"Traitor's" Birthday

President Roosevelt's most trusted adviser on European affairs is 48-year-old William Christian Bullitt, U. S. Ambassador to France. Chief spokesman abroad for the President's policy of encouraging the European democracies to resist the dictators' aggressions, Ambassador Bullitt telephones Mr. Roosevelt almost daily from Paris, writes him long, chatty, informal reports on the European situation.

Despite his hearty, rugged, American patriotism, the Ambassador has long been more at home in Europe than America. As a youth he studied in Munich. He was in Russia when the World War started. As a correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger he covered the early part of the War from Austria-Hungary and Germany. When the U. S. declared war, his knowledge of languages and European affairs landed him in the U. S. State Department, where he had an office only three doors from that of Franklin Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He was one of the youngest members of President Wilson's peace-treaty mission to Paris in 1918-19, and he was prominent among the group of young men who protested the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. He resigned from the peace commission when they could not get them changed.

Sent by President Wilson and Wartime British Prime Minister David Lloyd George to observe the new Soviet Russia, young Bullitt returned to have his report (recommending recognition of the Soviets) ignored and himself denounced by Mr. Lloyd George in the House of Commons. For the next 14 years Bill Bullitt occupied his time writing a violent expatriate novel, getting psychoanalyzed in Vienna, divorced twice. If his old friend Franklin Roosevelt had not won the Presidency, Bill Bullitt might still be sitting around Paris at loose ends.

But in 1933 Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, received Mr. Bullitt as the first U. S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Entering upon his job there with high hopes of cultivating real U. S.-Russian friendship, the Ambassador experienced a long series of personal disappointments and disillusionments. In 1936 he got himself transferred to Paris, likes it much better.

Frenchmen admire the Ambassador's cultivated tastes in wines and foods. They call him "that spectacular American." He is on intimate terms with many a French statesman. He frequently visits Premier Edouard Daladier. He was one of the few foreigners allowed to visit the powerful French Maginot Line. He has made little secret of his French sympathies and it was he who persuaded President Roosevelt to approve of the sale of U.S. warplanes to France last month.

Last week the most devotedly Francophile U. S. Ambassador to France since Myron Herrick, did his verbal best at telling the dictatorial enemies of France where to get off. At a George Washington's Birthday dinner at the American Club in Paris, attended by the Duke of Windsor and such top-notch French bigwigs as Premier Daladier, Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet and Chief of Staff Marie Gustave Gamelin, Mr. Bullitt replied to German and Italian press charges that the U. S. was trying to start a war. With intentional and significant emphasis the Ambassador said: "We are not in the habit of starting wars."

Taking the cue for all it was worth, M. Daladier replied: "Do I need to repeat to you this evening, my American friends, that France will never yield to either the menace of force or the blackmail of guile? . . . For us peace and liberty are inseparable boons. We [the U. S., France] do not need to be bound by texts, nor by pledges, to strive together for what we believe to be the good of humanity. We do not need to make contracts with each other."

Evening's low light: The Duke of Windsor, former King of England, listening to his old friend, Bill Bullitt, say that George Washington would "doubtless have been hanged as a traitor if it had not been for the assistance given him by the French."

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