Word: bullitts
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William C. Bullitt, this week, spoke the President's mind...
...with historical care. In 1789 Thomas Jefferson, Minister to France, addressed his fellow Americans from the steps of Philadelphia's Independence Hall. He had just returned from Paris, where he had witnessed the first determined steps towards a French Republic. This week, another envoy to France, William Christian Bullitt, also recently returned from Paris, stood on the same steps (under the auspices of the same American Philosophical Society which had sponsored Jefferson) and declared: "I have seen the French Republic destroyed...
...well qualified as any expert observer to explain how it had happened was elegant, wealthy, bald-headed Mr. Bullitt, who had seen Paris fall. No one doubted that his words had first been well weighed by Mr. Roosevelt. But never before had a U. S. Ambassador, a member of the Administration, been permitted to talk on international affairs with such undiplomatic, brutal bluntness. Mr. Bullitt minced no monosyllables. What he saw was the need for desperate haste. He quoted Hitler's handwriting on the democracies' wall: Each country will imagine that it alone will escape. I shall...
...Said Mr. Bullitt: "The strategy of destruction by which the free nation of France was overthrown is the strategy of destruction by which the enemies of freedom hope to overthrow liberty in this, the greatest of the nations that freedom has created. . . . The United States is in as great peril today as was France a year ago. And I believe that unless we act now, decisively, to meet the threat we shall be too late...
...France, said Mr. Bullitt, there had been many honest pacifists, as now in the U. S. There had been many who believed the German propagandists who told them they could buy peace with Germany. There had been those who believed that Hitler would be satisfied after the occupation of the Saar, after Austria, after Czecho-Slovakia. "There are also Americans who argue that if Hitler should conquer Great Britain he would be content to stop there, and that the United States would be able to cooperate happily with the Hitler Empire of Europe. To believe this is to misunderstand...