At Harvard, his professors did not tolerate the antics in which Bullitt engaged at Yale, such as his constant jokes in the lecture halls and his practice of diverting a classroom conversation in order to dominate it and show off his intellectual abilities.
[29] The Bullitts were described by the Russian historian Alexander Etkind as a "socially progressive, but culturally conservative" couple who greatly admired the welfare state of Imperial Germany, which preserved the rule of the traditional elites while providing sufficient care for the poor to apparently end the possibility of a revolution.
[32] When Bullitt objected that the Ottomans would be opposed to the loss of their capital, Rathenau cynically replied, "We would only have to publish full accounts of the Armenian massacres, and German public opinion would be so incensed that we could drop the Turks as allies.
[53] On 28 March 1919, Bullitt shared a breakfast with Lloyd George, who told him that personally that he was in favor of accepting Lenin's offer, but the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic led by Béla Kun had alarmed the Conservative Party's backbenchers.
[62] On 7 May 1919, Bullitt called a meeting of the younger members of the American delegation at the Hôtel de Crillon and asked all to jointly resign to protest the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which he argued were too harsh on Germany, in order to embarrass Wilson.
[89] 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.
[25] In It's Not Done, Bullitt mocked American life as asinine and philistine as at one point a character commented that the United States was full of "matchless clowns such as Bryan, Billy Sunday, Gompers" along with "the Rotarians, Ku Kluxers and the readers of The Book of Etiqutte".
[93] The plot of It's Not Done concerned a young man, John Corsey, from an ultra-wealthy family in Chesterbridge (a city in Pennsylvania that was a barely disguised Philadelphia) who attends Harvard Law School, but drops out and then works as a journalist.
[94] However, at the prompting of his overbearing mother, John abandons Nina to marry Mildred Ashely, a beautiful and "proper" woman from the American upper classes who strongly resembles Bullitt's first wife, Ernesta Drinker.
[101] Greatly influenced by Freud's theories, Bullitt wrote a novel, The Divine Wisdom, that was considered highly scandalous at the time due to its frank description of sexuality and an incestuous affair between the two main characters.
[103] The real reason for the divorce suit was that Bullitt had realized that his marriage to a well known Communist writer was threatening his political ambitions, and he used his wife's lesbian affair as his cudgel to win sole custody of their daughter.
Bullitt arrived in the Soviet Union with high hopes for Soviet–American relations with the aim of forging a possible alliance against Japan, whose imperialistic policies in Asia as demonstrated by the conquest of Manchuria in 1931 was a matter of grave concern in both Moscow and Washington.
[118] The American historian David Kennedy wrote: "The brash Bullitt and the silky Welles cordially detested one another, but they agreed that the United States must take a more active role in the world and encouraged the same attitude in their chief".
"[151] Kaufmann noted: "Whereas polo equipment for the Red Army, baseball games and zoo parties for Bolshevik functionaries had failed to soothe the Soviet beast, elaborate fetes and a superb chef at the Place de la Concorde brought him the most intimate confidences of high French society".
[160] In Berlin, Bullitt met with the Four Year Plan Organization chief Hermann Göring; the German Foreign Minister Baron Konstantin von Neurath; and the Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht to declare American support for revisions in the international order in favor of Germany.
[156] In January 1938, Roosevelt launched a plan for an international conference in Washington to be hosted by himself to be attended by diplomats from a number of smaller powers such as Sweden, Hungary, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, and Turkey plus three Latin American nations that he yet to choose.
[185] On 14 November 1938, Bullitt was present at a meeting at the White House where Roosevelt announced a secret plan to deter Germany from war by supplying American aircraft on a gargantuan scale to Great Britain and especially France.
[189] Roosevelt's strategy was to ensure American economic and material support to Britain and France on such a scale that Germany would never dare risk a war with those powers, but at the same time do so in such a low-key manner that it would avoiding angering isolationists.
[192] Monnet planned for France to create a corporation in Canada that would borrow the money for more aircraft orders, leading to Morgenthau to crossly point out the Johnson act of 1934 forbade loans to nations that defaulted on their World War One debts as the French had done in 1932.
[192] On 6 February 1938, Bullitt reported that Daladier had told him that Britain was "a most weak reed on which to lean" and claimed that Chamberlain had proposed international arbitration during the "Dutch war scare" of January 1939, when misinformation appeared that Germany was on the brink of invading the Netherlands.
[202] On 7 April 1939, Bullitt met with Colonel Beck and Juliusz Łukasiewicz, the Polish ambassador in Paris, to assure them as "Roosevelt's right-hand man in foreign affairs" as he called himself of American sympathy for Poland in the Danzig crisis.
[208] On 28 June 1939, Daladier told Bullitt that the only way to prevent the Danzig crisis from turning into a war was creating the "peace front" as soon as possible and for Congress to repeal the Neutrality acts as he maintained that otherwise Germany would invade Poland sometime that year.
[203] On 30 June 1939, St. Léger told Bullitt that his only hopes for stopping the Danzig crisis from turning into a war were a French alliance with the Soviet Union and for the United States to generously provide aid to France, especially in the form of modern aircraft.
[223] In a desperate gesture, Bullitt advised Roosevelt to send the U.S. Atlantic fleet on a tour of Greece, Portugal and the international free city of Tangier in a bid to deter Italy from entering the war on the Axis side.
[227] On 14 June 1940, the Wehrmacht took Paris, and the next day Bullitt watched the victory parade from the balcony of the American embassy on the Place de la Concorde as thousands of German soldiers clad in their grey uniforms marched triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées, following precisely the same route used in 1871.
[235] Bullitt was normally tolerant of homosexuality and his private secretary, Carmel Offie was more or less openly gay, but he chose to make an issue of the incident with the porters as a way to destroy the career of Welles, a man he greatly hated and whose job he had long desired.
[250] On his way home, Bullitt stopped in Dublin on 19 August 1942 to meet Éamon de Valera and asked him for permission for American air and naval forces to use Ireland as a base for anti-submarine operations along the North Atlantic run.
[252] On 16 June 1943, the columnist Drew Pearson wrote in his popular "Washington Merry-go-round" column that the War Secretary Henry L. Stimson had written on the margin of Bullitt's memo that it "did not serve the purposes of the country".
[272] Bullitt advocated greater American involvement in south-east Asia to preserve French Indochina and testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that if France failed in Vietnam, "the U.S. should perhaps take a hand in the matter".
[274] In his 1948 article "How We Won The War and Lost the Peace" in Life, Bullitt criticized Roosevelt's foreign policy towards the Soviet Union as one of endless blunders and concluded: "Russia will be able to mobilize the manpower and industrial strength of China and Japan for its ultimate assault on the United States".