William C. Bullitt
| William Christian Bullitt, Jr. | |
|---|---|
 |
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| United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union | |
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In office 21 November 1933 – 16 May 1936 |
|
| President | Franklin D. Roosevelt |
| Preceded by | David R. Francis As Ambassador to Russia |
| Succeeded by | Joseph E. Davies |
| United States Ambassador to France | |
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In office 1936–1940 |
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| President | Franklin D. Roosevelt |
| Preceded by | Jesse I. Strauss |
| Succeeded by | William D. Leahy |
| Personal details | |
| Born | January 25, 1891 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | February 15, 1967 (aged 76) Neuilly, France |
| Political party |
Democratic (till 1948) Republican (from 1948) |
| Religion | Episcopalian |
William Christian Bullitt, Jr. (January 25, 1891 – February 15, 1967) was an American diplomat, journalist, and novelist. Although in his youth he was considered something of a radical, he later became an outspoken anti-communist.
Bullitt was born to a prominent, well-to-do Philadelphia family, the son of Louisa Gross (Horwitz) and William Christian Bullitt, Sr. His grandfather was John Christian Bullitt, founder of the law firm today known as Drinker Biddle & Reath. He graduated from Yale University in 1913, after having been voted "most brilliant" in his class. He briefly attended Harvard Law School but dropped out on the death of his father in 1914. At Yale he was a member of Scroll and Key.
He married socialite Aimee Ernesta Drinker in 1916. She gave birth to a son in 1917, but the baby died after two days. They divorced in 1923. In 1924 he married Louise Bryant, journalist author of Six Red Months in Russia and widow of radical journalist John Reed. Bullitt divorced Bryant in 1930 and took custody of their daughter, after he discovered Bryant's affair with English sculptor Gwen Le Gallienne. The Bullitts' daughter, Anne Moen Bullitt, was born in February 1924, eight weeks after their marriage. Anne Bullitt never had children. In 1967, she married her fourth husband, U.S. Senator Daniel Brewster.
William C. Bullitt became a foreign correspondent in Europe and later a novelist. In 1926, he published It's Not Done, a satirical novel that lampooned the dying aristocracy of Chesterbridge (Philadelphia) and its life revolving around Rittenhouse Square.The New York Times described the work as "a novel of ideas, whose limitation is that it is a volley, a propaganda novel, directed against a single institution, the American aristocratic ideal, and whose defect is that the smoke does not quite clear away so that one can accurately count the corpses."
Working for Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference, in 1919, Bullitt was a strong supporter of legalistic internationalism, subsequently known as Wilsonianism. Prior to the negotiation of the Versailles accords, Bullitt, along with journalist Lincoln Steffens and Swedish communist Karl Kilbom, undertook a special mission to Soviet Russia to negotiate diplomatic relations between the US and the Bolshevik regime. Having failed to convince Wilson to support the establishment of relations with the Bolshevik government, Bullitt resigned from Wilson's staff.
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