The Foreign Service Journal, October 2013

56 OCTOBER 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Five Envoys, One Mission Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Took America into the War and into the World Michael Fullilove, Penguin Press, 2013, $29.95, hardcover, 480 pages. Reviewed by Steven Alan Honley We rightly think of Harry S. Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson and George F. Kennan as the prime movers behind America’s assumption of global primacy following World War II. But it in no way diminishes their contributions to take the story back to the beginning of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s third term, as debate raged over whether the U.S. should, or even could, enter the war. That is precisely what Australian historian Michael Fullilove does in Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Took America into the War and into the World. Although I initially found his subtitle’s whiff of hyperbole off-putting, Fullilove largely proves his thesis. Framed by a magisterial prologue and epilogue, and organized chronologically, each chapter of the book focuses on a different “fact-finding mission” (as FDR usually described them to reporters) dispatched to Europe between 1939 and 1941. Thankfully, the author does not share Roosevelt’s pungent disdain for the State Department and the Foreign Service. However, he also does not always seem clear about the differences between pub- lic diplomacy and the practice of more traditional forms. The first of the five special presidential representatives, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles (deputy to Cordell Hull), was the only professional diplomat in the group, and his Foreign Service career had actually ended in 1925. He visited Rome, Berlin, London and Paris in the spring of 1940 to deter- mine whether a second world war was inevitable and, if so, what the United States could and should do to assist its allies. Ironically, perhaps the chief obstacle Welles and the next envoy, Bill Dono- van—a World War I hero who would later head the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency—faced was the U.S. ambassador at the Court of St. James’s at the time. Joe Kennedy was publicly critical of the government to which he was accredited and did his best behind the scenes to undermine bilateral ties. (If one needed a case study to illustrate the perils of elevat- ing incompetent political appointees to high positions, particularly at critical junctures, one could hardly do better than Kennedy.) Lamentably, though Kennedy’s suc- cessor in London, John G. “Gil” Winant, was by all accounts highly capable and energetic, the series of visits by FDR’s envoys badly undermined his authority. After winning an unprecedented third term in November 1940, Roosevelt threw a lifeline to the United Kingdom in the form of the Lend-Lease military assistance program, and promptly dispatched three men to London to help secure it. First Harry Hopkins, the frail social worker and presidential confi- dant, was sent to explain the program to Prime Minister Winston Churchill; then Averell Harriman, a handsome, ambitious railroad heir, was tasked with expediting aid. FDR even put to work his Republican opponent in the 1940 presidential elec- tion, Wendell Willkie. (Imagine Barack Obama sending Mitt Romney to evaluate developments in the Middle East for him.) The book makes clear that all five envoys were successful in their respec- tive missions, which were both broad and vague enough to give FDR plenty of room to disavow any agreements he found inconvenient. But for my money, Hopkins was far and away the most effec- tive diplomat, which explains why FDR sent him on three increasingly arduous and far-flung missions in 1941 (including a trip to Russia to confer with Josef Stalin). Hopkins was already suffering from dire health problems, so his dedication to duty almost certainly shortened his life considerably. Drawing from a prodigious range of primary and secondary sources, includ- ing hundreds of letters and telegrams, Fullilove does a splendid job of setting the stage for each trip. He then describes how the envoy carried out his various tasks and assesses the trip’s effectiveness. In the process, we get a great deal of local color, including approving accounts of the fact that two of the five envoys carried on extramarital affairs during their missions (one with Churchill’s daughter-in-law!). That “boys will be boys” attitude makes all the more galling Fullilove’s penchant for directing opprobrium at Sumner Welles’ bisexuality, which had no bearing what- soever on the performance of his duties. Those concerns aside, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and warmly recom- mend it. Steven Alan Honley is editor of the Journal . Each chapter focuses on a different “fact-finding mission” FDR dispatched to Europe between 1939 and 1941. BOOKS