16

UNITING EUROPE

With the removal of Welles, Hull became responsible for work on the United Nations. He tried to shape the UN into a global body in which the Big Four would play a less decisive role. While Welles imagined the inter-American system playing a central role in the UN, Hull envisioned an executive council, a general assembly, an international court, and social and economic agencies. From his comfortable retirement, Welles attacked Hull for his failure to take particular Latin American interests into account. Continuing the old rivalry between Latin American and Russian experts in the State Department, Hull’s closest adviser in planning the UN was Russian-born Leo Pasvolsky, who started his career as the secretary to the last ambassador of the Russian Empire in America and published many books on the politics and economy of the Soviet Union.¹

In 1943 Bullitt ran for mayor of his native Philadelphia on the Democratic ticket. The race was hopeless: his rival was the acting mayor, the Republicans had controlled the city since 1884, and Roosevelt’s support was unreliable. The rumor was that the president first approved Bullitt’s nomination and then retracted it, saying, “Cut his throat.” In his letter to LeHand, Bullitt attributed his failure to “a combination which appeared for the first time in American politics—although it is nothing new for Europe—an axis of communists and reactionary Republicans. There was no conceivable lie they didn’t circulate.”² The former ambassador had more ambitious goals. The archive has preserved Bullitt’s detailed plan to create a National Morale Service, which would conduct public opinion surveys, study moral questions, and operate domestically and in foreign countries to scientifically advise the president on matters of public morality.³ However, Bullitt’s victory over Welles signaled his own demise. Neither Truman nor Eisenhower requested his advice on international relations.

In the mid-1940s Bullitt returned to journalism and wrote a big series of articles for Life magazine. His first essay was entitled “The Tragedy of Versailles.” To organize peace is more difficult than to organize war, he wrote. The way a war concludes is important: if the winner fails to build a sound postwar order, a new war is inevitable. Habitually criticizing Wilson and preparing to criticize Roosevelt, Bullitt stayed faithful to cosmopolitan anti-isolationism, which was still central to the Democratic Party. International relations require that all sides adhere to basic moral obligations, he argued. This is why one cannot negotiate with dictators: they always deceive. At the end of every big war, Bullitt said, there comes a time when the world is ready for change, and the duty of the victor is to lead this change. Acting in the name of peace, the victor should rely on his strength and accept the burden of responsibility; this is what Wilson failed to do, and Roosevelt, Bullitt suggested, would fail too. The “moment of great opportunity passes quickly. . . . We must use our power when we have it. . . . Good intentions are not enough. . . . We as a nation cannot resign from this earth. . . . We cannot escape history”—these were Bullitt’s words on the eve of the new American victory.⁴

In his essays for Life magazine, Bullitt emphasized the unification of Europe as the main postwar challenge. Moreover, he claimed that a united Europe was actually Roosevelt’s idea. It was the president who “was convinced that the Treaty of Versailles would lead to war in Europe unless France and Germany could be reconciled and persuaded to work together for the formation of a confederation of European States.” This idea “was entirely sound,” Bullitt wrote, and played such an important role in Roosevelt’s thinking that he made detailed plans to visit European capitals to discuss his idea about a European confederation after the conclusion of the war. But the Great Depression and Hitler ended this plan. ⁵ Having focused his postwar political efforts on building a European union as opposed to Welles’s project of creating the United Nations, Bullitt hoped that ascribing this idea to Roosevelt would give it more clout. In Bullitt’s vision, “a European federation of democratic states” should have been “open to all states which were not puppets [of the USSR] and had democratic constitutions and enforced a Bill of Rights—democratic German states included.” It was the only way to incorporate the Germans as equal citizens of Europe, and to prevent them from becoming “serfs in an enslaved Europe” under Soviet rule. Publishing this proposal in 1948 in Life, Bullitt suggested that it had matured much earlier, in 1945 or perhaps even in 1941. Roosevelt and Truman were both betrayed by the “officials of the Department of State who were devotees and expounders of the evil nonsense that the Soviet Union was a ‘peace-loving democracy.’” Praising the Marshall plan, Bullitt wrote that American money alone could not prevent the Communist conquest of Western Europe. “Unless the remaining independent states of Europe could be united militarily, economically, and politically in a democratic federation, they would fall one by one to Soviet assault.” It was the task for the United States “to use all its power to persuade the Western European democracies to forget their old hatreds and rivalries and unite for self-protection.”⁶

Once again, Bullitt proposed turning the creation of a European union into a condition of American postwar aid. He mourned the fact that Marshall and his team, which included Bullitt’s former associates Kennan and Bohlen, could not make this happen. For his part, Kennan stated, he promoted the unification of Europe as the only feasible method of postwar settlement, beginning in 1942. For Kennan, only a united Europe could help Germany reintegrate into the rest of the world. However, the Russians were firmly opposed to this idea, Kennan wrote, and Roosevelt did not wish to discuss divisive problems during the war.⁷

Bullitt’s former associates in Moscow helped initiate the Cold War, and now they were the leading voices in foreign politics. But even they saw Bullitt’s views as too aggressive. His experience was too distant from that of most Americans, and he knew it. Nonetheless, he tried to convince ordinary readers of his ideas. “We as a nation cannot resign from this earth,” he wrote in Life. “We cannot wash our hands of it. . . . We cannot escape history. Pontius Pilate washed his hands, and the world has never forgiven him.”⁸ In fact, he opposed political realism on the moral grounds that were very much in the spirit of Wilson. Both his anti-isolationist stance and the evangelic rhetoric continued the Wilsonian tradition.

Things were changing quickly. In February 1946 Isaiah Berlin visited the State Department and met Bullitt there; they discussed Turkey and American relations with the United Kingdom. Berlin wrote in a letter, “Bullitt is not in the government or trusted much by anyone now. Nevertheless, I think that what he says is truer today than it was a fortnight ago.” Stalin’s speech in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow changed public opinion in Washington: according to Berlin, this speech “shook them all surprisingly, and all the weathervanes, Lippmann etc. . . . are generally talking tough, or at least complaining that Russia once more destroyed their hopes.”⁹ The same February, Kennan sent his “Long Telegram” from Moscow, in which he expounded on the views he had developed in his discussions with Bullitt almost ten years earlier. “At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.”¹⁰

A similar impulse drove Bullitt’s book The Great Globe Itself: A Preface to World Affairs, which was also published in 1946. The book starts with a Freudian idea, from Civilization and Its Discontents, that humanity’s progress in mastering nature has surged much ahead of its progress in mastering its own affairs. The nuclear bomb gave new life to this narrative. Focusing on the new geopolitical situation that followed the use of the nuclear bomb against Japan, Bullitt had no doubt that the Soviet Union would soon master the bomb as well. America should be afraid of no country but the Soviet Union, Bullitt wrote. In October 1949 he debated these ideas over lunch with Kennan, who recorded the conversation. Bullitt said that de Gaulle would have been prepared to “take real leadership in Europe in the direction of integration,” which would have helped to resolve the German problem. He blamed Roosevelt’s violent aversion to de Gaulle for America’s failure to take advantage of this opportunity.¹¹ He also blamed Roosevelt for American indifference to the Polish question.

Again, the key to Bullitt’s thinking was the analogy between the two world wars, the two wartime presidents, and the two peace treaties signed at Versailles and Yalta. The Roosevelt administration made a mistake, Bullitt argued in his book, when it did not oblige Stalin to respect European borders. In exchange for Lend-Lease aid, Roosevelt had to negotiate with Stalin the postwar “European confederation of democratic states,” which would include Germany. Bullitt’s conclusion was gloomy. We were at war, he said, to prevent Germany from dominating Europe and Japan from dominating Asia. Now, after all our sacrifice, we clearly see that both continents may be dominated by the Soviet Union. In The Great Globe Itself, Bullitt was sharply critical of the United Nations, the creation of his old enemy Welles. The UN could prevent the collision between the great powers no better than the League of Nations, and for the same reasons. Now publicly, he contrasted his project to create a united Europe to Welles’s project of the United Nations. He had lost his career, but he would not let go of his ideas.

The historical analysis of the relationship between the peoples and authorities in Russia, which both Bullitt and Kennan touched on, is the most important aspect of The Great Globe Itself. For both men the continuity of the Russian political tradition was inevitable and unbreakable. Bullitt gave more weight to changing ideologies such as imperialism or socialism; even though his picture was less detailed than Kennan’s, it was in many ways more nuanced. But he shared with Kennan many insights on the continuity of Russian expansion in Europe and Asia. Both Bullitt and Kennan saw historical continuities from Genghis Khan to the Romanovs to Stalin in their analysis of Russian authoritarian tendencies.

In his analysis of relations between Russia and the West, Bullitt referred to classic British geopolitical texts, including those by Halford Mackinder, another participant of the Paris Peace Conference and critic of Versailles. While Bullitt was on his way to talk to Lenin in 1919, Mackinder was traveling to talk to Lenin’s archenemy, White general Anton Denikin, whom he eventually saved from the Bolsheviks by organizing his flight to England. Mackinder wrote, famously, “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”¹² In 1945 Kennan translated these theoretical concerns into the practice of Cold War politics: “A basic conflict is thus arising over Europe between the interests of the Atlantic seapower, which demand the preservation of vigorous and independent political life on the European peninsula, and the interests of the jealous European land power, which . . . will never find a place, short of the Atlantic Ocean, where it can from its own standpoint safely stop.”¹³ In his review of The Great Globe Itself, Nikolay Timashev, a Russian émigré and law professor from New York, criticized Bullitt for ignoring the great tradition of resistance to the state, which inspired many generations of liberal, radical, and socialist activists in Russia. The author of Great Retreat, a remarkable book about Stalin’s cultural politics, Timashev urged his readers to respect the tradition of cultural protest that led to the Russian Revolution and still opened ground for hope.

Both Kennan and Bohlen had outstanding diplomatic careers. After participating in the Tehran and Yalta conferences, where he was Roosevelt’s personal assistant and Hopkins’s interpreter, Bohlen served as ambassador to the Soviet Union and France, wrote speeches for Marshall, and until the Cuban missile crisis, helped several American presidents formulate policies toward the Soviet Union. After his “Long Telegram,” Kennan became the head of the new policy planning staff at the State Department. An influential adviser to Secretary of State George Marshall, Kennan was the architect of “containment,” a massive geopolitical project that fundamentally shaped the postwar order. In formulating his dual strategy of containing the Soviet Union and restoring Europe, Kennan reiterated Bullitt’s old idea that support for the Non-Communist Left in Europe was the best counterweight to Bolshevism. Bullitt’s former associates probably knew that their former boss and mentor had formulated the idea of the Non-Communist Left long before them, in 1918.¹⁴ But Bullitt’s attitudes toward the Soviet Union were more aggressive than those of Kennan. He was critical of Kennan’s idea of containment; for his part, Kennan did not fully support Bullitt’s idea of a united Europe. Kennan wrote about Bullitt’s later years: “Unquestionably, he deserved better of the country than he received of it. . . . In the end of his life, Bullitt became extremely bitter and violent. . . . It was a sad, but not unnatural, ending for an unusually sanguine and unjustly frustrated man.”¹⁵

At least for his work in France, Bullitt did receive recognition from those people whose opinion he appreciated the most—military officers. He received many French medals and orders and in June 1947 was awarded the American “Legion of Merit.” General Jacob Devers, commander of US ground forces in Europe, decorated Bullitt with this order for his “outstanding service” with the French armed forces during the Second World War. It was a rare example of an American official receiving an American award for military service in the armed forces of another state. In an article published in Life on June 2, 1947, Bullitt wrote that the communists in France had been too successful, and that Europe might lose its fight with the Soviets. The communists had set up the largest party in France, which combined excellent organization with powerful propaganda. They fought very well during the war, Bullitt said, not for France but for the Soviet Union. They were dangerous: if the communists were to march on Paris, who would defend it? A quarter of the Paris police were members of the Communist Party, and another quarter sympathized with it, he wrote. Bullitt’s numbers were exaggerated, but his recipe for fighting communism was realistic: support for non-communist left-wing parties and American aid. First a social democrat, then a New Dealer, and finally a neoconservative, Bullitt would have been a good representative of the American political class if his ideas had not been more radical and precocious than those of his peers.¹⁶

In March 1946 Bullitt lunched with the top officials in the American navy—Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and Admiral William Leahy. Forrestal wrote in his diary that Bullitt was “most disturbed about the Russian situation.” Bullitt wanted the president to create a working group to evaluate policy vis-à-vis Russia.¹⁷ Since the start of the Cold War Bullitt’s ideas had converged with those in leadership positions in Truman’s administration, which probably made him feel even lonelier: the jobs he should have had were taken by those he had mentored.

Bohlen wrote Marshall’s famous June 1947 speech announcing his plan to rebuild Europe. In the glossy pages of Life, Bullitt agreed that the Marshall Plan was necessary to prevent Europe from falling into the hands of Stalin. Nonetheless, Bullitt thought the amount of American money being directed to Europe would be insufficient; again, he argued that the Marshall Plan ought to be reinforced by a union of European states. Only a united Europe could resist Soviet expansionism. The United States had to convince European states to forget their old feuds and unite against the Soviets. As he had done in his letters to Roosevelt years before, Bullitt suggested that the formation of a European confederation be a key condition of American aid. Following Churchill, who used similar terms in his postwar speeches, Bullitt urged the governments of Great Britain, France, and the United States to focus on creating a European federation or perhaps a “United States of Europe.” For Churchill, a European Union was a conservative, British-led bulwark against Soviet Russia. For Bullitt, a “United States of Europe” was a projection of his American patriotism: if only the rest of the world would look like America, the world would be a better place. But according to Bullitt, everyone at this point had to understand that Europe must “unite or disappear.” The prospective federation should be open to all nations on the continent that had a democratic constitution, those who won the war and those who lost it. In this vision, the union of European states would be specifically directed against the Soviet threat. As early as 1936, during his tenure as ambassador to the Soviet Union, Bullitt wrote to the State Department: “The fundamental aim of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union is to keep Europe divided.”¹⁸ In 1943 and then again in 1947, he repeated that the United Europe—“pacific but armed”—should be an important and, moreover, necessary factor in deterring Russia: “the Soviet Union can not be disarmed. Since this is so, Europe cannot be made a military vacuum for the Soviet Union to flow into. . . . The balance of power which is in the interest of Great Britain and ourselves to seek is the balance of power between an integrated Europe (with Germany and Italy disarmed) and the Soviet Union.”¹⁹

This wisdom was so unusual, however, that even his closest friends did not embrace it. Kennan, who had initially supported Bullitt’s plan for European unification, was becoming increasingly opposed to the idea. In April 1944 he came to Washington and stayed with Bullitt; influenced by their conversations, Kennan wrote about the necessity of long-term—“patient, persistent and intelligent”—efforts to achieve “the maximum degree of federation in Europe.” For Kennan, however, a European federation would need Soviet consent. If Moscow agreed, this federation would prevent confrontation over the forthcoming division of Germany. Should the Soviet Union disagree, “we will be right and they will be wrong, and we will have to find ways of persuading them to accept our view,” Kennan wrote to Admiral Leahy.²⁰ But as the war wound down, Kennan was increasingly critical of the European idea.

Gradually, Kennan realized that the litmus test for Soviet goodwill was not Germany but Poland, and the fate of Poland made him all the more melancholic. As he watched the Soviets launch their offensive in Poland and refuse to support the Warsaw Uprising, Kennan understood their actions as having “tremendous importance for the future of Europe.” He saw the Soviet desire to liquidate the Polish government, “with all its records and archives and memories,” as stemming not from any particular strategic interests but of “the interests of certain groups within the Soviet Government” to suppress the memory of their “past mistakes.” Clearly, Kennan meant the Soviet massacre at Katyn. In 1944 he could only suggest that the United States “bow our heads in silence before the tragedy of a people who have been our allies, whom we have saved from our enemies, and whom we cannot save from our friends.” Seeing the Polish question as “the touchstone of Russia’s relations with the West,” Kennan was not optimistic about the prospects of a European federation. With the legitimate Polish government replaced by Soviet puppets, “there remain[ed] for the Anglo-Saxon powers the division of western Europe into spheres of influence,” the core element of Kennan’s future policy of containment.²¹ In September 1947 Kennan talked to Berlin, and they both took part in negotiating the Marshall Plan in Paris. “The State Department did not really want a Customs Union to be set on foot in the immediate future, but wished that the participating countries should react favorably to the idea of some eventual union,” Kennan said.²² Although Kennan’s thinking had diverged from that of Bullitt by the mid-1940s, his postwar analysis leaned heavily on Bullitt’s earlier writings. Indeed, his message to European diplomats in Paris closely resembled Bullitt’s message from twelve years before. Kennan told Berlin that “there was a new set of men in Washington, with simple, honest minds,” and he recommended the same to British diplomats: “Subtlety on our [British] part must at all costs be avoided, and we should send simple, honest men to represent us,” Berlin wrote.²³

In the meantime Bullitt wrote about Communists’ increasing power in France and Italy. Repeating what he had realized about thirty years earlier, he pointed out that military loss and economic hardship were the parents of communism. Only American aid could restrain Soviet influence in Europe. Unlike Keynes, Kennan, or Monnet, Bullitt justified this aid on political rather than economic grounds. “Unless we are ready to take the ultimate consequence of having Stalin’s empire extend across Europe and Asia, from Atlantic to Pacific, we shall have to give adequate help.” Moreover, he suggested revising the very foundations of this aid. “We shall give, not lend,” he insisted. The aid would not and should not be returned. “We are fooling no one but ourselves by calling these billions ‘loans and credits.’” In fact, they were gifts—“gifts from the American taxpayer” that were supposed to keep foreign “countries from falling prey, one by one, to Soviet imperialism.” These gifts would have never been returned, but—precisely as gifts—would contribute to friendship more than loans. These gifts, of course, could have been called bribes. But Bullitt was not cynical about the American aid. “Man lives, in the deepest recesses of his being, by faith and hope.” For the French and other Europeans, he thought, this faith and hope needed to focus on the “United states of Europe”—or Europe, “in the long run, will be united under Soviet tyranny.”²⁴

In Bullitt’s mind the postwar project to unite Europe was a political response to the expansionist policy of the Soviet Union rather than an economic plan focused on international trade and customs fees. In the meantime the Marshall Plan was beginning to work, financing the restoration of many European countries, including Greece and Turkey, and stopping the spread of communism there. The Soviet Union refused to accept this assistance and pressured its new allies—Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Finland—to decline it.

At the end of his life, Bullitt was unemployed and uninvolved. Wealthy and mostly healthy, he turned his discontent into quarrels with old friends and disciples. His recollections of Roosevelt became ironic, even dismissive. Sarcastically, he wrote in Life that when Roosevelt came into the White House in 1933, he ran his foreign policy, “impelled by his life-long interest in our Navy and his passion for postage stamps.” Repeating Wilson’s mistakes, Roosevelt had first promised voters that he would avoid war, and then he used his political genius to enter it. Versailles made the Second World War inevitable; Yalta made the Cold War inescapable. Having won the war, the United States lost the peace, but the Soviet Union had won both. Such was the “tragicomedy of American foreign policy,” according to Bullitt.²⁵

In 1947 he went to China to visit his old friend Chiang Kai-shek. A civil war was raging there, with the Americans and the Soviets supporting opposing sides, the first proxy war of the nuclear era. In a long essay in Life, Bullitt warned his readers that a victory for Soviet-style communism in China was imminent. As Bullitt understood it, China was “caught in the sort of vicious circle that has become familiar to the Europeans since World War I.”²⁶ For the Chinese government, inflation was the only way to cover the war costs. Inflation would hurt the middle class, creating a base for the Communist movement, which would completely destroy the middle class. Only American aid could prevent a Communist victory, Bullitt said; moreover, the task could be accomplished at a surprisingly low cost. Because of hyperinflation, the whole budget of the Chinese government was equal to the municipal expenditures of New York City, and American aid would make a palpable difference. Bullitt gave detailed advice on how he would spend American money in China. He would increase salaries, cut the army, punish corrupt officials, decentralize the government, reduce social inequality, and bring in foreigners to collect taxes and control elections. Whether his calculations were correct, the US government did not follow Bullitt’s advice. The victory of the Chinese Communists led to enormous loss of life and wealth and resulted in a decade of terror.

Written during President Truman’s election campaign, the Berlin crisis, and the start of the Cold War, Bullitt’s essays in Life magazine personally attacked George Marshall, then the secretary of state, for engineering Chiang Kai-shek’s military defeat by preventing American supplies from reaching China. His was a “dishonorable” policy in which “the blind [were] leading the blind.” Bullitt also accused Truman of “making Berlin another Munich.” Even Truman could not “be so ignorant” as to believe his own statements, Bullitt wrote in 1948. “Vital interests of the American people throughout the world have been endangered by incompetent leadership. . . . We face today a struggle not for security but for survival.”²⁷

In 1948 Bullitt endorsed a progressive Republican, Thomas E. Dewey, for president; in all likelihood, he was still counting on a position in the State Department. Truman’s unexpected victory destroyed this plan.²⁸ At the beginning of 1950, he still hoped to return to politics. He felt a mutual respect with Eisenhower, whom he had known since the war in France. Dining with the president at the White House in May 1955, he insisted on a firm policy toward the Soviet Union. He remained committed to European integration, which became the life’s work of his friend and former protégé, Jean Monnet.

The fight between the “Russian experts” and the Soviet “fellow travelers”—between the Bullitt-Kennan contingent and the Davies-Welles contingent within the State Department—lasted a long time. In 1960 Dean Acheson, the former secretary of state and adviser to several presidents, wrote that Kennan and Bohlen were dangerous: they peddled “incommunicable” hunches and believed that their advice had to be “accepted by those who have not had the same occult power of divination.” Bohlen had told him, “Dean, you came to this field too late to be able to get the feel of it.”²⁹

The Cold War was in full swing and the Soviet Union was at the center of the public imagination, but many of those experts who worked with Bullitt in Moscow were again being purged from the ranks of the State Department. It seemed that American experts on Russia, with their “occult knowledge,” were consistently losing out to their pro-Soviet and allegedly more “liberal” colleagues. But, as Bullitt, Kennan, Bohlen, and Berlin saw it, this was not the point: one could be both liberal and anti-Soviet. In fact, confronting the enemies of human dignity in both the United States and the Soviet Union was the fundamental liberal challenge.

Over time Bullitt’s political essays became bitter. Frustrated about the past, suspicious about the present, and ceaselessly warning about the future, he used increasingly strong language to describe his experience: “While our soldiers, sailors and aviators were fighting with superb skill and courage, our foreign policy was handled with ignorant and reckless disregard of the vital interests of the American people.”³⁰ Stalin in 1947 was employing the same tactics as Hitler in 1936, and America was making the same mistakes as France had made: it did not attack when it should have, letting the enemy grow stronger and awaiting disaster. When he wrote this essay, the Communist Party was the largest political party in the French Parliament. Bullitt warned about a forthcoming national strike in France and the possibility of a Stalinist government in France and later in Italy. His recommendations in 1947 were pretty much the same as they had been in 1918, with one major addition: European integration. “If the remaining European democracies remain separate they will be swallowed one by one by the Soviet dictator.” Bullitt applauded President Truman’s initiative to provide a massive aid package to Greece and Turkey and suggested that the United States extend this aid to France.³¹

The more he became disillusioned with democratic politics, the more enchanted he became with the military. One of his memos from October 1950 renders the concerns of his old age. Bullitt had attended a luncheon in Washington together with Hoyt Vandenberg (the chief of staff of the US Air Force), Marshal John Slessor (the chief of staff of the Royal Air Force) and Mrs. Alice Longworth (Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter). They discussed the strategic balance between the Soviet and American air forces. In the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, it would take the Americans six months to restore its aerial superiority. All the while European and American armies would be fighting against Soviet forces without adequate air support. The conversation became quite emotional: Vandenberg said that he “was lying awake at night thinking of what an American Army might do” in this situation, because in the previous world wars the Americans had fought with complete control of the air.³² Both commanders agreed that priority should be given to the strategic bombers, and Bullitt was happy with this conclusion.

William Bullitt died in France in February 1967 of chronic lymphatic leukemia, which had progressed steadily in the last decade of his life. He lived to the age of seventy-six, a bitter American and French hero, a lonely man who died with his daughter at his side. Bullitt’s body was flown to Philadelphia, and services were held at the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, with Richard and Pat Nixon in attendance. He started his career trying to mediate between Wilson and Lenin, and he lived long enough to learn that a Soviet-trained assassin killed his old friend John F. Kennedy. One of his last decisions was to quit the Council on Foreign Relations in protest against the politics of this influential body. Another decision was to publish the biography of Woodrow Wilson that he had written with Freud. The publication caused a flurry of criticism; reviewers questioned Freud’s authorship, accused Bullitt of forgery, and ridiculed his approach to history. As he prepared his papers shortly before his death, he thought about friends from his youth: Inez Milholland, who sailed with him on Ford’s Peace Ship; Chicago journalist Charles Sweeney; Jack Reed; and most painfully, Louise Bryant. He rewrote a poem about them many times:

They are all gone,

Inez, Charlie, Jack,

Louise—the bravest of the brave—

Insane, trailing a dusty cape

In Paris gutters

They are all gone.

We loved each other once

Loved and were sure of life

And of ourselves

Sure we could conquer.

They are all gone.

And I who remain am nothing.

Ten years hence who will remember them?

There will be no one even to remember.

Inez Milholland’s voice

Little Charlie Sweeney’s smile

And Jack Reed’s gaiety.

Or Louise’s courage.

They are all gone.

I remain, and hope

Soon to be with them.³³