A Calculated Risk. Evan M. Wilson

      INTRODUCTION: THE SETTING AND CAST OF CHARACTERS

      THE OLD STATE DEPARTMENT

      Dean Acheson remarks in his book Present at the Creation that the State Department of the early 1940s was closer to the State Department of the nineteenth century than to the department that he was to head shortly after the Second World War. It therefore seems logical to begin with a few words of description of the setting in which the officers of the Department carried out their duties. The ornate building at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street, dating from the 1870s, with its high ceilings, white-painted swinging doors, and long corridors paved with alternating black and white marble squares, was reminiscent of some exclusive club. The total personnel was so small that everyone knew everyone else. A good deal of attention was paid to tradition and to doing things in the Department's customary style.

      Critics of the Department sometimes said that its policies and way of life were as Victorian as the building itself. In 1947 the Department moved into a new building that had been designed for the War Department and that now forms the nucleus of the State Department complex in Foggy Bottom. It was hoped that this move might result in a streamlining of Departmental procedures, but whether this has come about is debatable.

      At the head of the Department we knew was Cordell Hull, a veteran of the Spanish-American War and a distinguished-looking man who had a distinguished record in Congress before becoming Secretary of State in 1933. Hull approached every problem with deliberation and caution, whether in his office or on the croquet lawn where he found his favorite relaxation. It was commonly known in Washington that he and the Under Secretary, Sumner Welles, were not on good terms, and that Hull resented Welles’ inside track to the White House. Hull, in fact, was never one of President Roosevelt's intimates: for example, the President never even showed the minutes of the 1943 Tehran Conference to his Secretary of State.²

      Welles was a patrician who had a long diplomatic career in Latin America. He had been a schoolmate of Roosevelt's at Groton. In the extensive correspondence between the two men preserved at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, he addresses the President as “Franklin.” Also at the library are copies of letters addressed to Hitler, Mussolini, and a number of other leaders at the time of Welles's 1940 mission to Europe, in which Roosevelt refers to him as a “boyhood friend.”

      Welles had pronounced Zionist sympathies, more so perhaps than we realized at the time. This emerges from the many references to him in the literature of the period and especially in the correspondence of the Zionist leadership to be found at the Zionist archives in New York and Jerusalem. Many of Welles's own statements, as recorded in the published Foreign Relations of the United States (Near Eastern series) and in his own writings in later years, provide further confirmation of this. Indeed, he was the principal high-level contact of the Zionist leaders, and in early 1943, for example, it was he who took Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization and of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, to call on Roosevelt.

      In the summer of 1943, matters came to a head and Hull asked the President to remove Welles. As Under Secretary, Roosevelt selected Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., then serving as administrator of Lend-Lease. Stettinius, a former steel executive, had the reputation of being a capable administrator, but Roosevelt clearly expected that in matters of policy Stettinius would follow his lead.

      The next year (1944) Hull, in failing health, submitted his resignation, and Stettinius moved up to the Secretaryship. Joseph C. Grew, a veteran career diplomat who had been Ambassador to Japan at the time of Pearl Harbor, became Under Secretary.

      Stettinius's administrative good sense resulted in a far-reaching and much needed reform of the Department's organization, but with Roosevelt in charge he made relatively little impact on foreign policy. In 1945 he presided over the San Francisco Conference, at which the United Nations Organization was set up, and thereafter devoted much time and attention to the world body.

      Shortly after assuming office in April 1945 on the death of Roosevelt, President Truman replaced Stettinius with James F. Byrnes. In doing so he yielded to widespread criticism that Stettinius, who under the law then in effect would succeed to the presidency, lacked wide governmental experience and indeed had never held elective office. Byrnes was a prominent member of the Democratic party who had served as Senator, Justice of the Supreme Court, and in the Executive Office of the President. Simultaneously, Dean Acheson, formerly Assistant Secretary of State, was appointed Under Secretary.

      Not long after Byrnes took over the Department, I attended a meeting in his office to discuss the Palestine question. Byrnes, who had the courtly manner of an old-fashioned Southern politician, sat at his desk, rocking back and forth in his big chair, his feet in their high-button shoes barely touching the floor. From time to time, as the meeting progressed, he took shorthand notes—he had been trained as a court reporter and the accounts of several conversations he had with the British Ambassador regarding Palestine appear in the Foreign Relations in the form of dialogue, just as he recorded them.

      Byrnes's time was largely taken up with attendance at interminable meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers and he devoted little attention to Palestine. In fact, he rather pointedly washed his hands of the problem and repeatedly stated that he was leaving it to the President to handle. Thus it was Acheson with whom we usually dealt on such matters as required top-level consideration in the Department. In taking on this assignment Acheson managed to overcome a certain reluctance which he felt at becoming involved in Palestine affairs because of his close friendship with Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was a prominent Zionist supporter (their daily walk downtown from their Georgetown homes was a familiar sight to the celebrity-watchers of the period).

      Acheson, who had an outstanding legal career and who later was to serve as Truman's fourth Secretary of State, was an impressive figure who looked the perfect diplomat. He had a keen mind and an incisive wit and our frequent contacts with him were always enjoyable as well as educational. With his very considerable skill in drafting he imposed on us the same high standards that he set for himself.

      Truman tells us in his memoirs that he soon became dissatisfied with Byrnes and his free-wheeling tactics. In January 1947 he availed himself of Byrnes's resignation, which had been in the President's desk drawer in