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Young Bullitt bitterly swallowed his pride until May when he impulsively resigned from the U. S. Peace Commission after President Wilson refused to give him an audience. An admirer of Lenin, he predicted that the Reds would oversweep all Europe. He denounced the Versailles Treaty as a breeder of war hates, flayed the Polish Corridor settlement, warned of an early end to Reparations. Said Bill Bullitt: "I am going to the Riviera, lie on the sand, kick my heels in the air and let the world go to hell."
But in September, 1919, he was back in Washington and before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee speaking his mind on the iniquities of European diplomacy. He shot big round holes in the Versailles Treaty and quoted private conversations in Paris to make them bigger. He released his report on Russia and became a U. S. headline character. Mr. Lloyd George referred to "a journey some boys were reported to have made to Russia" and flayed the Bullitt report as a "tissue of lies." The net result of Diplomat Bullitt's activities was to furnish Republican Senators additional ammunition with which to de feat ratification of the peace treaty. But for speaking his mind he became a diplomatic outcast, with every Wilsonian Democrat ascribing his behavior to personal spite and sore-headedness.
After a Paris divorce in 1923, Bullitt married Anne Moen Louise Bryant Reed, widow of Red John Reed of Greenwich Village who went to Russia and today lies buried in the Kremlin wall. They had one daughter. In 1930 they, too, were divorced. Mr. Bullitt continued to travel in Europe every year, keeping up his personal contacts in London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna. His mind and manner seemed to please foreign statesmen as he told them what the U. S. was thinking and doing. In 1926 he published a novel (It Can't Be Done). Among his unproduced plays is one about the political life of Woodrow Wilson. He has a home at Ashfield, Mass, where he golfs, rides, picks apples. During the War he had an office near that of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, knew him well. He climbed on the Roosevelt bandwagon early last year, worked hard at Democratic campaign headquarters. Last January he again traveled abroad where some statesmen mistook him for an emissary of the President-elect. In the Senate the cry was raised that he was a Roosevelt "undercover man" peddling the idea of debt cancellation to Europe. Indiana's Robinson even demanded his arrest under the Logan Act of 1799. Such alarms were promptly spiked by Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Bullitt and the State Department. All that Ambassador Mellon could report was that "reliable eyewitnesses have seen Mr. Bullitt leaving No. 10 Downing Street."
Most of Mr. Bullitt's predictions about the world's "going to hell" have materialized. Today he seems a much better prophet than he did in 1919. The Versailles Treaty is in disrepute. Reparations have ceased. Germany is again a world power to be reckoned with. The Russian problem is no nearer solution than it was when he went to Moscow. But Special Assistant Bullitt is too smart to say openly, "I told you so."