William Christian Bullitt Jr. (January 25, 1891 – February 15, 1967) was an American diplomat, journalist, and novelist. He is known for his special mission to negotiate with Lenin on behalf of the Paris Peace Conference, often recalled as a missed opportunity to normalize relations with the Bolsheviks. He was also the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and the U.S. ambassador to France during World War II. In his youth, he was considered a radical, but he later became an outspoken anticommunist. Early years Bullitt was born to a prominent Philadelphia family, the son of Louisa Gross (née Horwitz) and William Christian Bullitt Sr. His grandfather was John Christian Bullitt, founder of the law firm today known as Drinker Biddle & Reath. His family was of French descent. His ancestor Joseph Boulet, a huguenot, had fled Nîmes in 1629. Bullitt's upbringing was cosmopolitan. Members of his family lived in the main European capitals, and he learned French and German at a very young age. He graduated from Yale University in 1912, after having been voted "most brilliant" in his class. He briefly attended Harvard Law School but dropped out on the death of his father in 1914. At Yale, he was a member of Scroll and Key. He married socialite Aimee Ernesta Drinker (1892-1981) in 1916. She gave birth to a son in 1917, who died two days later. They divorced in 1923. In 1924 he married Louise Bryant, journalist author of Six Red Months in Russia and widow of radical journalist John Reed. Bullitt divorced Bryant in 1930 and took custody of their daughter, accusing her of drinking and of having an affair with English sculptor Gwen Le Gallienne after he groomed her for Paris's lesbian scene. The Bullitts' daughter, Anne Moen Bullitt, was born in February 1924, eight weeks after their marriage. Anne Bullitt never had children. In 1967, she married her fourth husband, U.S. Senator Daniel Brewster. William Bullitt became a foreign correspondent in Europe and later a novelist. In 1926, he published It's Not Done, a satirical novel that lampooned the dying aristocracy of Chesterbridge (Philadelphia) and its life revolving around Rittenhouse Square. 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