Description:
Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles was one of the rising stars of FDR's administration. The president viewed Welles as indispensable, referring to him as "the only man in the State Department who really knew what was going on." And yet, at the height of World War II, he was forced to resign, as scheming colleagues (including Secretary Cordell Hull) spread rumors about Welles's alleged sexual solicitation of a male train porter in 1940. Something happened on that train; Roosevelt believed that the rumors were true, but, valuing Welles's expertise, he refused to cut his lifelong friend loose until the situation became politically impossible to ignore. This biography, written by Welles's eldest son, is understandably circumspect, concluding that a combination of exhaustion, wartime stress, and heavy drinking "let the bisexual nature latent in his nature burst their bonds." After his retreat into private life, Welles fell into the clutches of his valet, "a psychopathic bisexual ... whose hard drinking and turbulent influence hastened Welles's rush to self-destruction." (Shades of Harold Pinter!) Drawing extensively upon his father's papers, the author does an admirable job of rehabilitating Welles's reputation as a brilliant executor of American foreign policy, and skillfully portrays the cutthroat competition among members of the Roosevelt team, a competition in which he finally could not bring himself to take part.
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