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Sumner Welles is naturally fitted to his work, tailored to it as accurately as his clothes are tailored to him. First and most important, he is tough-minded, with the quality of mental resilience that can absorb pressures and withstand shocks, a sort of intellectual defense-in-depth. He has a firm hold on every one of the diplomatic virtues: he is absolutely precise, imperturbable, accurate, honest, sophisticated, thorough, cultured, traveled, financially established. He has been through the mill; the only surprises left for Sumner Welles are those of destiny.
He has, too, all the best minor diplomatic attributes: he is glacially distinguished, is one of the few U.S. men who can carry a stick with assurance, is a linguist of idiomatic excellence, never forgets names, never leaves so-necessary little things undone. He has a rich, resonant voice which he can inflect to an almost mathematical exactitude of tone.
Groton to Havana. Benjamin Sumner Welles was born in New York City on Oct. 14, 1892, the son of Benjamin and Frances Swan Welles. The senior Welles was something more than well-to-do. There is a legend (apocryphal) about the infant Sumner: that as a child at play, he wore white gloves.
He was already a member of the little band of conscious aristocrats at Groton School. At Groton he learned another syllable of the word "impeccable." What else he did there, no one can now recall. At Harvard he made no teams, was a member of no club. He is remembered principally as a fastidious dresser who wore stiff collars and a stickpin in his tie. He roomed with Horatio Nelson Slater, wealthy Bostonian, and in 1914 married Slater's sister Esther, a brunette beauty.
At Harvard Welles studied economics, Iberian literature and culture. He deliberately prepared himself for the Foreign
Service, deliberately chose Latin America as the most important field, in a day when Pan-American posts were regarded as hopeless holes. The Department played its ancient jest on him: he was sent to Tokyo. In two years in Japan he conceived an abiding distrust and dislike of the Japanese, and in 24 years has seen no reason to change his views.
In 1917 he was sent to Buenos Aires, worked there two years, became fluent in Spanish. By 1921 he was Chief of the Latin-American Affairs Division in Washington, the youngest ever—28. But in 1925 Republican Calvin Coolidge made things so consistently uncomfortable for Democrat Sumner Welles that he resigned from the Service.
Then he wrote his one book, a ponderous, lifeless, two-volume work which was technically a history of Santo Domingo, actually a careful indictment of U.S. foreign policy in the Hemisphere. The title was Naboth's Vineyard (Naboth was done out of his vineyard by King Ahab), and Welles struck out at Ahab-like Uncle Sam, at dollar diplomacy, at the use of military force to achieve diplomatically negotiable ends. He urged instead the stimulation of commercial ties, the interchange of experts, the sharing of the responsibility of keeping the Hemispheric peace. This was the germ of the Good Neighbor policy of Franklin Roosevelt.