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Author: Irwin Gellman Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421431378 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 551
Book Description
Originally published in 1995. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down, but he concealed the extent of his disability from a public that was never permitted to see him in a wheelchair. FDR's Secretary of State was old and frail, debilitated by a highly contagious and usually fatal disease that was as closely guarded a state secret as his wife's Jewish ancestry. The undersecretary was a pompous and aloof man who married three times but, when intoxicated, preferred sex with railroad porters, shoeshine boys, and cabdrivers. These three legendary figures—Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles—not only concealed such secrets for more than a decade but did so while directing United States foreign policy during some of the most perilous events in the nation's history. Irwin Gellman brings to light startling new information about the intrigues, deceptions, and behind-the-scenes power struggles that influenced America's role in World War II and left their mark on world events, for good or ill, in the half-century that followed. Gellman had unprecedented access to previously unavailable documents, including Hull's confidential medical records, unpublished manuscripts of Drew Pearson and R. Walton Moore, and Sumner Welles's FBI file. Gellman concludes that while Roosevelt, Hull, and Welles usually agreed on foreign policy matters, the events that molded each man's character remained a mystery to the others. Their failure to cope with their secret affairs—to subordinate their personal concerns to the higher good of the nation—eventually destroyed much of what they hoped would be their legacy. Roosevelt never explained his objectives to his vice president, Harry Truman, or to anyone else. Hull never groomed a successor, and Welles kept his foreign assignations as classified as his sexual orientation. Gellman tells the dramatic story of how three Americans—despite private demons and bitter animosities—could work together to lead their nation to victory against fascism. —William T. Walker, Presidential Studies Quarterly
Author: Irwin Gellman Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421431378 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 551
Book Description
Originally published in 1995. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down, but he concealed the extent of his disability from a public that was never permitted to see him in a wheelchair. FDR's Secretary of State was old and frail, debilitated by a highly contagious and usually fatal disease that was as closely guarded a state secret as his wife's Jewish ancestry. The undersecretary was a pompous and aloof man who married three times but, when intoxicated, preferred sex with railroad porters, shoeshine boys, and cabdrivers. These three legendary figures—Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles—not only concealed such secrets for more than a decade but did so while directing United States foreign policy during some of the most perilous events in the nation's history. Irwin Gellman brings to light startling new information about the intrigues, deceptions, and behind-the-scenes power struggles that influenced America's role in World War II and left their mark on world events, for good or ill, in the half-century that followed. Gellman had unprecedented access to previously unavailable documents, including Hull's confidential medical records, unpublished manuscripts of Drew Pearson and R. Walton Moore, and Sumner Welles's FBI file. Gellman concludes that while Roosevelt, Hull, and Welles usually agreed on foreign policy matters, the events that molded each man's character remained a mystery to the others. Their failure to cope with their secret affairs—to subordinate their personal concerns to the higher good of the nation—eventually destroyed much of what they hoped would be their legacy. Roosevelt never explained his objectives to his vice president, Harry Truman, or to anyone else. Hull never groomed a successor, and Welles kept his foreign assignations as classified as his sexual orientation. Gellman tells the dramatic story of how three Americans—despite private demons and bitter animosities—could work together to lead their nation to victory against fascism. —William T. Walker, Presidential Studies Quarterly
Author: Benjamin Welles Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan ISBN: 9780312174408 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 464
Book Description
In 1915, Sumner Welles, the son of an aristocratic family, began to work for the US State Department. Welles quickly showed an aptitude for the delicate job of international negotiation. His early successes in Japan later brought him to the attention of FDR who brought him into his administration as Under-Secretary of State. While Welles provided FDR with invaluable information about Europe and Japan, his main achievement was the development of US relations with Latin America. His bright career, however, was not to last. In 1940, FDR and his cabinet traveled to the funeral of William Bankhead, Speaker of the House. Welles traveled with them and, on the return journey, he propositioned a black Pullman car porter, allowing an aspect of his life that was heretofore hidden, to emerge. The scandal was made public and Welles resigned in 1943, thereby ending his career. This life of Sumner Welles is candidly written, for the first time, by his son, Benjamin Welles. Anyone interested in the accomplishments of this great man, the history of his time and the presidency of FDR, will want to read this beautifully written book.
Author: Christopher D. O'Sullivan Publisher: ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
According to Christopher D. O'Sullivan, there is still much to consider regarding Franklin D. Roosevelt's foreign policy. Exploring the worldview of Sumner Welles, who became one of Roosevelt's chief foreign policy advisors until Welles's tragic and scandalous resignation in the fall of 1943, O'Sullivan portrays an official coldly hostile to all European powers-allies and enemies alike. Welles resolved to create a postwar global Pax Americana based on the model of the Monroe Doctrine. Using a wide range of primary sources-many of them not previously available-O'Sullivan brings to light the deliberate aim of the State Department's planners to guarantee American hegemony in the postwar world. O'Sullivan explores American plans to build up China, to reconstruct Germany and Japan as postwar engines of economic recovery and integration, and to recreate Iran in the American image. On the question of Cold War origins, O'Sullivan demonstrates how Welles and State Department planners had, by 1943, abandoned a policy designed to block Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe on the grounds that there was little or nothing the United States could do about it. His book deepens our understanding of the so-called "special relationship" between Britain and the United States and makes a significant contribution to the history of the State Department during the Roosevelt era. It also raises larger questions about FDR's foreign policy. Given Roosevelt's tendency to rely on Welles's advice, this volume presents new perspectives on America's war aims. The first scholar to make extensive use of the Sumner Welles papers, O'Sullivan happened to be instrumental in the donation of the papers, which spent more than fifty years in private hands, to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library at Hyde Park.
Author: Townsend Hoopes Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 9780300085532 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 316
Book Description
In this comprehensive account, two prize-winning historians explain how the idea of the United Nations was conceived, debated, and revised, first within the U.S. government and then by negotiation with its major allies in World War II. 28 illustrations.
Author: Aviva Chomsky Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 1478004568 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 583
Book Description
Tracking Cuban history from 1492 to the present, The Cuba Reader includes more than one hundred selections that present myriad perspectives on Cuba's history, culture, and politics. The volume foregrounds the experience of Cubans from all walks of life, including slaves, prostitutes, doctors, activists, and historians. Combining songs, poetry, fiction, journalism, political speeches, and many other types of documents, this revised and updated second edition of The Cuba Reader contains over twenty new selections that explore the changes and continuities in Cuba since Fidel Castro stepped down from power in 2006. For students, travelers, and all those who want to know more about the island nation just ninety miles south of Florida, The Cuba Reader is an invaluable introduction.
Author: Randall Bennett Woods Publisher: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 070063181X Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
The Good Neighbor Policy was tested to the breaking point by Argentina-U.S. relations during World War II. In part, its durability had depended both upon the willingness of all American republics to join with the United States in resisting attempts by extrahemispheric sources to intervene in New World affairs and upon continuity within the United States foreign-policy establishment. During World War II, neither prerequisite was satisfied, Argentina chose to pursue a neutralist course, and the Latin American policy of the United States became the subject of a bitter bureaucratic struggle within the Roosevelt administration. Consequently, the principles of nonintervention and noninterference, together with “absolute respect for the sovereignty of all states,” ceased to be the guideposts of Washington’s hemispheric policy. In this study, Randall Bennett Woods argues persuasively that Washington’s response to Argentine neutrality was based more on internal differences—individual rivalries and power struggles between competing bureaucratic empires—than on external issues or economic motives. He explains how bureaucratic infighting within the U.S. government, entirely irrelevant to the issues involved, shaped important national policy toward Argentina. Using agency memoranda, State Department records, notes on conversations and interviews, memoirs, and personal archives of the participants, Woods looks closely at the rivalries that swayed the course of Argentine-American relations. He describes the personal motives and goals of men such as Sumner Welles, Cordell Hull, Henry Morgenthau, Harry Dexter White, Henry A. Wallace, and Milo Perkins. He delineates various cliques within the State Department, including the contending groups of Welles Latin Americanists and Hull internationalists—and describes the power struggles between the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Board of Economic Welfare, the Caribbean Defense Command, and other agencies. Of special interest to students of contemporary history will be Woods’s discussion of the careers and views of Juan Peron and Nelson Rockefeller—for American policy contributed in no small way to Peron’s rise, and Rockefeller was the man chiefly responsible for the U.S. rapprochement with Argentina in 1944-45. Woods also gives special attention to the impact of the Wilsonian tradition—especially its contradictions—on policy formation. The last chapter, dealing with Argentina’s admission to the U.N., sheds some light on the origins of the Cold War. Wood’s investigation of the Argentine problem makes a significant contribution toward the understanding of U.S.-Latin American relations in the era of the Good Neighbor Policy, and provides new insights into the evolution of hemispheric policy as a whole during World War II. It reflects the growing emphasis on bureaucratic politics as a principal determinant of U.S. diplomacy.
Author: Michael Fullilove Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101617829 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 494
Book Description
The remarkable untold story of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the five extraordinary men he used to pull America into World War II In the dark days between Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt sent five remarkable men on dramatic and dangerous missions to Europe. The missions were highly unorthodox and they confounded and infuriated diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic. Their importance is little understood to this day. In fact, they were crucial to the course of the Second World War. The envoys were magnificent, unforgettable characters. First off the mark was Sumner Welles, the chilly, patrician under secretary of state, later ruined by his sexual misdemeanors, who was dispatched by FDR on a tour of European capitals in the spring of 1940. In summer of that year, after the fall of France, William “Wild Bill” Donovan—war hero and future spymaster—visited a lonely United Kingdom at the president’s behest to determine whether she could hold out against the Nazis. Donovan’s report helped convince FDR that Britain was worth backing. After he won an unprecedented third term in November 1940, Roosevelt threw a lifeline to the United Kingdom in the form of Lend-Lease and dispatched three men to help secure it. Harry Hopkins, the frail social worker and presidential confidant, was sent to explain Lend-Lease to Winston Churchill. Averell Harriman, a handsome, ambitious railroad heir, served as FDR’s man in London, expediting Lend-Lease aid and romancing Churchill’s daughter-in-law. Roosevelt even put to work his rumpled, charismatic opponent in the 1940 presidential election, Wendell Willkie, whose visit lifted British morale and won wary Americans over to the cause. Finally, in the aftermath of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Hopkins returned to London to confer with Churchill and traveled to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. This final mission gave Roosevelt the confidence to bet on the Soviet Union. The envoys’ missions took them into the middle of the war and exposed them to the leading figures of the age. Taken together, they plot the arc of America’s trans¬formation from a divided and hesitant middle power into the global leader. At the center of everything, of course, was FDR himself, who moved his envoys around the globe with skill and élan. We often think of Harry S. Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and George F. Kennan as the authors of America’s global primacy in the second half of the twentieth century. But all their achievements were enabled by the earlier work of Roosevelt and his representatives, who took the United States into the war and, by defeating domestic isolationists and foreign enemies, into the world. In these two years, America turned. FDR and his envoys were responsible for the turn. Drawing on vast archival research, Rendezvous with Destiny is narrative history at its most delightful, stirring, and important.
Author: John F. Sears Publisher: Purdue University Press ISBN: 1612496342 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 363
Book Description
Refuge Must Be Given details the evolution of Eleanor Roosevelt from someone who harbored negative impressions of Jews to become a leading Gentile champion of Israel in the United States. The book explores, for the first time, Roosevelt’s partnership with the Quaker leader Clarence Pickett in seeking to admit more refugees into the United States, and her relationship with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who was sympathetic to the victims of Nazi persecution yet defended a visa process that failed both Jewish and non-Jewish refugees. After the war, as a member of the American delegation to the United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt slowly came to the conclusion that the partition of Palestine was the only solution both for the Jews in the displaced persons camps in Europe, and for the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. When Israel became a state, she became deeply involved in supporting the work of Youth Aliyah and Hadassah, its American sponsor, in bringing Jewish refugee children to Israel and training them to become productive citizens. Her devotion to Israel reflected some of her deepest beliefs about education, citizenship, and community building. Her excitement about Israel’s accomplishments and her cultural biases, however, blinded her to the impact of Israel’s founding on the Arabs. Visiting the new nation four times and advocating on Israel’s behalf created a warm bond not only between her and the people of Israel, but between her and the American Jewish community.
Author: Dominic Tierney Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822390620 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 235
Book Description
What was the relationship between President Franklin D. Roosevelt, architect of America’s rise to global power, and the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, which inspired passion and sacrifice, and shaped the road to world war? While many historians have portrayed the Spanish Civil War as one of Roosevelt’s most isolationist episodes, Dominic Tierney argues that it marked the president’s first attempt to challenge fascist aggression in Europe. Drawing on newly discovered archival documents, Tierney describes the evolution of Roosevelt’s thinking about the Spanish Civil War in relation to America’s broader geopolitical interests, as well as the fierce controversy in the United States over Spanish policy. Between 1936 and 1939, Roosevelt’s perceptions of the Spanish Civil War were transformed. Initially indifferent toward which side won, FDR became an increasingly committed supporter of the leftist government. He believed that German and Italian intervention in Spain was part of a broader program of fascist aggression, and he worried that the Spanish Civil War would inspire fascist revolutions in Latin America. In response, Roosevelt tried to send food to Spain as well as illegal covert aid to the Spanish government, and to mediate a compromise solution to the civil war. However unsuccessful these initiatives proved in the end, they represented an important stage in Roosevelt’s emerging strategy to aid democracy in Europe.
Author: Irwin Gellman
Author: Irwin Gellman
Author: Benjamin Welles
Author: Christopher D. O'Sullivan
Author: Townsend Hoopes
Author: Aviva Chomsky
Author: Randall Bennett Woods
Author: Michael Fullilove
Author: Sumner Welles
Author: John F. Sears
Author: Dominic Tierney