He was also special advisor to President Harry Truman and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes with rank of Ambassador at the Potsdam Conference in 1945.

[3]: 10 Davies played an important role in ensuring that the western states and Wisconsin gave Woodrow Wilson their delegate votes at the 1912 Democratic National Convention.

[3]: 10–11  Later, as a reward for his vital aid in winning Wilson the presidency, Davies was appointed head of the Bureau of Corporations agency.

Davies resigned from the FTC and launched his campaign for the special election that was held on 2 April 1918, but he lost to Republican Irvine Lenroot.

[3]: 14  Wilson then appointed Davies to serve as an economic advisor for the United States during the Paris Peace Conference following World War I.

[7] Davies’ most famous case was when he defended former Ford Motor Company stockholders against a $30,000,000 lawsuit that the U.S. Treasury Department brought against them for back taxes.

[2][8] Mary was the daughter of Civil War Colonel John Henry Knight, a leading conservative Democrat and business associate of William Freeman Vilas and Jay Cooke.

"[12] The German post was not open, but the ambassadorship to the Soviet Union had recently become available (William Bullitt resigned in May) and so it was agreed Davies would go to Russia.

Davies' appointment as the second-ever Ambassador to the Soviet Union was in part based on his skills as a corporate lawyer who had handled international cases, his longtime friendship with FDR since the Woodrow Wilson administration, and his steadfast political loyalty to the President.

In his memoirs, George F. Kennan recalls the animosity toward Davies that existed in the State Department's Division of Eastern European Affairs:He drew from the first instant our distrust and dislike, not so much personally (that was not of importance) but from the standpoint of his fitness for the office and of his motivation in accepting it.

We doubted his seriousness.... At the end of Mr. Davies's first day in Moscow, a number of us assembled in [Loy] Henderson's rooms and solemnly considered whether we should resign in a body from the service.

[14]Before leaving for the Soviet Union, Davies was directed by FDR to "make every effort to get all the firsthand information, from personal observation where possible, bearing upon the strength of the regime, from a military and economic point of view; also seek to ascertain what the policy of their government would be in the event of European war.

"[15][16] Davies' predecessor, William Christian Bullitt Jr., had been an early admirer of the Soviet Union who gradually came to loathe Stalin's brutality and repression.

By contrast, Davies remained unaffected[17] [citation needed] by reports of the disappearance of thousands of Russians and foreigners in the Soviet Union throughout his stay as U.S.

While he briefly noted the USSR's "authoritarian" form of government, Davies praised the nation's boundless natural resources and the contentment of Soviet workers while "building socialism".

[citation needed] In one of his final memos from Moscow to Washington D.C., Davies assessed: Communism holds no serious threat to the United States.

He ardently desired to make a success of a pro-Soviet line and was probably reflecting the views of some of Roosevelt's advisors to enhance his political standing at home.

[24] Mission to Moscow is a compilation, organized chronologically, of Davies' journal and diary entries, his personal and official correspondences, and his State Department dispatches (which FDR agreed for him to use).

He also made trips to London, Berlin, and to Washington, D.C. to confer with President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and there are journal entries covering those visits as well.

Part of the book's interest to readers is that it offers an inside look at the life of a high-level diplomat operating in a tense, politically treacherous, pre-war environment.

He was visiting Premier Molotov in the Kremlin to make a formal parting before Davies ended his ambassadorship in the USSR and began a new assignment in Belgium.

Recounting one anecdote from the meeting, Davies writes:In the course of our talk, I explained that I had always made it clear to the members of the Soviet government that I was a capitalist—this by way of not having any misunderstanding as to my point of view.

In a diary entry made shortly after the June 1941 Nazi-led multinational invasion of the Soviet Union, Davies records a recent meeting with FDR in the White House: "He had noticed that the press had carried the story that in my opinion the extent of the resistance of the Russian army would 'amaze the world,' and that this opinion was at variance with that of most military experts and others who knew Russia.

In 1943, Mission to Moscow was adapted as a Warner Brothers movie starring Walter Huston as Davies and Ann Harding as his wife Marjorie.

His rejection of the original script caused Warner Brothers to hire a new screenwriter, Howard Koch, to do a rewrite in order to gain Davies' approval.

[31] During the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings into the motion picture industry, Mission to Moscow was often cited as a movie demonstrating Communist propaganda in Hollywood.