1“NO COMMENT”
Sumner Welles had a secret.
It was a secret that, in 1940, the forty-seven-year-old undersecretary of state had in common with thousands of other men and women across Washington, DC, a swampy southern town not yet capital of the free world—a secret that bound him to earlier generations and linked him with those not yet born. Once discovered, it was a secret that could lead to societal banishment, institutionalization, professional disrepute, and criminal prosecution. In certain parts of the country, at a certain hour of the night, this secret might elicit horrific violence or even murder. And in Welles’s case, it was a secret that would set off a perilous chain of events leading to the destruction of his career, the wrecking of his marriage, and the hastening of his death, and that would, for more than half a century, leave myriad innocent victims in its wake.
By all external indicators, however, Welles had achieved nearly everything that a man of his status and vocation could have wished for. The progeny of New England blue bloods, Welles was named for his great-uncle, the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, and he enjoyed wealth, power, and renown. As a boy of twelve, he carried the bridal train of his Groton roommate’s sister, Eleanor Roosevelt, at the wedding to her cousin Franklin. Following the same academic path as the future president he would eventually serve, Welles enrolled at Harvard, where he studied Spanish culture and history and graduated after three years. His rapid ascent up the gilded ladder of American diplomacy was guaranteed the day he scored higher than any other applicant on the Foreign Service exam, and his appointment as head of the State Department’s Latin American Affairs division at the age of twenty-eight made him the youngest person ever selected to lead a regional bureau.
In 1925, Welles left his first wife for Mathilde Townsend, heiress to a railroad and coal fortune and a ravishing beauty “as well known in Paris, Philadelphia and Newport” as she was in the nation’s capital. Townsend had herself been married to Sen. Peter Gerry of Rhode Island, a friend of President Calvin Coolidge. Though this was an era when the private affairs of wealthy and powerful men did not generally intrude upon their public careers, to cuckold a U.S. senator, and a close associate of the president’s, no less, crossed a line. It was widely rumored that Coolidge personally ordered Welles’s dismissal from the State Department as revenge.
Welles and Townsend lived luxuriantly in a French Renaissance–style mansion at the corner of Massachusetts and Florida Avenues, where they were waited upon by fifteen servants. When his old family friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency in 1932, Welles was assured a senior State Department job, and after FDR appointed him ambassador to Cuba the following year, the New York Times heralded Welles as “the most-talked-of diplomat in the service of the United States.” Elevated to undersecretary in 1937, he helped craft the administration’s Good Neighbor policy, which sought to redress the legacy of American imperialism in the Western Hemisphere through assurances of military neutrality and reciprocal trade agreements, and authored the eponymous Welles Declaration pledging nonrecognition of the Soviet Union’s brutal occupation of the three Baltic states.
FDR would have certainly chosen Welles to be secretary of state had he not been compelled to appoint the lethargic and sickly Tennessee senator Cordell Hull to placate the southern wing of his New Deal coalition. A curmudgeon with false teeth, Hull was an odd fit for the State Department, then the bastion of worldly, well-cultivated men with sophistication and class—men, in other words, like Welles, who “never walked from the State Department to the Metropolitan Club without his Malacca cane, and [who] in the summer wore an impeccable Panama” hat, as one of his administration colleagues fondly recalled. FDR’s practice of dispatching personal envoys like Welles to carry out important diplomatic missions rankled Hull, who may have been genetically prediposed to holding a grudge. According to legend, Hull’s father, returning home from the Civil War battlefront, got into a fight with a man who threw him into a river. Three decades later, Hull Sr. tracked the scoundrel all the way down to Alabama and shot him on his front porch.
Welles regularly found himself in the position of “acting” secretary due to the recurrent illness of his nominal superior, who frequently skipped cabinet meetings and, at those he did attend, often fell asleep. If Welles was present in Hull’s stead, and the president asked him a question, “the reply would be swift, precise, and comprehensive,” wrote journalist John Gunther. “FDR must have wished at least ten thousand times that Welles, not Hull, was the actual Secretary.”
While FDR could always depend on him for candid assessments of the geopolitical situation, Welles was the soul of discretion. “Just to look at him can tell that the world would dissolve into its component parts if only a portion of the weighty state secrets that he carries about were divulged,” Interior Secretary Harold Ickes recalled. Future secretary of state Dean Acheson, who was one year behind Welles at Groton and who worked under him in the State Department, described Welles as “not an easy man to know,” citing a “manner formal to the point of stiffness.” British prime minister Winston Churchill credited Welles with coining a phrase since uttered perhaps more than any other in Washington: “No comment.”
Ironically, it was a secret that would be Welles’s undoing.
On September 17, 1940, standing in for his titular boss, Welles accompanied the president, most of the cabinet, and some one hundred members of Congress at the funeral of former Speaker of the House William Bankhead in Jasper, Alabama. Aboard the presidential train back to Washington that night, Welles joined Vice President Henry Wallace and several other administration officials in the dining car, where he began to drink heavily. The men eventually retired to their private cabins. What happened next would assume near-mythic proportions.
At around 5 a.m., Welles pressed a buzzer, alerting the porters in the adjoining carriage. Alexander Dickson, a twenty-nine-year veteran of the Pullman Company, who had staffed the presidential train since the Harding administration, answered the call. Like every other porter, Dickson was African American.
“Come in, porter,” Welles ordered. “Close and lock the door.”
Dickson hesitated.
“It will be alright,” Welles insisted.
Moments later, Dickson fled in distress. “You have a cocksucker up there in Compartment E,” he told his colleague Samuel Mitchell. “He wanted to blow my whistle.”
Welles rang the buzzer again. This time Mitchell answered. Welles, shirtless and in his pajama pants, instructed Mitchell to close the door and asked if he wanted to make twenty dollars.
“I don’t quite understand what you mean,” Mitchell replied.
Copyright © 2022 by James Kirchick.
