Cordell Hull Quotes

A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on. —CORDELL HULL, secretary of state to President Franklin Delano R

A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on. —CORDELL HULL, secretary of state to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

A school yard full of unruly school children in which children don't always understand the consequences of what they do. -US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, on international relations

Barrett opened the door and stepped into the large, spacious corner office of Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of state. “What’s the matter, Bill?” Hull asked, looking up from the stack of papers on his large oak desk. “Looks like you’ve seen a ghost.” “It’s the Czechs, sir,” Barrett said. “What about them?” “Hitler’s forces just crossed their border.” Hull was aghast. “Germany has invaded Czechoslovakia?” “I’m afraid so, sir.” “This is confirmed?” Barrett nodded. “Very well,” Hull said. “Get the White House on the line. I need to see the president.

Later that day, at about five-thirty P.M., Harriman met with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who was also suffering from a cold and looked tired. The two discussed the broader naval situation, in particular the threat to Singapore posed by the rising power and aggression of Japan. The U.S. Navy had no plans to interfere, Hull told him, but he personally believed that the navy should deploy some of its most powerful ships to the waters of the Dutch East Indies in a display of force, in the hopes—as Harriman paraphrased his remarks—“that by bluff the Japs could be kept within bounds.” By sitting back, Hull said, America risked the “ignominious result” of having Japan seize key strategic points in the Far East, while America kept its ships safely moored at their big Pacific base. Obviously tired and befogged by his cold, Hull could not for the moment remember its exact location. “What is the name of that harbor?” Hull asked. “Pearl Harbor,” Harriman said. “Yes,” Hull said.

Secretary of State Cordell Hull advised Roosevelt at the end of August 1944, a middle ground could be found of opposing “the mass transfer to the Reich of Germanic people from neighboring countries” but sanctioning “the removal of individuals and groups who constitute an especially difficult problem …” The supposition that at such a late date a formula of this kind might find favor with Edvard Beneš, much less Stalin, was nonsensical,

Irwin F. Gellman’s Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles,

The military-strategic dimensions of world order were, in American thinking, inseparable from the economic dimensions. US planners viewed the establishment of a freer and more open international economic system as equally indispensable to the new order they were determined to construct from the ashes of history’s most horrific conflict. Experience had instructed them, Secretary of State Cordell Hull recalled, that free trade stood as an essential prerequisite for peace. The autarky, closed trading blocs, and nationalistic barriers to foreign investment and currency convertibility that had characterized the depression decade just encouraged interstate rivalry and conflict. A

The M/S Saint Louis was a German passenger liner owned by the Hamburg-America Line. She was best known for her voyage in 1939, in which her Captain Gustav Schröder attempted to find homes for her passengers. On May 13, 1939, just prior to the Second World War, 937 German-Jewish refugees boarded the ship in the hopes of escaping persecution and the holocaust that was to follow. Although the passengers had previously purchased legal Visas, they were denied entry into Cuba due to contrived red tape. While the ship was in transit, Cuba changed its laws restricting entry to all but U.S. citizens. Even though the Nazi régime had already started to persecute Jews, the Captain of the Saint Louis insisted that the crew treat the passengers with courtesy and respect. Even though the crew followed the captain’s orders, the passengers became distressed when it was announced that they would not be allowed to enter Cuba. President Roosevelt and his envoys Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, and Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury, as well as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, tried to persuade Cuba to accept the refugees. However, their actions were to no avail. It is believed that the German ambassador, on orders from Berlin, put pressure on Cuba. The passengers were refused permission to land, even though they were refugees fleeing persecution.

Cordell Hull and other good Wilsonians who had pinned their faith on international law were outraged and frightened chiefly by Hitler’s lies, by his contempt for treaties and all the machinery of conciliation.

On March 7, 1936, Hitler’s army marched unopposed into the Rhineland, a demilitarized buffer zone between France and Germany. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull did not protest, and FDR went fishing.

In the throes of World War II, the great free-trading Secretary of State Cordell Hull reviewed the misery that America First nationalism had wrought on his world. After the last war, too many nations, including our own, tolerated, or participated in, attempts to advance their own interests at the expense of any system of collective security and of opportunity for all. Too many of us were blind to the evils which, thus loosed, created growing cancers within and among nations; political suspicions and hatreds; the race of armaments, first stealthy and then the subject of flagrant boasts; economic nationalism and its train of depression and misery; and finally, the emergence from their dark places of the looters and thugs who found their opportunity in disorder and disaster.34 Chastened by that memory, the Americans of the postwar era committed themselves to a new kind of world. It’s not a defect of the system that Germany no longer fields a giant Wehrmacht, that Japanese merchant shipping is guarded by American warships and aircraft rather than Japan’s own. It’s not a rip-off that South Korea pays for beef and fruit by selling electronic goods, or that the United States pays for electronic goods by selling beef and fruit. That was the plan all along. Trump talks of “great deals,” but he can feel certain that he has scored a great deal for himself only if he has imposed misery and ruin on his counterparty.

A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on. —CORDELL HULL, secretary of state to President

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress in a measured but determined voice: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” Roosevelt’s cabinet, led by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, initially urged the president to present to Congress a comprehensive history of Japan’s international misconduct. Roosevelt decided instead on an accessible five-hundred-word speech so that his message would get through to as many people as possible: The Japanese attack was treacherous, and the United States had to defeat this cowardly enemy, no matter what it took.

How were we taken so by surprise? Everything we have gone through at the State Department, for most of the past year has pointed unmistakably to Japanese aggression, to their deceitfulness, duplicity, and backdoor actions. We knew exactly what they were doing in Southeast Asia in the Netherlands East Indies in China. We had access to their diplomatic communications we have outstanding people in our intelligence offices, both army and navy. How could this have happened? -Former US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull