A House Divided

One day last week, insiders said, two of the President's top czars consulted on the quiet with Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Subject: how to get rid of Under Secretary Sumner Welles.

All were agreed. Best idea was to send him on some very long and difficult diplomatic mission, possibly even to Moscow, as a kind of traveling Ambassador. In the meantime someone else could be inserted in his job, possibly Norman Armour, U.S. Ambassador to Argentina.

Somehow the story leaked to the press. Perhaps it was planted. Insiders said that Sumner Welles then telephoned the White House to see if this deal had the Presidential blessing. Mr. Roosevelt is supposed to have answered no.

That noon good, grey Cordell Hull coolly and thoroughly denied the story as a fabrication. He was a little vague on the future status of Mr. Welles but clear that no such move was contemplated.

Mr. Welles icily told the press that the story was false.

Thus, once again, a flare-up of long-smoldering hates and jealousies in the State Department illuminated the fact that the U.S. has at least three State Departments.

> Department No. 1 is presided over by stern, righteous, feudal old Cordell Hull, architect of the reciprocal trade agreements, believer in old-fashioned international law, a Cabinet officer who is politically unassailable.

> Department No. 2 is the province of chill, correct, intelligent Sumner Welles, whose ability is generally underestimated by the citizenry, who are either so awe struck or repelled by his attitude that they miss the man himself. Welles, product of Groton and Harvard, an ace career diplomat, is the author of the Good Neighbor Policy which Mr. Roosevelt adopted.

> Department No. 3 is that segment of U.S. foreign relations which Franklin Roosevelt reserves for himself, working through miscellaneous aides. This segment has expanded ever since the start of World War II, includes matters handled by Assis tant Secretaries Adolf Berle and Dean Acheson,and others handled by such quasi-foreign-relations agencies as OEW, OFRRO and the Nelson Rockefeller Committee.

Messrs. Hull and Welles treat each other correctly, and even with a kind of friendliness at times. But mentally they are poles apart on most things. Welles is one of the swiftest, most businesslike administrators in the Government; Hull, perhaps because of his 24 years in Congress, is firm in his upright beliefs but lost in masses of papers and data that stack his desk.

Meanwhile the President goes on using a different kind of man for each kind of work. Instead of appointing a Secretary of State to do the job, and entrusting him with it, the President has stuck loyally to Hull as the chief, but has consistently by passed and circumvented him for ten years, using other men in and around the Department for special diplomatic chores. Examples: Raymond Moley, Brigadier General Patrick J. Hurley, William C. Bullitt, to mention only a few.

For the present, Mr. Welles is staying, but his friends reported him sick of the whole mess.

The Hubbub. This State Department situation last week bubbled over into the press. The New Dealing New York Post, which has hammered away at the State Department, saw in Sumner Welles's position an analogy with Anthony Eden's predicament after Munich. The Post suggested that Mr. Welles resign, as did Mr. Eden, and "allow events and the people to vindicate him." The left-wing Nation offered as its remedy the dismissal of Mr. Hull, admitting in the next breath that such a thing could and would not take place.

The New York Times pundit, Arthur Krock, veteran defender of Mr. Hull, was already on record that the best solution would be, in effect, for Mr. Roosevelt to oust Messrs. Welles, Berle and Acheson, and let Cordell Hull run foreign affairs.

A Hydra-headed State Department can hardly have a clear foreign policy. The fall of Mussolini found it without any in regard to Italy (see p. 17). The initiative on policy toward postwar Germany has been seized without any competition from the U.S. by the "Free Germany Committee" setup in Russia.

> The State Department also permitted the Japs to seize the political initiative in Asia, by gifts and promises of gifts of territory to its satellites in Burma, Thailand, Nanking and French Indo-China. Said the New York Times of this U.S. blunder: "We cannot win [Asiatic good will] unless we have something to offer, and what we offer will inevitably be measured against what the Japanese have, if only ostensibly, begun to carry out. ... It is time to give some translation. We may not need to promise full independence . . . but we do have to give some assurance of betterment in their lot." How long can the U.S., while fighting furiously around the globe, continue to have a negative foreign policy? Not only U.S. soldiers & sailors but the U.S.'s Allies and enemies, increasingly demand to know what the U.S. war aims are.

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