"On January 17, 1940, Harold Nicolson heard that there was 'still a group in the war Cabinet working for appeasement and at present in negotiation via the former Chancellor Bruning to make peace with the German General Staff on condition that they eliminate Hitler'. But the chance that the German 'opposition' might play the deus ex machina was long gone. Roosevelt was even less realistic. He continued to act as if a compromise peace might still be concocted on the basis of Munich-style concessions to the dictators; hence the 1940 trips to Europe by the Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, and the Vice-President of General Motors, James Mooney, the former touting concessions to Germany that even Chamberlain and Halifax thought laughable. Only with the fall of France was appeasement finally buried."
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LGBT peopleUnited States Under Secretaries of StateHarvard University alumniUnited States Ambassadors to Cuba
Original Language: English
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Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 381
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sumner_Welles
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Sumner Welles
Benjamin Sumner Welles (October 14, 1892 – September 24, 1961) was an American government official and diplomat in the Foreign Service. He was a major foreign policy adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and served as Under Secretary of State from 1936 to 1943, during Roosevelt's presidency. He preferred to be called Sumner after his famous relative Charles Sumner, a leading Senator from Massachusetts during the American Civil War and Reconstruction.
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