William C. Bullitt

William C. Bullitt

William Christian Bullitt (born January 25, 1891 in Philadelphia , † February 15, 1967 in Neuilly-sur-Seine ) was an American diplomat and author. In 1933 he was the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union .

youth

Bullitt was born into one of Philadelphia's wealthy families. He graduated from Yale University and the Harvard University Law School . He broke off this course when his father died in 1914. He has been to Europe several times, including with William Jennings Bryan and Thomas Alva Edison Jr. He tried unsuccessfully as a war correspondent in London and a war volunteer for the French army. In 1916, Bullitt married the socialist Aimee Ernesta Bowen. He combined his honeymoon during the war with interviews with government representatives and diplomats in Austria-Hungary and the German Empire for the Philadelphia Public Ledger . The ledger transferred him to his Washington office, where he made contacts with Edward Mandell House and other staff members of President Woodrow Wilson .

politics

Having a firsthand knowledge of European affairs, Wilson appointed him Deputy Secretary of State in 1917. In 1919 he worked in Wilson's negotiating delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and was considered a supporter of internationalism, which opposed isolationism in the USA. On a secret mission with the Swedish communist Karl Kilbom and the journalist Lincoln Steffens he explored the possibility of diplomatic contacts with the government of the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia and met Litvinov , Chicherin and Lenin . In a hearing before the Senate , he testified on the Treaty of Versailles and put his report on Soviet Russia on file. The Senate rejected the ratification of the treaty and thus the membership of the USA in the League of Nations . Convinced that the treaty would lead to a new war, Bullitt turned it down and left Wilson's staff. Bullitt resented his departure from the Wilson administration personally. Allegedly in collaboration with Sigmund Freud , whom he knew from his stay in Europe in 1920, he wrote a psychogram of Wilson's that was published in the USA in 1967.

After separating from his first wife and leaving the government, he married the journalist John Reed's widow , Louise Bryant , in 1924 . With her he had the daughter Anne, the couple separated in 1930.

In 1933, Bullitt worked on the election committee of Franklin D. Roosevelt and wrote his foreign policy speeches. Although he aspired to the post of ambassador in France , he was only appointed special representative of Foreign Minister Cordell Hull after the latter's election victory . The function was given to Jesse Isidor Straus , the nephew of Oscar Solomon Straus .

Ambassador to the Soviet Union

With the diplomatic recognition of Stalin's Soviet Union by the USA in November 1933, Roosevelt appointed Bullitt Ambassador to Moscow. One of his most important collaborators was George F. Kennan . Bullitt had led the preliminary negotiations, which concerned the cessation of Comintern propaganda in the USA, the protection of civil and religious rights of US citizens and the repayment of loans from the time of the Tsarist Empire . In 1935 he signed the first trade agreement between the two states. His parties in the ambassadorial residence Spaso House were considered legendary - Bulgakov described one in The Master and Margarita . During this time Bullitt traveled to Asia and spoke with the Japanese Emperor Hirohito and three times with Chiang Kai-shek . He informed Roosevelt about the murder of Kirov in 1934 and the beginning of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in 1937.

Donald Day , a journalist for the Chicago Tribune , revealed that Bullitt had exchanged thousands of dollars at 1:50 in Warsaw, regardless of the official Soviet exchange rate (US $ 1: 1.13 Torgsin rubles ) and smuggled them into the Soviet Union in diplomatic bags . Its trade was so extensive that the illegal exchange rate fell to 1:30. For the money, the diplomats bought antiques and property of murdered or exiled aristocrats in special shops of the Soviet secret police. Days article appeared in the Polish press and made him in Poland to persona non grata . It led to Bullitt's recall. Bullitt's experiences in the Soviet Union made him an anti-communist.

Ambassador to France

In August 1936 Roosevelt appointed him ambassador to France, which the Conservative Tribune commented on with the editorial "fallen up". During this time Bullitt warned against the participation of the USA in a future European war, was an opponent of the war and tried to mediate a Franco-German understanding. Since January 1939, however, he assured the Polish ambassador Potocki in Washington that the USA would support Hitler's demand for the return of Danzig and negotiations on the corridor. He continued this after the defeat of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, because "if England and France should not be able to defeat Hitler in Europe, American soldiers will have to fight their armies in America." Roosevelt's latest neutrality law partially did that possible.

As a former patient of Sigmund Freud , Bullitt and Princess Marie Bonaparte made it possible for Freud and his family to flee from Vienna, which had been occupied by the Nazis since 1938 , via Paris to London.

In 1939 the French President Édouard Daladier informed him about the espionage activities of Donald and Alger Hiss for the Soviet Union in the US State Department .

When the Wehrmacht took Paris in the western campaign in June 1940, Bullitt initially wanted to stay there instead of following the French government to Bordeaux . Roosevelt resented this enormously and led to a permanent break between the two. After the defeat of France in 1940, Bullitt traveled from Paris to the new government in Vichy . He spoke to François Darlan and Henri Philippe Pétain and attested that the new government was defeatist . He left Europe on July 15, 1940 and was replaced by Admiral William D. Leahy .

Middle East Mission and France

After his return to the United States, Bullitt tried to get a position as Minister of War or Navy in Roosevelt's cabinet, but this preferred Republicans Henry L. Stimson and William F. Knox . Bullit wrote countless articles and commentaries on the dangers of fascism and communism and the threat to the country. One of his speeches was printed in 2 million copies and distributed nationwide to reduce the strong influence of the America First Committee . In January 1941 he was formally resigned, but in July he was sent to the Middle East as "personal representative (Roosevelts) in the rank of ambassador" . Equipped with recommendations from Winston Churchill , he traveled to Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus and Lebanon and created the conditions for Operation Torch .

Now assigned to the Navy Department, Bullitt was involved in an intrigue in 1943 to force Sumner Welles out of government, which cost him his own position. In 1944 he applied unsuccessfully in Philadelphia as Democratic mayor. After failing to join the US Army, he joined Charles de Gaulle's French Liberation Army in May 1944 and landed with Jean de Lattre de Tassigny's troops in August of that year . He stayed with this unit until the end of the war. He received the Croix de guerre with a bronze palm branch and was accepted into the Legion of Honor .

After returning to the United States, he unsuccessfully sought a position in the Truman government. Even with Dwight D. Eisenhower he could no longer achieve anything, but was one of the founders of the American Committee for a United Europe . Bullit died of leukemia on February 15, 1967 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris.

Fonts

• The Bullitt Mission to Russia. Testimony before the Committee of Foreign Relations, United States Senate. Huebsch, New York NY 1919.
• It's not done. Harcourt Brace, New York NY 1926, (In German: You don't do something like that. Roman. Drei Masken Verlag, Munich 1928).
• The Establishment of normal Relations between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (= Department of State. Eastern European Series. 3, ZDB -ID 780091-5 = United States. Department of State Publication. 553). US Government Printing Office, Washington DC 1934, (Reprint: Seeds of Conflict. Series 4: The Russian Revolution from the October Revolution to the Moscow trials, 1917-1936. 4: Foreign relations. 3, 1975, ZDB -ID 2454027-4 ).
• The Great Globe Itself. A Preface to World Affairs. Scribner, New York NY et al. 1946.
• with Sigmund Freud : Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Twenty-eighth President of the United States. A Psychological Study. Houghton Mifflin et al., Boston MA et al. 1967.

literature

• Francis P. Sempa in Quarterly American Diplomacy at the University of North Carolina, January 2003 Online biography entitled William C. Bullitt: Diplomat and Prophet
• Matthias Schickel: Between Wilson and Lenin. The beginnings of global bloc formation in the years 1917–1919. Shown using the example of the American diplomat William Christian Bullitt (= studies on contemporary history. 45). Kovač, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-8300-1926-2 (also: Würzburg, University, dissertation, 2003).
• Orville H. Bullitt (Ed.): For the President. Personal and secret. Correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt. Houghton Mifflin, Boston MA 1972, ISBN 0-395-13997-X .

swell

1. ^ The Bullitt Mission to Russia. 1919.
2. ↑ Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study. In: Élisabeth Roudinesco , Michel Plon: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Names, countries, works, terms. Translation from French. Springer, Vienna et al. 2004, ISBN 3-211-83748-5 , pp. 1009-1013.
3. ^ History of the US Embassy in Moscow ( Memento from November 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) English
4. ↑ Donald Day : Onward Christian Soldiers. Suppressed Reports of a 20-year Chicago Tribune Correspondent in Eastern Europe from 1921. Noontide Press, Torrance CA 1982, ISBN 0-939482-03-7 .
5. ↑ Will Brownell, Richard N. Billings: So Close to Greatness. A Biography of William C. Bullitt. Macmillan, New York NY et al. 1987, ISBN 0-02-517410-X .
6. ↑ George H. Nash (Ed.): Freedom Betrayed. Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath (= Hoover Institution Press Publication. 598). Edited with an Introduction. Hoover Institution Press, Stanford CA 2011, ISBN 978-0-8179-1234-5 , pp. 593-596.
7. ^ Letter to Cordell Hull dated September 19, 1939.
8. ^ Francis P. Sempa in Quarterly American Diplomacy at the University of North Carolina, January 2003 Online biography under the title William C. Bullitt: Diplomat and Prophet

Web links

• Literature by and about William C. Bullitt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about William C. Bullitt in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .