W
ith Russia back at the center of the 21st-century geopolitical map, it seems only fitting that a new biography of William Bullitt has just been published. Bullitt was in many ways the architect of America’s 20th-century relationship with the Soviet Union. Alexander Etkind’s Roads Not Taken: An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt is an engrossing account of a Philadelphia blueblood who, though he grappled with Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Freud, FDR, and Stalin, has largely been forgotten.
When Bullitt graduated from Yale University in 1912, he was voted the “most brilliant” in his class. His writing skills and family connections landed him a job with the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Bullitt’s talents won him an assignment in the midst of war-torn Europe, where his insights caught the eye of Colonel Edward House, political intimate and chief political adviser to President Woodrow Wilson. The 20th century, House predicted, would be the bloodiest in human history because of the ties between Russia, Germany, and Japan—a trio he described as “the league of…discontent.”
House took Bullitt under his wing, setting in motion the young man’s long and tumultuous connection with the USSR. In 1919, House made Bullitt part of Wilson’s team at the Paris Peace Accords. But in the midst of the negotiations over the future of Germany, the Russian Civil War broke out. It was a bloody conflict that would come to claim 25 million lives. But at the time it seemed to have reached a stalemate. Sensing an opening, House sent the 28-year-old Bullitt to Russia to meet with the 49-year-old Vladimir Lenin, who was for the moment badly outgunned by his rivals. After three days of negotiation, Lenin agreed to forgo Soviet claims to much of what had been Czarist Russia. But when Bullitt returned to Paris with a seeming triumph at hand, Wilson was sick and too ill-disposed to give Bullitt his attentions. In the interim, the Bolsheviks rallied, and the three days that might have shaken the world had passed. An angry Bullitt denounced Wilson as a mountebank and resigned from the diplomatic corps.
Disillusioned, Bullitt devoted much of the 1920s to writing. In 1925, the year F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, Bullitt published It’s Not Done, a novel about the world that had been lost in WWI. While Gatsby sold 20,000 copies in 1925 and didn’t become a bestseller until the Depression, Its Not Done sold 150,000 copies in 1925 and went on to be largely forgotten. Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study, which Bullitt wrote with Sigmund Freud, has also been largely forgotten but for different reasons. A meld of Bullitt’s memories and Freud’s theories, the book’s publication was delayed by differences over the manuscript and by events in Europe. It was finally published in the 1960s, when psychobiography enjoyed a brief heyday. Perhaps Bullitt’s best claim to literary immortality comes courtesy of the Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, who immortalized him in the character of Woland in his classic The Master and Margarita.
A handsome contributor to FDR’s 1932 presidential campaign, Bullitt was connected to Roosevelt by way of Col. House. Both Bullitt and House believed that the failed 1919 mission to Lenin might yet be of use. In 1933, FDR became the first president to extend diplomatic recognition to the USSR and made Bullitt the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. Bullitt arrived in Russia with a strongly philo-Soviet attitude.
Etkind, who teaches at the European University Institute in Florence, paints a colorful portrait of Bullitt’s time at Spaso House, the famously elegant American embassy. In Russia, Bullitt trained George Kennan and Chip Bohlen, the two most prominent Soviet specialists of the Cold War. Etkind quotes University of Pittsburgh Russianist Sean Guillroy, who said that “Bullitt’s embassy was one big frat party,” where beautiful ballerinas had numerous dalliances with the embassy staff, including the twice-divorced Bullitt. Despite the reality that the ballerinas were supplying Stalin with intelligence, Bohlen fondly remembered the situation. “I have never had more fun or interest in my whole life,” he said. “This embassy…is like no other embassy in the world.”
The Holodomor, Stalin’s mass murder of Ukrainian peasants, was already well under way. But the horrors of the regime came home to Spaso House only with the murder of Sergei Kirov, a prominent member of the Politburo who had been rumored to be a possible successor to Stalin. Kirov’s murder, probably ordered by Stalin, was the beginning of the Great Terror. The episode had a profound effect on Bullitt and Kennan, who came to place Hitler and Stalin in the same bracket. Marxism, as Bullitt was coming to see it, was merely a mask for a new version of Czarist cruelty. But despite Bullitt’s extensive correspondence with FDR describing the horrors of Stalinism, the president continued to have a positive view of the Soviet leader. In his last dispatch from Moscow, Bullitt wrote, “The Soviet Union is unique among the great powers. It is not only a state but also the headquarters of an international faith.” Bullitt’s criticisms of Stalin, explains Etkind, cost him FDR’s good will.
But before he left for his next diplomatic posting, which was to be in Paris, Bullitt held what was perhaps the most extraordinary diplomatic ball ever staged. It was a barely believable party for 500 guests, including the Soviet foreign and defense ministers. The affair implicitly mocked Stalinism with a re-creation of a collective farm complete with baby goats, roosters, a drunken bear (and a Czech jazz band). The revelers munched on duck-liver pâté while starvation spread throughout countryside. The scenes of revelry live on as the climactic Satan’s Ball scene in Bulgakov’s novel, but many of those who attended—including the Bolshevik luminary Nikolai Bukharin, legendary theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and the modernizer of the Red Army Mikhail Tukhachevsky—were tortured and murdered only a few year later in Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s. The party is still remembered in Moscow.
After Bullitt’s departure from Moscow, things changed considerably. Joseph Davies, Bullitt’s successor as ambassador, was a major contributor to FDR’s 1936 presidential campaign. He was a wealthy anti-trust lawyer who knew little of foreign policy and referred to Stalin as the kindly “Uncle Joe.” It was a view consistent with Roosevelt’s own misunderstandings.
Transferred to Paris, Bullitt offered his opinions freely to FDR’s emissary Harold Ickes. He foresaw that Mussolini would find Ethiopia a burden, Franco would win the Spanish Civil War, and “China would win battles but lose the war to Japan.” But, Etkind writes of Bullitt, “overestimating his beloved France, he thought the war could last 20 years in Europe.” Where he completely missed the boat was on England, where he thought that the fascist Oswald Mosley would have to be installed as prime minister if the island didn’t fall to Hitler.
Bullitt’s influence on France was unusual for a foreigner. He attended so many cabinet meetings that the press described him as a minister without portfolio. But consistent with his exalted sense of himself, he showered insights and advice on Roosevelt concerning the whole of Europe. Aviation, he claimed, was “the new element” that changed the rules of European security. “The modern bombing plane has confronted Europe with an alternative of unification or destruction.” Etkind also notes that “the idea of European unification was increasingly present in Bullitt’s dispatches from Paris before the war.” According to Bullitt himself: “These dinky little European states cannot live in an airplane civilization.” He feared that war “will mean such horrible suffering that it will end in general revolution, and the only winners would be Stalin and company.”
Bullitt used his ties with the French to good effect. He promoted the career of the young Jean Monnet, who would go on to become one of the founders of the European Union. And he used his French sources to convince FDR that Hitler was a madman with unlimited ambitions. When Soviet intelligence chief Walter Krivitsky defected to the West, he brought with him the revelation of the coming Nazi-Stalin alliance, realizing Bullitt’s worst fears. But although he also had information about Alger Hiss’s Communist connections, Bullitt could neither get Washington to listen to him nor protect Krivitsky, who was assassinated by Stalin’s agents in his Washington hotel room.
Bullitt repeatedly rubbed FDR the wrong way by importuning the president for a major post in the administration. And he was blocked professionally by his rival, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, an ally of Alger Hiss’s and a man who had described Mussolini as “the greatest man [I] ever met.” Denied a position he thought worthy of his talents, Bullitt resigned from the diplomatic service and joined the French army as a major. He fought under rugged conditions as an aide to General Jean de Lattre Tassigny and demonstrated his courage by winning the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour.
As the war wound down, Bullitt was increasingly critical of Roosevelt. He ultimately saw FDR as a man who, like Woodrow Wilson, had won the war but lost the peace. FDR was, he argued, as weak at Yalta, physically and strategically, as Wilson had been at Paris. The UN, Bullitt maintained, left us powerless against the aggression of any “bandit great power.” But while Bullitt hurled imprecations in essays for Life, his protégé George Kennan, deputy head of mission in Moscow, had the eyes and ears of Secretary of State James Byrnes. In what became the famous February 1946 Long Telegram, Kennan crafted the argument that, according to Etkind, had “first been hammered out in extended discussions with Bullitt when they had been at Spaso House in Moscow.” Influenced by Bullitt, Kennan articulated what became known as the doctrine of containment:
Marxism provided the Soviet Union with the…fig leaf of…moral and intellectual respectability. Without it they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced their country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regime.
Kennan channeled his thoughts and fears into a patient doctrine that called on countering the Kremlin when it attempted to expand. The more voluble Bullitt couldn’t remain as calm. He saw the growth of Communist parties in France and Italy as the imminent footfalls of doom. After an extraordinary career, he would never again rise to the heights of fame. “Unquestionably,” notes Kennan, “he deserved better of the country than he received from it….in the end of his life Bullitt became bitter…an unjustly frustrated man.”
