumphal Germany. “Hitler will not stop. He can only be stopped,” Bullitt wrote. If Great Britain should be conquered, he warned, the United States would be in danger of immediate attack by the combined forces of the German and British navy. Hitler would first strike in South America, taking the continent country by country. “If Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America as far north as the Equator should be in the hands of the dictators, we would be completely encircled,” and nine-tenths of mankind would be mobilized against America. Bullitt’s conclusion was that America had to realize war was imminent; the nation had to mobilize everything possible—its navy, industry, and people—for the sake of victory. America’s military efforts were terribly delayed, though “no government in the world was so fully informed with regard to relations between Stalin and Hitler as the American government.” According to Bullitt, American diplomats—not the spies—warned of the forthcoming pact between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany as early as the end of 1934; they also warned about the later attack on the Soviet Union.9
When the German-Soviet war started in the summer of 1941, Bullitt published another essay in Life magazine, urging Roosevelt to send aid to Stalin, but to do it only on the condition of Stalin’s “formal, written, public pledges” to respect prewar boundaries and to commit to “the formation of the confederation of the European states.”10 These conditions were very different from the American wartime policy of unconditional support of the Soviet Union. It was true that Bullitt knew infinitely more about the enemies and allies than Hopkins. But Roosevelt’s strategy of giving all and any possible support to the Soviet Union did lead to victory in the Second World War. Securing the gigantic transfer of arms and equipment to the USSR through Lend-Lease, Hopkins’s shuttle diplomacy helped the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain win the war. The same strategy also led to the Yalta Conference, Soviet control over Eastern and Central Europe, the bloody revolution in China, and the Cold War.
Things were changing fast, and now Bullitt could not keep up with the intuitive Roosevelt. On July 1, 1941, a week after the start of the German-Soviet war, Bullitt told the president that although the policy of supporting anyone fighting against Hitler was sound, he did not think the Soviet Union would be able to withstand the attack. And if the Nazis were able to procure vast Soviet resources, they would catch up with America in oil, steel, and other materials. America needed to develop its military industry faster than the Germans could develop their military industry on Soviet territory, Bullitt argued.11 Always personal, he blamed Roosevelt’s opposing opinion on the manipulation of Sumner Welles, his old enemy in the State Department. But the main cause of Roosevelt’s increasing estrangement ran deeper. Bullitt’s political principles and experience in Moscow put him at odds with Roosevelt’s pragmatic policies. “When our government began in 1941 to treat the Soviet Union as a ‘peace-loving democracy’ instead of a predatory totalitarian tyranny, it made one of the most disastrous errors in the history of the United States,” Bullitt wrote later. Bullitt and Roosevelt “were at opposite poles in their views of Stalin,” Orville Bullitt, his brother and historiographer, stated.12
In June 1941 Roosevelt’s secretary of twenty years, Margaret LeHand, had a stroke, and the president was left without her service. From the surviving letters it is clear that she was still in love with Bullitt, but his feelings for her turned into friendship. If Roosevelt connected her premature illness with her unhappy engagement, that could be another reason for his disappointment in Bullitt. Margaret was left partially paralyzed and lived with a full-time nurse in Somerville, Massachusetts. In several letters Bullitt asked her to join him on his Ashfield farm. Dictating her letters to the nurse, Margaret refused. She died three years later.
According to Ickes, Bullitt lunched with Roosevelt in early June 1941 and insisted that the United States should enter the war. “Bill said that if Roosevelt waited too long, he would go down in history as the man who by his failure to act had destroyed American civilization as we know it.” Ickes agreed with Bullitt that the president was “too sure in his sense of timing.” After the German attack on the Soviet Union, Ickes telephoned Bullitt to ask him what he thought would happen next. Bullitt was pessimistic. The Russian army was composed of peasant soldiers who could not fight a mechanized war, he said. During the rapid retreat of the Red Army from the Western borders of the Soviet Union, Bullitt even believed that some Soviet generals were on Hitler’s payroll.13
Roosevelt did not want to involve Bullitt in talks that concerned American relations with Britain and the Soviet Union, but they continued their lunches and correspondence. Laying out his wartime philosophy in his letters to Roosevelt, Bullitt saw the Second World War as “an immense opportunity” for the States because it could make America the “dominant political power” in the world. The Allies ought to be supported to the extent that they were useful, he argued, and suggested several conditions for Lend-Lease that he wanted Stalin to accept. The USSR had to agree to guarantee the eastern boundary of Europe as it existed in August 1939, before the double invasion of Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviets also had to agree to a postwar confederation of European states and promise to make no demands on China. In their correspondence, Roosevelt agreed with Bullitt, but he also believed Stalin was willing to help him. “If I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him to return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything.” In response, Bullitt reminded Roosevelt that “when he talked of noblesse oblige he was not speaking of the Duke of Norfolk but of a Caucasian bandit whose only thought when he got something for nothing was that the other fellow was the ass.”14 The situation was more complex. Roosevelt’s real fear was that Bullitt’s carrot-and-stick policy would force Stalin to strike a separate deal between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, a sort of new Brest-Litovsk that would strengthen the Nazis. Bullitt responded that a separate pact between Russia and Germany was impossible because Stalin would never again trust Hitler, who betrayed their previous pact. It was a crucial point, and there was no way to verify it.
In November 1941, Roosevelt offered Bullitt a new and challenging mission. The president wanted a clear picture of what was happening in North Africa and the Middle East. The British troops were fighting the Nazis close to the holy sites and oil fields of Arabia and Palestine, but it was unclear where American interests should lie in the region. Bullitt’s mission to Northern Africa would be a deeply personal endeavor. The president “wanted the sort of report that would make him feel as though he had been there himself. . . . He stated that he wished this trip to be made for him and for him alone,” Bullitt wrote after another lunch at the White House. The two men also discussed Sumner Welles; Roosevelt “flatly” said that Welles would do everything to knife Bullitt in the back, and he promised to prevent any such behavior.15 Bullitt agreed to the mission with a view that, upon his return, he could organize “appropriate action to carry out” his recommendations in Washington. He was still angling for a top position in the Roosevelt administration.
In November 1941 Bullitt was appointed personal representative of the president of the United States in the Near East with the rank of ambassador. “Reposing special faith and confidence” in Bullitt, Roosevelt asked him to go to Northern Africa and then to India, Burma, and the Dutch East Indies.16 In a telegram to Churchill, Roosevelt asked him to assist “my old friend Bill Bullitt” with his new mission. On his way to Egypt, Bullitt learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The British governor of Trinidad told him the news and did not hide his joy that America would join the Allied powers. Bullitt’s response was quite different; he later wrote that the blindness of American democracy made the Japanese attack so unexpected and disastrous: “All democracies find it hard to face unpleasant facts and prefer to cling to happy illusions until they are hit on the head as we were at Pearl Harbor. But if democracies do not act in time . . . they are obliged finally to resort to the most costly form of defense—war.”17 With America now at war, Bullitt set about surveying the situation in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt. He warned that Hitler could send several divisions from the Russian front to Turkey to secure Middle Eastern oil and recommended that the United States send reinforcements to Egypt, where some American troops were already stationed. General Marshall confirmed Bullitt’s concerns, and Roosevelt seemed pleased with the report. Bullitt traveled in the region for about a month, and he was clearly in a rush to return to Washington. The trip was as successful as it could be, and Roosevelt wanted him to return for a follow-up. But Bullitt refused: he was waiting for a position in the wartime administration.
Still striving to take part in the war, in June 1942 Bullitt became a special assistant to the secretary of the navy, a position that was not so different from the one he had left more than twenty years earlier. In this modest role, he flew to Europe to see Churchill and de Gaulle, and discussed a possible invasion in Africa with General Eisenhower. Bullitt recommended that Jean Monnet head the civil administration of the occupied areas. He counted the German submarine arsenal and advised Roosevelt to liberate Edouard Herriot, the former French prime minister imprisoned by the Vichy regime. He wrote drafts of propaganda booklets that the Americans were disseminating among troops landing in Africa. But Roosevelt kept him away from more important diplomatic talks, and Bullitt was not involved in the Anglo-American meetings in Casablanca and Cairo.
In November 1942 Roosevelt asked Bullitt for advice about organizing civil administrations in American-occupied territories in Europe. Bullitt unexpectedly used the opportunity to tell the president how to wage war and build peace. In a series of letters Bullitt outlined his vision of postwar Europe, focusing on the Soviet threat. These letters foreshadowed Cold War rhetoric, summed up Bullitt’s Soviet experience, and applied what he had learned in Moscow to the new realities of the Second World War. The third and most important of these letters, from January 29, 1943, suggested that Roosevelt start new conversations with Stalin about “an integrated, democratic Europe.” Again, Bullitt’s political thinking about the future of the Pacific, North Africa, or even France led to new, grand-scale speculations about Russia. “The Russians are an immensely endowed people, physically strong, intellectually gifted, emotionally rich. The Ukrainians are even more gifted than the Russians. They were overcome by the Russians by force of numbers. The Russians win their battles both in the field and in bed. No race on earth, not even the German, has shown such burgeoning energy.”18
We may all admire the courage of the Soviet soldiers, Bullitt explained, but Stalin had not changed. The wishful thinkers argued that in the course of war Stalin had become a Russian nationalist; but Russian nationalism had never been peaceful, Bullitt explained. “The extraordinary valor with which the peoples of the Soviet Union have fought against the Nazis has rendered the Russians so popular in both the United States and Great Britain that all possible virtues are being attributed to the Soviet government.” For Bullitt, it was nothing more than “a warm sentimental wave of enthusiasm” and “wishful thinking.” The Soviet Union was still a totalitarian dictatorship with no freedom of speech, press, or religion; fear of the secret services was universal. America was in a practical alliance with the Soviets, but it was also committed to democracy in Europe. America fought the war to prevent Nazi domination of Europe and could not allow the victory to result in Soviet domination on the continent. After the defeat of Germany, Bullitt forecasted, the Soviet state would begin to show its aggressive nature, and the United States would have to confront this just as it had previously confronted the Nazis. According to his prediction, Stalin would try to annex Russia’s neighboring states using his favorite method of staging revolutions across Europe. Bullitt came up with an almost accurate list of fifteen European states that would fall under Soviet domination without American intervention, but he was particularly concerned about Poland. As long as the Soviet Union remained dependent on American aid, however, the president could protect Europe from postwar Soviet aggression. Bullitt wanted Roosevelt to urge Stalin to make war on Japan and respect the prewar boundaries in Europe. Bullitt also wanted Roosevelt “to get Churchill to work for an integrated Europe.” Bullitt believed that as long as the world was in war, Roosevelt was in a position to get these public commitments from Stalin and Churchill. He also proposed an “immediate order to Hull to reorganize the Department of State” (For the President, 585). As a military strategy, Bullitt proposed landing US troops in Greece and Turkey instead of northern France. Having fought their way through the Balkans and Romania, the soldiers would rid Hungary, Austria, and Poland of Germans, and then they would arrive in the Baltic to finalize US control over Central and Eastern Europe. Having taken Europe from the south, American troops would contain the USSR within its prewar borders. Had Stalin not accepted this strategy, Bullitt recommended focusing on Japan and delaying the landing in Europe (590).
These letters to Roosevelt unveiled Bullitt’s idea of a united Europe—a project he had been presenting to Roosevelt continuously since 1937, when he saw in this project “the only chance, . . . the slim one” to save peace. Then he hoped that the “sweeping proposal” would come from Blum, and it would be “some scheme that would be little short of the proposal for the unification of Europe.”19 Later, during the war, Bullitt argued that after the defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan, it would be necessary to ensure that Europe turned into a single, powerful, and integrated state. Only a united Europe could take part in ruling the world on a level playing field with the United States, Great Britain, the USSR, and China. Moreover, only a united Europe could stop the spread of communism, which would grow stronger after Soviet victory over Hitler. It was a pioneering but clear program of European unification. “An integrated democratic Europe, pacific but armed, is a vital element for the creation of world peace. How can such a Europe be achieved?” (585). Bullitt sought the disarmament of Germany and Italy and the destruction of their military industries. He also envisioned that a democratic Europe would eventually include those two states as equals and facilitate their reconstruction. He acknowledged that the Soviet Union could not be disarmed, and precisely for that reason, united Europe had to be strong and powerful. Bullitt wrote that “an Anglo-Saxon armed dictatorship over all the earth” was a bad idea; instead, he forecasted a confrontation between continental Europe, integrated into one state, and the Soviet Union (585). He believed that in such a world, the United States and Great Britain would serve as outside arbiters; in case of trouble, they would provide economic and military help to the newly unified Europe. This balance of power would be in the interest of Great Britain and the United States, he wrote, as it would stabilize relations between integrated Europe and the Soviet Union.
Referencing the League of Nations’ failure to keep the peace after the First World War, Bullitt proposed to start working on European integration while the war was still going on. It was necessary to get the Allies to sign on to the idea of a united Europe while the USSR and Great Britain were still thoroughly dependent on America. After the war ended, the Soviet Union would do everything to prevent the unification of Europe, Bullitt wrote. The position of England with regard to the European project was not clear, and he suggested that Roosevelt should discuss the idea with Churchill.
In the midst of the war, Bullitt proposed getting the Allies to publicly consent, in exchange for continued American aid, to building a united Europe that would include both winners and losers of the war. American allies had to provide guarantees that “the states of Europe are not to be over-run and are not to be placed in tutelage in British and Soviet spheres of influence.” If either or both the United Kingdom and the USSR failed to give such public assurances, Bullitt recommended pivoting American military planning from Europe to Asia. Only the “explicit engagements” of both allies would give America “the decisive voice in the settlement in Europe” after the war (592). As a diplomatic strategy, Bullitt advised Roosevelt to get verbal consent for building a united Europe first from Churchill and then from Stalin. He suggested starting these talks sooner rather than later, because the defeat of Germany would diminish America’s most persuasive bargaining chip, military aid. Moreover, he advised the whole State Department to focus on pursuing this entirely new task of postwar settlement.
A united Europe was a radical idea well beyond the horizon of American policy-makers. For Bullitt, however, it was an essential part of the postwar world. Both the Soviet Union and Great Britain had to “agree explicitly” to the “American” project for Europe, which was, for Bullitt, a crucial step toward worldwide coordination of peace efforts. “Europe is to be organized as a democratic unit which will take its place along with the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and China as one of the great guarantors of world peace,” Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt (585).
The president did not respond to this semi-official letter from the assistant to the secretary of the navy; he probably replied in a personal conversation, and his response was negative. Moreover, it seems that this particular letter from January 29, 1943—a letter that contained an alternative strategy of American landing in Europe, a project of united Europe, a list of countries that were under threat of the Soviet interference or annexation, and an advice to reorganize the Department of State—forever distanced Bullitt and Roosevelt, even more than their political disagreement about Stalin or their personal conflict about Welles. To the president, focused on the routine of global war, Bullitt’s ideas sounded haughty and untimely, even utopian. Having promised Stalin that he would open the second front in Europe and then delaying the landing in France, Roosevelt sought to maintain the combat capability of Soviet and British troops with generous American supplies. Stalin had his own ways to express his discontent with the delay of the second front. Despite receiving vast amounts of American military aid, Stalin did not allow US pilots to use Soviet airfields in the Far East because of the Soviet neutrality toward Japan. American pilots shot down by Japanese forces who managed to escape to Soviet territory were kept in forced labor camps. Stalin’s behavior was unworthy of an ally, but Roosevelt tolerated it because he did not wish to ignite the slightest conflict with Stalin. Bullitt’s recommendations on the two most significant issues of the moment—relations with key allies and the strategic direction of the American offensive—were completely opposed to Roosevelt’s plans. In early 1943 Bullitt’s foresight was unsurpassed, unexpected, and probably incomprehensible. Roosevelt had asked him for a proposal regarding civil administration on the occupied territories; what he got was a treatise on the open future.
At the end of the war James Forrestal, who would soon become secretary of the navy, played golf with Joseph Kennedy, ambassador to Great Britain and father of a future president. According to Forrestal’s account of the outing, Kennedy said that, after the German invasion of Poland, France and Britain would not have declared war against Germany if the United States had not encouraged them to do so. It was Bullitt who pulled Roosevelt into the war against the Germans, convincing him that Hitler was an enemy of Western democracy. If America had not entered the war, Kennedy said, the Nazis would have seized the USSR, and Great Britain would have remained neutral. In response, Forrestal asked what Kennedy thought the Germans would do after they conquered Russia? We do not know Kennedy’s answer—they were playing golf, after all.20
In May 1944, five weeks before D-day, Bullitt applied to enroll in the army. In an official response John McCloy, assistant to the secretary of war, asked Bullitt to withdraw his application. As Bullitt wrote their conversation, McCloy said, “my knowledge of the French situation was so great and my influence on the French so large that no matter the rank I might have I would, within a month, actually be running relations with France.” McCloy also told Bullitt that the president wanted to personally handle all matters of policy toward France, without receiving advice from anyone. Bullitt replied that he simply wanted to fight and that he would agree to any military role, even as a chauffeur. McCloy told him it would not work; even as a chauffeur, Bullitt would soon be “running the entire show.” Roosevelt said that he “knew all about France,” and McCloy told Bullitt that the president forbade Secretary of War Henry Stimson from making any decision with regard to France without his consent. As a result, the desk in the Oval Office was “filled with directives concerning French” that awaited Roosevelt’s consent “at the crucial moment before the invasion.” An additional problem for France, according to McCloy, was the fact that Roosevelt was opposed to everything that came from de Gaulle and Jean Monnet. “The truth was,” McCloy told Bullitt, “the President hated de Gaulle personally.” Isaiah Berlin, who had British sources, also noted that Roosevelt’s administration did not believe that de Gaulle represented France and did not “want to mortgage the future by supporting him.”21 McCloy promised to talk with Roosevelt about Bullitt once again, but he also told Bullitt that Roosevelt “was gradually disintegrating as did all men who held great power for too long.”22 McCloy knew what he was talking about: over the course of his career, McCloy served five American presidents.
Roosevelt was ready to make concessions, and he did so with Stalin in Yalta in February 1945. At the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt produced a draft for a new international organization, which inherited many features of the League of Nations. Roosevelt was as physically weak in Yalta as Wilson had been in Paris. Bullitt had warned both presidents, Wilson and Roosevelt, and he was right both times: after defeating the enemy, America had to use its might to win the peace. In Yalta, Roosevelt continued to pursue friendship with Stalin, but just a month later he accused Stalin of disrespecting their joint decisions on Poland and Germany.
In the meantime Bullitt made another extraordinary decision. In a letter to his old friend Charles de Gaulle, he offered his services to the French army. On May 25, 1944, General de Gaulle replied from Algeria: “Come now! Good and dear American friend! Our ranks are open to you. You will return with us into wounded Paris.”23 Bullitt became a commandant (major) in the French army and served in the headquarters of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, one of the best of the French commanders. Together with de Lattre, Bullitt landed in the south of France in August 1944, fought in the Vosges through the autumn, and liberated Alsace in January 1945. He accompanied de Lattre to the front, interpreted for him, and was responsible for disseminating propaganda behind enemy lines. De Lattre was known as a great strategist, but he also went into the front line “constantly” and always brought Bullitt along, as he reported to his brother—“so that I have a chance to be in the scrap both at the planning end and the execution.” It was Bullitt’s moment of redemption. In a revealing letter from the front, he compared his 1944 experience in France with his 1919 experience in Russia: “Nothing since 1919 has given me so much satisfaction as the job I am doing now, and I haven’t felt so well in twenty years.”24 As an ambassador of a great power who became an officer in the army of his host country, Bullitt had no predecessors and, to date, no followers.
He enjoyed his service for France, a country he loved second after his own. The discipline in de Lattre’s army was harsh and the conditions difficult, but the chef was excellent, and Bullitt was responsible for the wine cellar. There was no shower, and he could wash only during his rare visits to American troops. But Bullitt admired de Lattre, who was “taut, intense, intuitive”—all high praise in Bullitt’s vocabulary.25 Accompanying de Lattre, Bullitt was in the middle of the battles at Toulon and Marseille and took part in many village and mountain attacks: “saw a lot of the real thing at distances of a few yards,” he wrote in a letter. He used this word—“real”—as the key to his new experience: “I have been able to be of some real service at various times,” he wrote to his brother. In December 1944 they were stuck in the Vosges, and de Lattre lamented the low morale of his army: “The general impression is that the nation has neglected, has abandoned us.”26 Bullitt was then “Chef de la Section d’Action sur le Morale de l’Ennemi,” responsible for the propaganda among the Nazi troops; but he was clearly important for the morale of the French soldiers. On January 5, 1945, de Lattre formed the Second Shock Battalion, which had Bullitt’s initials, WB, and the Philadelphia Liberty Bell on its tricolor flag. The battalion song included a couplet about Bullitt:
Commandant William Bullitt
Is the godfather of the battalion,
He is the man who understands our journey,
His big heart we thank,
When we shout: forward, forward!27
In October 1944 Bullitt went to Paris to open the gates of the embassy he had left four years ago, a dramatic gesture. In a French uniform, he mounted the balcony to survey the Place de la Concorde, and Parisians burst into applause. Bullit joked that they probably mistook him for General Eisenhower, who was just as bald.28 But the war was still going on, and on December 18, 1944, he wrote to his brother, again predicting the future: “The Boches are still fighting like tigers and will have to be beaten in field after field and that will not be a short job, but I think that six or eight months ought to cover it—unless there is some sort of catastrophe.”29 In January, Bullitt was seriously injured in a car accident in Alsace. He damaged his left leg, hip, and ribs, and this injury was to plague him for the rest of his life. He was sent to an American hospital in Paris. His old friend and longtime secretary, Carmel Offie, who was now deputy political adviser at Allied Force Headquarters in Italy, visited him; Bullitt asked for books on foreign affairs and history. Later Bullitt returned to the front and remained with General de Lattre until the end of the war. On the day the French entered Baden-Baden, de Lattre publicly spoke of appointing Bullitt as governor of the city; apparently it was a joke. On July 14, 1945, the French army held a victory parade in Paris, reviewed by General de Gaulle. At the head of the parade that marched up the Champs-Elysées were the cars of de Lattre along with his best officers, Bullitt among them. Bullitt returned to the United States later in July, decorated with high French honors—the Croix de Guerre with palm and the Legion of Honor.
He returned to his apple farm in Massachusetts. From there, walking with a cane, experiencing back pain and fighting progressing symptoms of leukemia, the former ambassador and commandant observed world politics, read history books, and wrote for glossy magazines. His judgment of Roosevelt’s legacy was harsh. When Roosevelt died in April 1945, Bullitt wrote that he had left American foreign policy “in bankruptcy,” and that the new president, Harry S. Truman, “was a little man” who could not live up to his “time of greatness.”30 Having no international experience, Truman selected his advisers by balancing their conflicting interests. His Russia hands were Charles Bohlen, who became one of the most influential Soviet experts in Washington, and Joseph Davies, Bullitt’s successor in Moscow and Stalin’s fellow traveler. There was no role for Bullitt in the new White House.