The Modifier

Cordell Hull was polite and quiet to the point of colorlessness. A tall, studious, stooping man who talked with a faint lisp, he had a habit of clasping and unclasping his long, sensitive hands during periods of silent meditation. He was a Tennessee mountain man; in 52 years of public life he lived inflexibly by the code of the Cumberland frontier. He abhorred ostentation, insisted on personal independence, and never quite forgot the old Tennessee tradition of violence. As he grew old he developed a saintly look.

But he had shrewdness, a poker player's eye (said a friend: "He could look sad and beautiful and humble while he held four of a kind"). He was an implacable partisan politician. In moments of wrath he could curse, in his soft drawl, with the eloquence of a river gambler. Few events of the war years comforted official Washington more than the tongue-lashing old Cordell Hull delivered to the Japanese diplomats, Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura and Saburo Kurusu, on the day of Pearl Harbor.

Little Billy's Boy. He was born in a cabin at Starpoint, in the Cumberland foothills. Cord's daddy, trigger-tempered, one-eyed little Billy Hull, was famous. He had killed the man who shot out his eye and had grown rich rafting logs down the river (he left nearly $300,000 when he died). Cord started early to add luster to the family name.

He was a lawyer at 19, a member of the state legislature at 21, a circuit court judge at 31. In 1906, when he was 35, he was elected to Congress and went away to Washington. He served in Congress for 24 years. During the bleak years of 1921-24, when the rumble of the Harding landslide still echoed across the nation, he served as Democratic national chairman. Slowly, he built a reputation as an economist. He was mentioned, vaguely, as presidential timber. But the '20s were dreary years for Democrats. When he was elected to the Senate in 1930, he had good reason to believe he had reached the zenith of his career.

First & Last Chance. Then, when Hull was 61, Franklin Roosevelt became President of the U.S. and Cordell Hull was made Secretary of State, Hull had been in office only a few months when a major rift opened between him and the New Dealers. He was heading the U.S. delegation to the London Economic Conference, which sought an objective dear to his heart: the revival of international trade. Success, in Hull's view, turned on reduced tariffs and fewer trade restrictions. Roosevelt publicly endorsed these goals, but while Hull was crossing the Atlantic, the New Deal planners saw that free trade conflicted with their own notion of a "managed" price level; their influence was added to the old high-tariff group among businessmen and farmers. Roosevelt pulled the rug out from under Hull and the conference was a spectacular failure, with the British government placing all blame on the Americans.

Years later, in his memoirs, Cordell Hull wrote: "I believed then, and do still, that the collapse of the London Economic Conference had two tragic results. First, it greatly retarded the logical economic recovery of all nations. Secondly, it played into the hands of such dictator nations as Germany, Japan and Italy . . . From then on they could proceed hopefully: on the military side, to rearm in comparative safety, on the economic side, to build their self-sufficiency walls in preparation for war. The conference was the first, and really the last opportunity to check these movements toward conflict."

A Fulcrum of Influence. On many another occasion Roosevelt was his own foreign secretary, ignoring Hull. Yet Hull clung tenaciously--not to a job--but to a fulcrum of influence from which he could (and did) greatly modify the New Deal's economic nationalism.

After eleven years he could point to specific victories--the Reciprocal Trade Agreements, the Good Neighbor policy.

He received the Nobel Peace Prize for his early efforts toward the establishment of the United Nations. But after eleven years of office he was exhausted. In a moment of awful weariness he confided that he had come to feel that he was picking up endless lighted fuses and tamping them out. He resigned in November 1944 after nearly twelve years in office, longer than any other Secretary of State. (His successor: Edward Stettinius.)

For the rest of his life, Cordell Hull was in and out of the hospital, growing steadily feebler, suffering from diabetes and arteriosclerosis, often on the point of death but always able to call upon his Tennessee toughness to pull him through. Last week, at 83, in the U.S. hospital at Bethesda, Md., Hull fell into a coma. He did not awaken.

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