Retreat from Moscow

Retreat from Moscow

Bald and affable William Christian Bullitt's great dream came officially to an end last week. When in 1933 President Roosevelt revealed, as his first great diplomatic coup, the fact that the U. S. had recognized Russia, he simultaneously announced that his good friend, rich young "Bill" Bullitt, would go to Moscow as first U. S. Ambassador to the U. S. S. R. Recognition and appointment were a consummation for which Philadelphia's Bullitt had yearned and worked with increasing ardor ever since he went from the Peace Commission, supposedly on behalf of Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson, to confer with Lenin in 1919.

In Moscow, as an outspoken friend of the Soviet Union and a onetime husband of the widow of its U. S. Hero John Reed, Ambassador Bullitt quickly became the most favored of capitalist envoys. On the understanding that Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff had promised President Roosevelt that Russia would buy great quantities of U. S. goods in return for recognition, Ambassador Bullitt made plans for a $1,200,000 Embassy, which Congress on the same understanding had authorized, awaited the Red trade orders which would cement the U. S. and the U. S. S. R. in bonds of commercial friendship.

The orders did not come. Slowly it became apparent that Comrade Litvinoff had not meant quite what Franklin Roosevelt thought he had in closing their recognition deal. Russia, it seemed, did not propose to pay off old debts after all, proposed to buy U. S. goods only if the U. S. gave her unlimited credit and a long, long time to pay. Plans for the million-dollar Embassy were abandoned, the idle Embassy staff was pared to the bone. Climax came last summer when President Roosevelt was forced to transmit through Ambassador Bullitt a sharp note charging the Russian Government with flagrant violation of its pledge not to foster Red propaganda on U. S. soil (TIME, Sept. 2, 1935). Early last June disillusioned Bill Bullitt returned to the U. S. At the Patrick Henry Bicentennial celebration in Hanover County, Va. in July, appearing as the President's representative but with every listener keenly aware that the subject of Russia had long been uppermost in his mind, he declared:

"Dictatorships, based on secret police and firing squads, have been set up in many lands. The noblest words that can issue from the mouth of man have been prostituted and the noblest sentiments of the heart of man have been played upon by propaganda to conceal the simple truth: that those dictatorships are tyrannies imposing their dogmas on an enslaved people."

At a press conference one day last week President Roosevelt announced that his equally warm friend, Ambassador to France Jesse Isidor Straus, who fainted while reviewing a Bastille Day parade in Paris, had been forced to resign his job because of ill health. Half-hour later a one-line White House release announced that Ambassador Straus's successor at Paris would be William Christian Bullitt.

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