William Christian Bullitt Jr.

William Christian Bullitt, Jr.
United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union
In office 21 November 1933 – 16 May 1936
President	Franklin D. Roosevelt
Preceded by	David R. Francis As Ambassador to Russia
Succeeded by	Joseph E. Davies
United States Ambassador to France
In office 1936–1940
President	Franklin D. Roosevelt
Preceded by	Jesse I. Strauss
Succeeded by	William D. Leahy
Personal details
Born	January 25, 1891 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died	February 15, 1967(1967-02-15) (aged 76) Neuilly, France
Political party	Democratic

William Christian Bullitt, Jr. (January 25, 1891 – February 15, 1967) was an American diplomat, journalist, and novelist. Although in his youth he was considered something of a radical, he later became an outspoken anticommunist.

Early years

Bullitt was born to a well-to-do old Philadelphia family. His father was William Christian Bullitt, Sr., and his grandfather was John Christian Bullitt, founder of the law firm today known as Drinker Biddle & Reath. He was graduated from Yale University in 1913, after having been voted "most brilliant" in his class. He briefly attended Harvard Law School, but dropped out on the death of his father in 1914. At Yale he was a member of Scroll and Key.

Bullitt went to Europe to became a foreign correspondent and novelist.

Early diplomatic career

Working for Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference Bullitt was a strong supporter of legalistic internationalism, subsequently known as Wilsonianism. Prior to the negotiation of the Versailles accords, Bullitt engaged, along with journalist Lincoln Steffens, in a special mission to Soviet Russia together with the Swedish Communist Karl Kilbom, to negotiate diplomatic relations between the USA and the Bolshevik regime. Having failed to convince Wilson to support establishment of relations with the Bolsheviks, Bullitt resigned from Wilson's staff.

He later returned to the United States and testified in the United State Senate against the Treaty of Versailles, having his report from his Russian trip placed into the record.

He married socialite Aimee Ernesta Drinker in 1916. She gave birth to a son in 1917, but the baby died after two days. They divorced in 1923. In 1924 he married Louise Bryant, widow of radical journalist John Reed. They divorced in 1930 after he discovered her affair with English sculptor Gwen Le Gallienne. The Bullitts had a daughter, Anne Moen Bullitt, born in 1924 who married as her fourth husband, in 1967, U.S. Senator Daniel Brewster.

First U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union

Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him as the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, a post that he filled from 1933 to 1936. At the time of his appointment, Bullitt was known as a liberal, and thought by some to be something of a radical. The Soviets welcomed him as an old friend because of his diplomatic efforts at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. But although Bullitt arrived in the Soviet Union with high hopes for Soviet-American relations, his view of the Soviet leadership soured on closer inspection. By the end of his tenure he was openly hostile to the Soviet government. He remained an outspoken anticommunist for the rest of his life.

Ambassador to France

Bullitt was re-posted to France in October 1936 as Ambassador. Fluent in French and an ardent Francophile, Bullitt became very established in Paris society, renting a château at Chantilly and owning at least 18,000 bottles of French wine. As a close friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom he had almost always had a daily telephone conversation, Bullitt was widely regarded as Roosevelt's personal envoy to France, and as such was a man much courted by French politicians. Bullitt was especially close to Léon Blum and Édouard Daladier, and had cordial, through not friendly relations with Georges Bonnet. Historians have criticized Bullitt for being too influenced by the last person he spoke to and for including too much gossip in his dispatches to Washington.

On September 4, 1938 in the midst of the great crisis in Europe that was to culminate in the Munich Agreement, during the unveiling of a plaque in France honoring Franco-American friendship, Bullitt stated that "France and the United States were united in war and peace", leading to much speculation in the press that if war did break over Czechoslovakia, then the United States would join the war on the Allied side. On September 9, 1938, Roosevelt denied that the U.S. would fight on the Allied side in the event of a war breaking out over Czechoslovakia.

In 1939 Prime Minister Édouard Daladier informed him French intelligence knew that Alger Hiss in the United States Department of State was working for Soviet intelligence. Bullitt passed the information along to Hiss' superior at the State Department.

Post-diplomatic career

After the German invasion of France in 1940, Bullitt fell out with FDR. Bullitt insisted on remaining in Paris as the only ambassador of a major nation left when the Germans marched in. This angered Roosevelt, who believed Bullitt should have followed the French government to Bordeaux to look after US interests. Once thought a potential cabinet member, he found his upward mobility blocked and left the administration. He ran for Mayor of Philadelphia as a Democrat in 1944, but lost after failing to gain Roosevelt's support. Denied a commission in the U.S. armed forces by FDR, Bullitt joined the Free French Forces to oppose Nazi and Vichy government control over France and her colonial holdings. This period was likely the most productive from a literary standpoint.

Between 1941 and 1945 Bullitt wrote volumes of stories and social commentary on the dangers of both fascism and communism.

Bullitt and Freud

Bullitt had been psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud in Vienna in the 1920s. The patient and the analyst became such good friends that they decided to write a book together, a psychobiographical study of Woodrow Wilson. This was quite exceptional, as Freud very rarely cooperated with other authors. The book, first published in Europe in the 1930s did not appear until 1967 in the U.S. When it did, many psychoanalysts doubted that Freud had had much to do with it. Recent research indicates, however, that Freud was an active co-writer. The book nevertheless received an almost unanimously hostile reception, renowned historian A.J.P. Taylor calling it a "disgrace," and concluding with the question: "How did anyone ever manage to take Freud seriously?"

Freud's view of Wilson was that of a naive American politician whose foreign policy ideas were driven by religious fanaticism. Bullitt had been dismissed by Wilson late in the battle for the League of Nations, and Bullitt never forgave the slight. It is not clear how much of the book was really written by Bullitt, as he was skilled in several languages, while Freud wrote only in German and had died by the time it was published. Several references attributed to Freud are uniquely American, such as his introduction in which he compared Wilson's naiveté to Christian Science.

Works

• The Bullitt Mission to Russia, New York: Huebsch (1919).
• It's Not Done, New York: Harcourt Brace (1926).
• The Great Globe Itself, New York: Scribner's (1946).
• (with Sigmund Freud) Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study, Boston: Houghton Mifflin (1967).

References

• Adamthwaite, Anthony. France and the Coming of the Second World War 1936–1939. London: Frank Cass, 1977. ISBN 0714630357.

External links

• William C. Bullitt: Diplomat and Prophet—Documents Bullitt's opposition to the Nazis throughout the 1930s and the period leading up to the war.
• Works by William Bullitt at Project Gutenberg
• William Christian Bullitt Jr. at Find a Grave