Sumner Welles

Sumner Welles (1892-1961) was Under Secretary of State in US 1937-1943 during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.

During the Cuban crisis in 1920, Washington appointed Welles as ambassador to Cuba. Welles arrived in Havana with a specific charge: mediate ‘in any form most suitable’ an end to the Cuban crisis. Welles’ role in these kinds of mediations was crucial. Welles started mediating and promising both sides of the Cuban opponents what they wanted to hear.

Welles promised Machado help of new commercial treaty to relieve economic distress if Machado reached a political settlement with the opposition. The government believed that the proposed mediation represented a clever form of continued support and a guarantee that Machado would serve a full length of his term.

Welles promised the opponents of the Machado’s government a change of government, and participation in the subsequent administration, if they joined the mediation and supported an orderly transfer of power. The opposition believed that the mediation was an ingenious method by which the United States planned to remove Machado.

The mediation provided the United States the means with which to pursue several policy objectives at once. The mediations provided the means through which opposition groups could obtain their objectives and join the political process in an orderly, instructional fashion. Just as important as easing Machado out was the necessity of easing new political elements in. The mediation conferred on sectors of outlawed opposition a measure of political legitimacy, providing them with a vested interest in a settlement sanctioned and supported by the United States. This served as a recruitment process, a method by which the US determined which groups were ‘responsible’ and which were not.

As U.S. special envoy to Cuba in 1934, Welles, along with the Cuban upper class, maneuvered to oust then-President Gerardo Machado from office with the support of Fulgencio Batista, an army sergeant. In January 1934, Batista transferred army support from Grau to Union Nacionalista leader Carlos Mendieta. Within five days, the United States recognized the new government.

Following the principles of Stimson Doctrine, on July 23, 1940, he made a declaration on the US non-recognition policy of the Soviet annexation and incorporation of the three Baltic States as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. More than 50 countries later followed US in this position.

Beautifully groomed, tall, austere, chilly --- he had it all. He was rich, he was smart, he was handsome --- in that 1920's type of well-groomed, double-breasted handsome. (All his clothes were tailored in London; they even fabricated his shoes.) Welles' grasp of world affairs was astonishing; he spoke several languages, and was known as a man who would work nonstop on whatever project was sent his way. He was once described by Washington columnists Alsop and Kintner as a "tall, powerfully-built, beautifully tailored man with the glacial manner, and an expression which suggests that a morsel of bad fish has somehow or other lodged itself in his moustache." But fate --- in the form of the strange windings of his icy personality --- intervened. On a presidential train to Alabama, in 1940, Welles, drunk, tried to seduce not one but several sleeping-car porters. Possibly no one would believe that a senior government official in his right mind --- least of all the patrician Under Secretary of State --- would solicit Pullman porters on a train carrying the President, the cabinet, the Secret Service and railway officials. But it was so (a similar incident occurred on another train weeks later), and although it took three years, the man who rose to, in effect, be such a powerful force in U. S. foreign affairs, a major architect of what was to become the U. N., was finally driven from office. (According to his son, he was able to stay as long as he did because Roosevelt believed that what a man did when drunk should not be held against him.) Yet, Welles, Senior was a man who was, he says, a "secret drinker, physically and emotionally exhausted by ten years of crushing responsibility." The result: Weary and in his cups, he let the bisexual urges latent in his nature burst their bonds, leading to tawdry advances to railway porters and others. ("Tawdry" in our view doesn't sound or feel like exactly the right word.) The last eighteen years of Welle's life --- 1943 - 1961 --- were a mess. He turned morose, drank to such an extent that his wife abandoned him, and hired on as butler a bisexual ne'er-do-well named Gustave who turned his world and his life to a shambles --- chasing the maids around the kitchen with a meat-cleaver, for one. It was a time marked by bitter memories and bitter vituperative letters directed at his enemies, all left over from his days of glory. His troubles were revealed to the world in a 1956 issue of Confidential, the primary outing magazine of its day. These and other revelations caused Welles to attempt suicide in a creek near his mansion, in the middle of the winter. It's a woeful tale of hubris and a man at war with his own passions, but there is something rather diffident in his son's account, told distantly; coldly, even. For one thing, Benjamin refers to himself, rather oddly, in the third person, as if he didn't want to seem too involved. (When one writes about a close family member, one should not have to refer to one's self as "he.) It appears that this is a tale by a man who hasn't fully integrated as writer and as son the story of one who was fearfully proud when successful, and fearfully tortured when unmasked.