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Onetime Columnists Joseph Alsop & Robert Kintner described Mr. Welles as looking like a man with a bit of bad fish caught in his mustache. Newshawk Blair Bolles said simply: "Mr. Welles is cold fish. He was brought up in ... cold-fish ways . . . went to the cold-fish schools . . .
entered a cold-fish calling. His hero is a slightly warmed-over cold fish, Charles Evans Hughes. He is as reserved as a box at the opera. . . . Even his blond mustache looks cold." A Central-American Minister described him as looking like a tall glass of distilled ice water.
Departmental little-wigs, leaving his office after a dressing down, often turn up their coat collars and feign a shiver. Sometimes the shiver is not feigned. Receiving a diplomatic protest or rebuff through Welles has been likened to being stabbed to the heart with an icicle.
Welles is a diplomat's diplomat, as Mel Ott is a ballplayer's ballplayer. But there have been other contributing causes to the popular misunderstanding of Sumner Welles. The Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 put him squarely on the spot. He threw his weight heavily on the side of Franco and the Fascists. For this he has never been forgiven. But his reasoning was clear.
Almost to a man the ruling classes and the Governments of Latin America were pro-Franco, pro-Catholic, even pro-Fascist, if that were necessary to kill Communism.
To keep for the U.S. the good will of Latin America, Welles opposed aiding the Loyalists in Spain, worked persistently toward a policy of Hemisphere neutrality.
He was successful. The New Deal's natural sympathy toward a democratic Government in Spain was never permitted to reach the point of actual aid. The other Governments in the Hemisphere were comforted to find the U.S. aligned with them. This policy, the Department now admits privately, was a great aid to Hitler and Fascism. But the Hemisphere movement toward unity made great gains.
Next came Munich. Welles was in the thick of appeasement — but so was Frank lin Roosevelt. Welles sat in on all the councils, helped devise the pleading notes that the President sent to Mussolini, Hitler, Benes, Chamberlain, Daladier. But Welles had none of the illusions that haunted Chamberlain and Daladier. From Munich on, he was at the shoulder of Cordell Hull and the President in every move taken, and all the moves were against Naziism.
Welles did not give up diplomatically, any more than the President did; it was on the theory of let's-take-one-last-look-around-before-the-explosion that Roosevelt sent Welles to Rome, Berlin, Paris and London in February 1940. "No proposals, no commitments," was the order given Welles. He merely talked and listened. The fruit of his trip was at once a little thing and a big one: the final, absolute conviction that Adolf Hitler is an utter and complete liar.