The Donkey, the Carrot, and the Club: William C. Bullitt and Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1948 PDF
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THE DONKEY, THE CARROT, AND THE CLUB THE DONKEY, THE CARROT, AND THE CLUB William C. Bullitt and Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1948 Michael Cassella-Blackbum Westport, Connecticut London Library of Congress Cataloging Data can be found online at www.loc.gov British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright C 2004 by Michael Cassella-Blackbum All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number ISBN: 0-275-96820-0 First published in 2004 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.pmeger.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright Acknowledgment The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material. Lines from “From Morning-Glory to Petersburg.’* Copyright © 2002, 1967,1963 by Adrienne Rich, from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems, 1950-2001 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Letters of Edward Mandell House to William Christian Bullitt, 1917-1919. Edward Mandell House Papers. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. William C. Bullitt Microfilm Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. From Morning-glory to Petersburg (THE WORLD BOOK, 1928) “Organized knowledge in story and picture” confronts through dusty glass an eye grown dubious. I can recall when knowledge still was pure, not contradictory, pleasurable as cutting out a paper doll. You opened up a book and there it was: everything just as promised, from Kurdistan to Mormons, Gum Arabic to Kumquat, neither more nor less. Facts could be kept separate by a convention; that was what made early childhood possible. Now knowledge finds me out; in all its risible untidiness it traces me to each address, dragging in things I never thought about. I don’t invite what facts can be held at arm’s length; a family of jeering irresponsibles always comes along gypsy-style and there you have them all forever on your hands. It never pays. If I could still extrapolate the morning-glory on the gate from Petersburg in history—but it’s too late. 1954 Adrienne Rich Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements xiii 1 Introduction 1 2 The Origins of the Cold War 11 3 Mission to Moscow 33 4 Living the Life of a Radical 63 5 Recognition of the Soviet Union, 1933 91 6 The Donkey, the Carrot, and the Club 117 7 Fear and Loathing in Moscow 147 8 The Revenant in Paris 177 9 At War 203 10 Bullitt, History, and the Postwar Order 231 11 Conclusion 237 Bibliograhical Essay 263 Bibliography 269 Index 281 Preface This work is first and foremost a biography of William C. Bullitt. It tells the story of those years when Bullitt was intimately connected to Russia and the Soviet Union. It focuses on perhaps the most charming, thoughtful, and devi ous person in the interwar and early postwar years of Soviet-American rela tions. Bullitt is a fascinating human being, for better or worse. The work also tells the story of those whom Bullitt tried to reason with and persuade, and those he attempted to bully and cajole to ensure that the United States reached its objectives in Soviet-American relations. If the work is exciting, enlighten ing, and frustrating it is because William C. Bullitt is all that and more. I originally intended to tell the story of ideology through Bullitt, but real ized after the first few drafts that the work had two too many themes: ideologi cal conflict and William C. Bullitt, the person and diplomat. After a reviewer bludgeoned me with criticism about my schizophrenic work, it came to me that if I simply let Bullitt and his truculent Soviet adversary, Maksim Litvinov, tell their tale of Soviet-American relations in their own words, in their own time, I had little to do in order for ideology to come forward as a player in this story. Ideology, in particular Wilsonian international liberalism and Marxism- Leninism, shines throughout this work because it meant so much to Bullitt and the Soviet leadership he dealt with on a regular basis. Thus, one of the major points of this work is how ideology colored Bullitt's view of Soviet- American relations from 1917 to 1948. Belief systems are amazingly power ful. Nationalism, for example, can carry a people to the moon or to the wholesale slaughter of neighboring peoples. William C. Bullitt lived by his belief in Wilsonian international liberalism. To be sure, foreign policy making is com X Preface posed of many variables. In the last decade or so historians have paid more attention to cultural determinants, such as consumer goods, music, and mov ies as purveyors of influence. Coca-Cola sells not only a soft drink but America as well. Ideology helped sell the Cold War. According to John Lewis Gaddis in We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Stalin “never gave up on the idea of an eventual world revolution.”11 argue that Bullitt and many others in the State Department did not give up on the eventuality of a liberal world order. Unfortunately, ideology is difficult to measure and uneven in its use, but understanding its use is important nonetheless. This work is about William C. Bullitt, but the use and misuse of ideology in Russian and Soviet-American relations remains quite prominent as well. The second major point of this work is Bullitt’s attempts to encircle first the Bolshevik state and then the Soviet Union in a Liberal world order. To do this the work follows Bullitt’s early years in the State Department, beginning in 1917 when he first came in contact with the “Russian problem.” Bullitt was sympathetic to revolutionary efforts, but saw the Russian Revolution as an opportunity to incorporate the weak and insignificant Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin into the larger Liberal world order. To Bullitt’s great frustra tion, Woodrow Wilson and the Allied leadership at the Paris Peace Confer ence refused, for many different reasons, to take those steps. After this first failure, Bullitt showed up in the expatriate world of the 1920s where he married the exotic socialist Louise Bryant, wrote a scorching novel of Philadelphian elite society, wrote a biography with Sigmund Freud of Woodrow Wilson, and finally returned to the fold of the rising Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt. He never strayed far from the issue of Russia and the Soviet Union. Again Bullitt attempted to isolate the former Bolsheviks. He helped orchestrate American recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933. He became the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union, but he could not solve the nagging problems between the two nations. Diplomacy failed as the American and Soviet leadership again and again had different ideas about how problems such as debts, loans, and propaganda between the United States and the Soviet Union could be resolved. My last point is to show how Bullitt’s fear and loathing of the Soviet Union drove him to take the opposite stance from that for which he had earlier worked so hard; he began the effort to isolate the Soviets from the Liberal world order. As a prominent member of the diplomatic corps in Europe, Bullitt attempted, but needed little help, to marginalize the Soviets from the ranks of Liberal nations. As ambassador to France from 1936 to 1940, Bullitt’s paranoid views about the Soviet Union encouraged him to try building a stable Europe with France and Nazi Germany allied at its center. Even in the wake of Hitler’s seizures of Austria and Czechoslovakia, Bullitt did nothing to help turn En gland and France toward the Soviets rather than toward Nazi Germany. Back in the United States while the war raged on, but often on the outside of the Roosevelt administration, Bullitt attempted to wake up as many as pos
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