A Saint in Politics

CORDELL HULL by Juilus W. Pratt. 2 volumes, 840 pages. Cooper Square. $15.

When President Roosevelt was about to appoint Cordell Hull Secretary of State, five Democratic Senators complained that Hull was too idealistic for the job. The objection was unusual, and F.D.R. laughed it off; but this first biography of Hull shows that the Senators had a point.

A diplomatic historian for 40 years, Julius Pratt has taken a close look at the Hull record. He plowed through the Hull papers in the Library of Congress, the unpublished papers of some of Hull's State Department colleagues. Pratt has written a spare, straightforward narrative that steers shy of judgments. But he does lead a reader to the inescapable conclusion that Hull--an amalgam of idealism, caution, and at times heroic stubbornness--was not up to the job of Secretary of State, even though he held it for nearly twelve years, longer than anyone else.

Confidence of Congress. Hull was a likable Tennessee politician, who became a state circuit judge at 32, served 24 years in Congress and was elected Senator in 1930. Frail but craggy in appearance, he struck people as the solidest of citizens. He looked dignified, even saintlike. He spoke with gravity and with a slight, endearing lisp. When he helped put Roosevelt over at the 1932 Democratic Convention, he was practically assured appointment as Secretary of State. He brought to the job a conviction that all the world's ills could be cured by lowering tariffs and living up to the principles of international law.

In a matter of months, Hull learned the major fact of his new job: Roosevelt intended to be his own Secretary of State. The lesson came when Hull went to the much-vaunted World Economic Conference in London in 1933 with the hope of increasing international trade by stabilizing the world's wildly fluctuating exchange rates. Roosevelt was experimenting with inflation as a cure for the U.S. Depression and did not want to peg the dollar. He torpedoed the conference (and Hull) with a disdainful note saying the U.S. would not cooperate.

But Hull had the confidence of his old colleagues in Congress, and in 1934 he persuaded Congress to pass the Reciprocal Trade Act, allowing the President to negotiate tariff cuts with other countries without having to go to Congress for authorization.

No-Good Neighbors. Hull worked hard to promote the Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America, but had a harder time persuading Nazi Germany to be a good neighbor. If Roosevelt was cautious in speaking out against Hitler for fear of antagonizing the isolationists, Hull was even more timid. He objected to Roosevelt's provocative speeches, argued down such formidable Cabinet colleagues as Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, who were urging direct action against Germany. In 1940 Canada was worried that Germany might invade Greenland and suggested sending some troops there. Hull vetoed the idea as too inflammatory. Soon after, Iceland pleaded for U.S. protection; again Hull said no. F.D.R. overrode him and sent a destroyer to the island.

From then on, the President bypassed Hull, at least in the European theater, and relied on Stimson, Hopkins or Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles for diplomatic chores. By 1943 Hull was humiliated enough to force a showdown. Either Welles had to leave the State Department, he told F.D.R., or he would. Though Welles was a close friend, F.D.R. knew the domestic political value of Hull. Welles left.

Hull had a freer hand in the Far East. The most important job of his career was handling the touchy prewar negotiations with the Japanese. Hull doggedly insisted that the Japanese clear out of China, as well as out of Southeast Asia, before he would discuss anything else. The Japanese refused to budge. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Hull admitted the Japanese negotiators into his office and, according to legend, gave them an old-fashioned cussing-out that all Americans cheered. Historians today generally agree that war with Japan was probably inevitable, but it has been argued that Hull never really gave diplomacy a try.

Hull was equally stubborn about De Gaulle. The leader of the Free French exasperated him by criticizing U.S. negotiations with Vichy France (which paid off handsomely in the Allied North African landings). When De Gaulle ordered the Free French to occupy the Vichy island of Saint-Pierre, off the coast of Newfoundland, Hull flew into a rage from which he never quite recovered. "Amid gigantic events," Churchill marveled, "this small incident seemed to dominate in his mind."

Least excusable of Hull's policies, Pratt implies, was the pressure he put on Chiang Kai-shek to come to terms with the Chinese Communists. Concerned above all with military victory over Japan, Hull wanted the Communists in the war; Chiang had them boxed into northwestern China. Chiang repeatedly said that the Communists had only one ambition: to take over China. Hull responded that the Generalissimo showed a "discouraging lack of progress in his thinking."

However, in 1944, his last year in office, Hull helped foil one maneuver: the incredible Morgenthau Plan. Presumably authored by Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White, a Communist sympathizer, the plan proposed to destroy all German industry and "pastoralize" the nation. Hull wrote later: "It angered me as much as anything that had happened during my career as Secretary of State."

Euphoric Future. Hull shared many Americans' illusions about Stalinist Rus sia. From F.D.R. down, most of the Administration believed that Russia would behave nicely in the postwar world if the U.S. went out of its way to be friendly. In Moscow in 1943, Hull persuaded Molotov to agree to a postwar international organization in return for Allied concessions: one-third of the ships of the conquered Italian navy transferred to Russia, reassurance Df a second front in the spring of 1944. In a euphoric mood, Hull went home to address a joint session of Congress: "There will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests." On the strength of that vision, which was shared by many, Hull worked unstintingly to create the United Nations.

In many ways, the U.S. was lucky to have Hull as Secretary of State in the prewar years. Though a Wilsonian liberal, he had the respect of the nation's conservatives. He helped swing national opinion from isolationism to internationalism. But like his mentor Wilson, he was too didactic, too cocksure of his own principles. By believing that the United Nations would solve all the world's problems and make obsolete the cold realities of Communist hostility, he contributed to the bad peace that followed World War II.

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