- In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw war coming with Hitler's Germany, even as he reconciled the isolationism of American politics with his old internationalist instinct.

Today's guest tells the story of FDRs personal reliance on his hand picked ambassadors to Europe in the critical years before America's entry into World War II.

He's Ambassador David McKean, this week on Story in the Public Square.

(melodic music) - Hello and welcome to Story in the Public Square where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with the Providence Journal.

- This week, we're joined by David McKean, the former US Ambassador to Luxembourg.

He's also an accomplished author whose most recent book is "Watching Darkness Fall, FDR, His Ambassadors and the Rise of Adolf Hitler.

Mr.

Ambassador, thank you so much for being with us.

- Well, thank you, Jim.

And I'm delighted to be with you today, looking forward to it.

- Well, congratulations on dark, on "Watching Darkness Falls".

I finished it this weekend.

It's really an important piece of work.

Give our audience a quick overview of the book itself.

- Sure, well, you know, this is really the story of diplomacy during the, US diplomacy during the 1930s.

And what I decided to do was to really do a group biography.

So I picked four ambassadors in Europe, and obviously this doesn't encompass all of President Roosevelt's foreign policy during this period, but four ambassadors in Europe who I thought were critical to our foreign policy at that time, and really sort of traced their time and the kind of advice that they were giving to President Roosevelt during this period.

And it's a, it's a, it's a mixed bag.

As I say in the introduction, these are, this is a problematic, but very interesting group of individuals.

And there's also a supporting cast as well.

There's obviously the Secretary of State who at the time was Cordell Hull, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in many way the president's political conscience, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, who was just a brilliant individual and close to the Roosevelt family and finally Harry Hopkins, who became in many ways, his most trusted advisor, but the four ambassadors just very quickly were William Dodd, who was the ambassador to Germany, Breckinridge Long, the ambassador to Italy, William Bullitt, who was our first ambassador to the Soviet Union and then later ambassador to France, and finally someone who of many people are familiar with Joseph P. Kennedy, who was the ambassador to the United Kingdom.

- Now we're going to talk about each of them in a little bit of detail, but I, you know, having been a US ambassador yourself in the Obama administration, I'm curious, as a starting point, what do most Americans not appreciate about the role of an ambassador today and how does that differ from the role that these men played in the 1930s?

- So that's a very good question.

Let me start with sort of the second part of that question, which is that, you know, in the 1930s, this is before the internet, it's before, before Zoom, it's before, really before television and we were in many ways isolated, and you have to remember that we were only a little more than a decade away from the First World War.

And at the time there was really no overarching view of American foreign policy and so that we were somewhat isolated and there was a very much a feeling in the country that we wanted to remain isolated, that the United States needed, obviously we were in the middle of, in the midst of the Great Depression in 1932, when Roosevelt was elected so it was a critical time.

But the ambassadors for President Roosevelt were really his eyes and ears at the time and in many ways, Franklin Roosevelt was his own secretary of state.

So he relied on these individuals, and this is not something that would happen today, but he had, you know, he had phone calls with them.

He wrote them directly and they wrote to him directly, he read their cables.

So he was very involved in what the ambassadors were doing.

And whenever they were in Washington, they went to see him.

Again, this is not something that you would really see today.

Today's ambassadors, you know, I think we, our President in 200 and something, you know, countries with the ambassadors and consuls around the world so it's a vast, vast network that we have at the State Department these days.

And the role of an ambassador today has, it has some similarities because it's very important for the ambassador to be communicating what American foreign policy is and in some instances to be implementing that policy.

But I, you know, in my view, sort of most important quality that an ambassador can have is to have the virtue of being a good listener, because you do want to know what's happening in the country and you do want to convey that back to Washington DC to the Assistant Secretary and Assistant Secretaries of the Department of State.

- So in 1933, the United States was reeling economically and politically from the Great Depression.

What role did foreign policy play early in the Roosevelt administration?

- Well, you know, Franklin Roosevelt came to office and he actually had somewhat of a familiarity with Europe at least.

He had been an assistant secretary of the Navy, and he'd traveled to Europe many times as a boy and a young man so he knew Europe well, but foreign policy played really no role in the campaign of 1932 when Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover.

Roosevelt really didn't mention foreign policy and the only thing he really did was he came out against the Treaty of Versailles because he believed that at the time it was important for the United States not to be involved.

I mean, it was really this feeling that goes back to George Washington no entangling alliances and so he was convinced that it was important to the United States to say, to stay as far away from foreign policy as possible.

Now, the one thing that he did believe was that there were a lot of reparations that were owed to the United States as a result of World War One and so he wanted his ambassadors to essentially be sort of a collection agency to make sure that those countries, that they were posted to, paid their bills to the United States.

And he also was somebody who believed in free trade, and he felt that if trade could help again, to ameliorate some of the economic distress in the United States, then it was very, very important.

But the general feeling was that the United States should stay out of the internal affairs of other countries.

- So Roosevelt and Dodd, who was his ambassador to Germany, were aware of Nazi persecution of Jewish populations in Germany.

Can you tell us when they became aware of that and what their reaction was and how much they knew?

- Sure so it's, you know, it's an interesting history here.

One of the things that I write about was that there was a very detailed article in the Atlantic magazine in 1932 and 1933 about the rise of Hitler and about what was happening in Germany.

So Hitler was a known quantity at the time.

And when, but when Dodd went to Germany, I mean a little bit of background on Dodd, because I think it's important, he was from a small town in North Carolina.

He'd been educated at Virginia Tech.

He was, he'd lived for a year in Germany, so he spoke German, but he really had no diplomatic background.

He had no political background.

He was at the University of Chicago and was Chairman of the History Department there and knew somebody in Roosevelt's cabinet and the president was trying to find a really seasoned individual, a seasoned diplomat, a statesman to take the job of ambassador, but he couldn't, you know, he couldn't find the, four people turned him down.

So eventually he, this cabinet official suggested Dodd and Roosevelt had met him and said, well, that sounds fine to me.

And so he nominated him and Dodd went to Germany with an open mind and had hoped to, I think, you know, to live up to what Roosevelt described as sort of a liberal model of being someone who would espouse democratic values, but he quickly saw what was happening even though Hitler was not yet, did not yet have the full range of power.

The Nazis were very prevalent on the streets of many cities in Germany, and they were brutal.

They were roughing up anybody who was opposed them.

And so he slowly became aware that there was a movement in Germany that was very contrary to those democratic values that he and Roosevelt had discussed in their initial meeting.

And he became aware, I think probably in 1934, that after Hitler became the chancellor, that they were establishing work camps around Germany.

Roosevelt also became aware of this.

But again, you know, relating back to your earlier question, he was preoccupied with what was going on in the United States and so while he, and again, his foreign policy was that you should not become involved in the internal affairs of another country.

- Yeah, the, so much of that history feels heavy with the what ifs of history.

If the west had more forcefully confronted Hitler, one of the other challenges facing the United States at the time was the, was German rearmament.

The Versailles Treaty had kept the German army at a hundred thousand troops.

When did Roosevelt and his ambassadors become aware of German rearmament and what did they do about it?

- So actually Dodd became aware of that quite early in his tenure in Germany and, you know, this was a, was a priority for Roosevelt from the beginning, that the nations of Europe needed to maintain neutrality, that they should not rearm that, you know, there should never again be the kind of war that had existed in the Great War as it's known and when millions of people were killed.

So it was early.

I think that Roosevelt, however, you know, was somewhat powerless to do anything about it because he was, he was forced to work with a Senate that again, had wanted nothing to do with foreign policy.

The American people I think, would have agreed with him or did agree with him on the issue of rearmament, but there was no, there was no sort of groundswell about this issue.

And so that while his ambassadors, not only Dodd, but others as well tried to convince the Europeans to make this a priority.

It was, they found it very, very difficult and Hitler, you know, completely ignored the Treaty of Versailles and began to rearm.

Now the alarm, the alarm bell was sounded, but it didn't stop anything.

- So at the start of the Roosevelt administration, the United States had not formally recognized the Soviet Union, but it did so in November of 1933, walk us through that, why, why and how?

- Sure, so, you know, again, this is his ambassador, the man that Roosevelt appointed to be the first ambassador to the Soviet Union was a man named William Bullitt who was a very charismatic, interesting, intelligent individual.

He's a real character in this book and somebody who I didn't know a lot about.

He actually negotiated with Vladimir Lenin in 1919 in Paris during the peace talks and so he was very familiar with the Soviet Union and Roosevelt had met with Bullitt and immediately was attracted to him, liked him very, very much.

And Bullitt felt that it was important for the United States to have relations with the Soviet Union.

And again, Roosevelt thought that there might be opportunities here in terms of reparations and in terms of trade.

And he recognized that, you know, communist Soviet Union was not, was antithetical to everything that the United States stood for.

But I think he felt that in the end, we needed to have relations with as many countries as possible and that perhaps again, that some good could come of the relationship and Bullitt was very persuasive and very optimistic in the beginning.

But when he arrived in the Soviet Union in 1933, you know, he had a terrific meeting with Stalin, which I recount, a lot of drinking of vodka, and, but it was sort of downhill after that.

And within a year, he felt that he was powerless to get anything done, that he wasn't, he didn't have access to the hierarchy of the communist party.

He was being followed, his phone lines were being tapped and he wanted out and so that relationship deteriorated very quickly.

- Yeah, one of the things that struck me, whether you're talking about Bullitts first interaction with Stalin, Dodd's first interaction with Hitler or Breckinridge Long's initial views of Mussolini, there seemed to be, it's not that they were enamored, but they were taken by this first introduction to these leaders.

What do you think was going on in those each of those interactions?

- So that's, you know, that's an interesting question.

I think, you know, as an ambassador, you, again, you go, you know, when you're posted in a country, the first inclination is that you want to get off on a good foot, that you, you know, you want to, you want to listen, you want to be, you want to have access to people in the government, but you also have to go into these meetings with your eyes open.

Look, Bullitt didn't know Stalin particularly.

He'd never met the man before.

He had, as I say, a very sort of interesting first encounter with him, it was again, sort of a raucous dinner where there were a lot of the communist hierarchy was there.

And I think he thought he might be able to, you know, to make some headway with the communists.

A little bit different with Bullitt.

I mean, excuse me with Long, Long was sort of, I would describe him as somebody who was easily impressed by money and power frankly.

He thought that Mussolini, after his first meeting he called him a man of astounding character.

And, you know, Mussolini sort of had this kind of grand office that the two men sat in and he was a consummate flatterer, and Long liked being flattered and he had a beautiful house in Rome, Long did, beautiful residence.

So I think he thought the situation was pretty, you know, pretty good.

He was not somebody who in the end, as I say in the book, I think ever should have been appointed ambassador.

In fact, he's never should have been in the Roosevelt administration.

He was, he was not in the end, a very, very good, very good fellow.

You know Dodd, Dodd again was somebody who I think in the initially was trying to make a good impression with the German government and thought perhaps that he could have some influence there if he, you know, if he just talked to them and had, and use sort of moral suasion, but he actually pretty quickly understood that Hitler was not going to be somebody that the United States could work with.

And within a year, you know, he basically said that he was not gonna in any way participate in any official government functions where any of the Nazi hierarchy were there.

And by 1937, he would, he had called them all a, you know, a bunch of murders, which in fact, they were.

- Your book describes the evolving assessment of Adolf Hitler by Roosevelt and his closest advisors.

Can you give us an overview of that evolution, where it began and where it netted out later in his presidency?

- Sure, well, again, I think, you know, I think Roosevelt initially, he didn't really give a lot of thought to Hitler.

In fact, he sent William Bullitt early on and on a mission to Europe and Bullitt went to Germany and talked to somebody who knew that you knew there who was very plugged in to the government and to the media.

And this individual told Bullitt, you know, he told him very sort of surreptitiously, he said, Hitler, he said, he's, you know, he's a small time housepainter, who's managed to enthrall crowds politically but he's basically a flash in the pan and Bullitt relayed this information to Hitler.

I mean, excuse me, to Roosevelt and I think Roosevelt sort of tucked it away, but he knew that the events were devolving in Germany pretty quickly.

And he's certainly getting information from Dodd in 1934, 1935, 1936, that the situation was getting worse and worse.

And so he, he was very aware that Hitler was rearming.

He was very aware by 1937, that Hitler was sending his political opponents and German Jews to concentration camps.

And he certainly knew by 1938 with the Munich Accord, that, you know, that Hitler was someone who was bent on war with other nations of Europe.

Again, this was something that Dodd was telling him at this point, Bullitt was telling him this, that war was inevitable and actually even Breckenridge Long felt that war was inevitable at this point.

- So how did Roosevelt respond to the inevitability of war?

Which of course was the correct prediction.

- Yeah, again, you know, I think you've always got to keep in mind, and the way I sort of think about Roosevelt is that this is a president and it's not unlike other presidents, but Roosevelt was perhaps more a master of this than others and he certainly had bigger challenges, I think, than most presidents, he, again, you have the Great Depression where 25% of the country was unemployed, where of GDP had fallen to a levels 30 years earlier and when he came into office, you know, there were banks closing every day.

And so he had to essentially, it just triaged on so many levels domestically.

And he was also very politically aware of what was happening and he was very politically aware of where the country was in terms of foreign policy.

So it wasn't really until 1935 that he says, he gives, he says a speech.

In a speech he says, you know, I'm frankly more worried about what's happening abroad in Europe than I am what's happening domestically.

And by that time, he had actually passed a lot of very, very important legislation on the domestic level and things were beginning to slowly turn around.

So he was making progress, but things were devolving in Europe.

And so, you know, after Munich, William Bullitt tells him, listen, you have got to rearm the United States.

And at that time, the United States really had, you know, had no military at all.

So no army, had a weak navy and not much of an air force to speak of and Bullitt correctly advised the President that if war came to Europe, that the, an air war would be, would be extremely important and that he needed to vastly increase the production of airplanes.

And he says, at one point, you know, you need to have a, have a million man army because in a year or two, you won't regret it.

- And did you, David you, the fourth ambassador that you, that you chronicle this book is Joseph P. Kennedy.

And this is in some respects, the most absurd, the most fraught, the most complicated relationship that Roosevelt had with his ambassadors, particularly because Kennedy seemed to be defeatist in the face of German aggression.

Talk to us a little bit about that relationship.

- So let me just first say, you know, defeatist is exactly the right word.

It wasn't that rose, that Kennedy admired Hitler.

He actually thought Hitler was, you know, was an evil man, but he felt that the United States just should not be involved in any war in Europe and that we ought to find out, that we ought to reach some sort of accommodation with Hitler.

So in the end he became an appeaser, but it really was because he, not because he liked Hitler or admired him, you know.

I think Breckinridge Long and the other, on the other hand, there were indications that he actually admired some things that Hitler did which is appalling.

So, you know, Kennedy had served, they'd known each other.

First of all, Kennedy and Roosevelt had known each other a long time and Kennedy had supported him in 1932.

He had come to Washington and served as the first Commissioner of the Security and Exchange Commission.

He'd done a terrific job.

He wanted to be a united, the secretary of the treasury and Roosevelt refused to appoint him to that.

And after Kennedy resigned from the SEC, Roosevelt then appointed him as head of the Maritime Commission, which was some ways a demotion but Kennedy was loyal and he actually did a good job at the Maritime Commission as well.

And then ultimately he decided he wanted an ambassadorship to the Court of St. James and Roosevelt, again was, as I mentioned earlier, was an extremely political guy.

And he thought not a bad idea in 1938 to put Kennedy into in England.

Number one, it'll keep him out of the political, the political scene and the potential for Roosevelt to run for a third term in 1940.

And number two, you know, Kennedy was an aggressive and spoke his mind and he thought maybe he'll shake up the British government because Roosevelt actually did not have a high opinion of the British government.

Now, as that relationship progressed, and during the time that Kennedy became the, that Kennedy was the ambassador, Roosevelt undercut him at every point.

And Kennedy made a number of very ill-advised mistakes of his own, ill-advised moves of his own.

He talked to the press and he tried to make foreign policy.

And that was something that was, that Roosevelt was not going to stand for.

- We got about literally about 25 seconds left here, David, this is not your first foray into the Roosevelt era.

Why does this era still fascinate Americans so much?

- Well, I think because it is an era that, you know, so much was on the line.

I mean, you know, not only was our economy in shambles when Roosevelt took office, but our democracy was literally, our way of life was threatened by both Germany and Japan.

So it wasn't, it was an incredible period.

And we need, you know, thank God we had a leader like Roosevelt.

He was not a man without flaws, but this was a man who was very empathetic, but at the same time, very unsentimental, he was very pragmatic, but he was also very idealistic.

You know, I think he was the, he was the man for the moment.

- Well, the book is fascinating.

It's "Watching Darkness Fall".

He's Ambassador David McKean.

David, thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you want to know more about Story in the Public Square, you can always find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit Pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

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