Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull and Summer Welles.

• Author: Falcoff, Mark

Benjamin Welles (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 437 pp., $35.

Irvin F. Gellman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 499 pp., $39.95.

In late 1933 - and for a decade thereafter - pedestrians passing by the State Department (now the Old Executive Office Building) were treated to a spectacle promptly at 9:30 each work day morning. A chauffeured Rolls Royce would glide to a halt at the southeast corner, and an impeccably tailored gentleman would alight from the car. If, as in this case, it was winter, he would be wearing a double-breasted overcoat and brown fedora and bearing a cane. He would briskly ascend the granite steps and hurry to his office. Behind him would lumber a portly chauffeur, who would hand the gentleman's briefcase to a waiting State Department usher.

The arriving official was, unmistakably, Benjamin Sumner Welles, undersecretary of state and arguably the most important figure in American foreign policy during the first three administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Indeed, so central was Welles to U.S. foreign policy during those years that it has remained something of a mystery to the uninitiated why he never ascended to the top rung of the department, even after his equally long-lived chief, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, finally retired in late 1944. For years we have been awaiting a biography that would clarify these and other questions about Welles' long and spectacular career. Now, nearly four decades after his death, we have two. The first is by Welles' son Benjamin, who for decades was one of the leading foreign correspondents of the New York Times; the other, which is actually a multiple biography of Welles and his contemporaries (mainly, though not exclusively, of Roosevelt himself and Cordell Hull), is the work of Irwin E. Gellman, previously known for his studies of American diplomatic history.

For some years the American scholarly community has been awash with rumors about the fate of Welles' personal papers, and particularly about the unwillingness of his heirs to allow independent researchers access to them. The excuse, so it ran, was that Benjamin Welles himself was planning a biography of his father. But the project itself was so long delayed in publication that many began to think that the literary project in question was entirely fictitious - a dodge to prevent prying eyes from intruding into some of the embarrassing aspects of Welles' personal life. With the publication of Sumner Welles we can see that those allegations were entirely without foundation; drawing not only on personal papers but also on interviews with family friends and even descendants of his father's enemies, Benjamin Welles has provided a very complete portrait, a significant contribution to scholarship in its own right. Far from avoiding unpleasantries, he actually begins the book by putting his ugliest cards on the table - relating more or less in full what is known of an episode that allegedly took place on a train carrying a presidential delegation back to Washington from the funeral of House Speaker William Bankhead in 1940.

On that occasion, Welles, drunk and under the influence of barbiturates, supposedly propositioned (without success) several members of the dining car staff, all of whom in that era were, of course, black males. Although the episode led to an FBI investigation and was eventually leaked to Washington social and political circles, it was not until 1943 that Welles' many enemies in Congress, the State Department, and elsewhere succeeded in bringing about his resignation.

Such scorched-earth tactics against one's rivals and political opponents are a familiar feature of life in Washington. There is, however, one important difference: a half century ago no newspaper would print a word of the charges against Welles, even after, as Gellman recounts, Hull rather indelicately (and illegally) showed the FBI file to James Reston of the New York Times. Indeed, it was not until 1956 that two of Welles' enemies - one of them William Bullitt, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and to France - managed to plant the story of Welles' alleged sexual tastes in Confidential, a scurrilous precursor of today's (comparatively tame) supermarket tabloids. This...