Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
The President’s ride across Rome to the Vatican, standing up in an open touring car, developed into a triumphal procession. The crowd was so great His Holiness was kept waiting fortyfive minutes.
The President had let it be known that on his return from the Vatican he would address, from the window of the Quirinal, the enormous crowd that had gathered in the square outside. He was intending to undercut Orlando and Sonnino through a direct appeal to the Italian people to back the Fourteen Points. When he returned from his papal audience he found that squads of police had dispersed the crowd.
This discourtesy threw the President into a cold rage. He let loose to the newspapermen gathered about him in no uncertain terms. The incident threw a chill over the rest of the Italian trip, although the enthusiasm of the crowds in Milan surpassed that of the crowds in Rome.
In Milan the President’s presence had been advertised for a gala performance of Aïda at La Scala. It was a Sunday. The President declared he never went to the theatre on Sunday. The Italian chief of protocol smoothly explained that this was a “sacred concert,” and the President allowed himself to be placed in a box where he listened solemnly while choruses sang the national anthems and soloists caroled out some arias from church music. Right after, the curtain rose and Aïda was performed in its entirety.
In Turin the President harangued a thousand mayors from the cities and towns of the Piedmont region who had gathered to greet him. They represented men of every walk of life, bankers, merchants, farmers, storekeepers, blacksmiths. When he shook hands with them all after his address a few of the more rustic mayors bent over and kissed his hand. The President was deeply touched.
At the university an honorary degree was bestowed on him. Edith felt her husband was at his best in the simple friendly speech of appreciation he addressed to the students. He brought down the house by putting on a blue student cap. “How young and virile he looked as he stood there,” she exclaimed.
These stately progresses seemed to Edith Wilson the consummation of her girlhood dreams. “Fate having chosen me,” she wrote in My Memoir, “for such a Cinderella role, I have tried to picture it for others, in an endeavor to make a return for this great privilege which was mine.”
Colonel House’s Predicament
When the Wilsons arrived back in Paris on January 7, fagged by many functions and long trainrides, the President was determined that ceremonial engagements should no longer be allowed to interfere with the work of peacemaking. He instructed his secretary to accept no more invitations.
As soon as he was settled at the Hôtel de Mûrat, he called his confidential colonel on the private telephone line he’d had installed between his study and House’s room at the Crillon, to be brought up to date on the news. The formal opening of the Peace Conference was set for January 18.
The American commissioners were meeting that afternoon at House’s rooms at the Crillon. Much to Lansing’s chagrin, House—who with innocent vanity noted in his diary that he had more rooms than all the other commissioners put together—usually managed to have them meet in his suite. The President, whose familiars were already dropping hints that the confidential colonel was taking too much the center of the stage during his absences, sent word that he would be there at five to preside over this meeting in person. Almost at the same moment a message arrived from Clemenceau that he too was calling on House at five P.M. for a private talk.
The colonel faced a dilemma. Even his worldfamous tact was strained to meet this test.
“The President came first,” House noted. “I brought him to my reception room and had the other commissioners meet him.” The President of the United States had just started a lively discussion with Lansing and Bliss and White on the difficulties they were facing, when Monsieur le Président du Conseil de Ministres was announced. “I asked President Wilson to excuse me and took Clemenceau into another room, where we had one of our heart to heart talks.”
Clemenceau, one of the most malicious of men, who liked House, but was already complaining that Wilson thought he was Jesus Christ, undoubtedly appreciated the possibilities for mischief. Keeping the President of the United States waiting in the anteroom was as much fun as putting something over on Poincaré. He dawdled over his conversation with House.
House was preoccupied with his task: “I convinced him,” House dictated to the faithful Miss Denton when she typed out his diary, “I think, for the first time that a League of Nations was for the best interests of France … I called his attention to the fact that today there was only one great military power on the Continent of Europe and that was France … There was no balance of power so far as the Continent was concerned, because Russia had disappeared and both Germany and Austria had gone under … I asked whether or not in the circumstances France would not feel safer if England and America were in a position where they would be compelled to come to the aid of France in the event another nation like Germany should try to crush her … If she lost this chance which the United States offered through the League of Nations it would never come again … Wilson could force it through because, with all the brag and bluster of the Senate, they would not dare defeat a treaty made in agreement with the Allies, and thereby continue alone the war with Germany or make a separate peace.”
Clemenceau in his Splendeur et Misère de la Victoire described House with approval as “a supercivilized person escaped from the wilds of Texas, who sees everything, understands everything, and while never doing anything but what he thinks fit, knew how to gain the ear and the respect of everybody.” Certainly he wanted House to think well of him.
Maybe he really was convinced, for the moment. “The old man seemed to see it all,” noted House, “and became enthusiastic. He placed both hands on my shoulders and said, ‘You are right. I am for the League of Nations as you have it in mind and you may count upon me to work with you.’ ”
House took advantage of the Tiger’s enthusiasm to bring up the troublesome matter of reparations. Certain sections of the French press, known to be “inspired” by the government, were beginning to call for the cancellation of American war debts, at the same time demanding incredible billions in reparations from Germany. The Germans must not only be made to pay the whole cost of the war and repair all the damage the war had done, but they must furnish pensions for Allied veterans. “I urged him to use his influence to discourage such schemes. They were doing harm to France and would eventually prejudice the Americans against her.”
When House finally ushered Clemenceau into the meeting of the commissioners, it was obvious that the colonel’s absence had lasted too long. The President had been left to mark time with what he’d come to consider a group of dunderheads. Observers noted the chill in Wilson’s manner. Some dated from that moment the President’s alienation from his confidential colonel.
Paris under the Flood
During the first days of January all Paris tingled with expectation. The city had never been more crowded. The population awaited the opening of the Peace Conference as they would await the opening of the season of horseracing or a world’s fair. People resorted to every conceivable intrigue to obtain admission to the opening session set for the Salon de l’Orloge at the Quai d’Orsay.
Every great hostelry flaunted the flag of some foreign potentate. The less expensive hôtels meublés were packed with humbler representatives of every nation, tribe, enclave, minority on the Eurasian continent. In uniform and out of uniform Greeks, Macedonians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Croats, Slovenes, Czechs and Slovaks, Transylvanians, Ukrainians, Galicians, Poles, Lithuanians, Esthonians, Latvians milled in the lobbies. There were robed Arabs of the Hedjaz chaperoned by legendary young Colonel Lawrence.
There were Palestine Arabs and Arabs of the Mespot, Persians, Kurds, Syrians, Christian Lebanese and Moslem Lebanese; representatives of Armenia and Azerbaidjan and Caucasian Georgia. There were Jewish Zionists, and contesting factions of Poles and Silesians and an envoy from the Duchy of Teschen.
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The American Commissioners Plenipotentiary had their offices at 4 Place de la Concorde in a rambling suite which included the old cabinets particuliers upstairs from Maxims, with their memories of the grand dukes and the superannuated whoopee of the Second Empire. Navy yeomen were in charge: Harold Nicolson remarked that the place smelled like a battleship. There security was rigorous. Marines scrutinized passes so sharply that many an important personage was left kicking his heels in the guardroom while clerks scuttled about looking for his identification. At the entrance swarthy delegations stormed around the tall immovable sentries begging for appointments with “Monsieur le Président Veelson.”
Disappointed there they would troop up the Champs Elysées to the Hotel Astoria near the Arc de Triomphe, where the British delegations had their offices. Every province of the empire on which the sun never set had its representative, with attendant bevies of experts and specialists. The entrance was barred to foreign inroads by a cordon of Tommies resplendent with brasspolish and pipeclay.
Around the edges of the recognized delegations hovered all sorts of adventurers peddling oil concessions or manganese mines, pretenders to dukedoms and thrones, cranks with shortcuts to Utopia in their briefcases, secret agents, art dealers, rug salesmen, procurers and pimps. Petites femmes solicited strangers on the boulevards with scraps of all the languages of Europe. Restaurants and nightclubs were packed to the last table. Taxis were at a premium. Business boomed at the Maison des Nations.
Even the Seine was in flood. The autumn rains had turned to intermittent slushy snow. The quais and lowlying streets were awash and the brown water swirled as high as the carved keystones of the bridges.
He Didn’t Want Any Lawyers
Excited by the carnival atmosphere, thrilled by the hope of humane and rational solutions, the younger men among the British and American delegations got along famously. They swapped back copies of The Nation and The New Republic for The Spectator or The Round Table. They exchanged luncheons at the Crillon for luncheons at the Hotel Majestic, where the British had imported an entire London staff, from headwaiter to dishwasher, so that their tabletalk should not be reported to foreign ears.
At the Crillon the eager young men might be rewarded with a glimpse of Colonel House’s receding chin as he slipped with silent tread down a corridor, but the important personages among the Americans kept out of sight.
At the Majestic the British leaders ate in full view. While you talked of the League the tall figure of its fosterfather, Lord Robert Cecil of the bulging forehead and bushy hair, might be seen unfolding like a jackknife from behind a table.
For any world problem you could find an expert with the facts at his fingertips. A great number of dedicated and wellintentioned and well-prepared people were putting all they had into solving the world’s ills. The American specialists were encouraged to find such likemindedness among the British. Such of them as could get through the language barrier found occasional young Frenchmen unexpectedly in accord. Full of hope they compared their plans to fashion a just peace and a League of Nations that would work.
Left in a certain isolation by the fact that the livelier spirits tended to foregather in Colonel House’s anterooms, the Secretary of State kept his nose to the grindstone. Lansing was a conscientious man. He liked precision. He was convinced that careful agenda must be prepared for the coming meetings. Over the Christmas period he suffered agonies from an ulcerated tooth. Mrs. Lansing was not a bit well. Illness in the family did not keep him from carefully elaborating a skeleton plan for a treaty for the President’s use, or from cooperating with House’s specialists in drawing up a tentative formula for a League of Nations. When he tried to explain his schemes to the President, he discovered, to his mortification, that the President was not in the least interested.
Wilson had his own ideas. According to House, he was still trying to fit his own sketch of a covenant for a League of Nations into thirteen headings. His constitution for the league was based on the draft House had presented the summer before. House’s assistants were sitting up nights harmonizing this document with Cecil’s reworking of the British Phillimore Committee’s plan, which had just been flown over from London, after some final touches by the energetic hand of the South African representative, Jan Christiaan Smuts. The President let Lansing know in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want him to meddle in the business. He didn’t want any lawyers, he told him in the tone he knew how to make so disagreeable. Problems of procedure did not interest him.
Lansing like House was a careful diarist. He made his entries in a small precise hand. On January 10 he recalled the hour’s conference with the President and the commissioners in General Bliss’s room, at which he presented his memorandum. “A very unsatisfactory session,” wrote Lansing. “Pres’t apparently resents anybody offering suggestions or doing anything in the way of drafting a treaty for a league of nations except himself … He said he did not want lawyers to engage in that.”
Lansing was proud of his knowledge of international law. It was his whole career. This remark of the President’s cut him to the quick. Years later, when he published his apologia for his part in the drama he wrote a whole chapter about it. From that moment he made no further suggestions about the covenant or the league.
He unburdened himself to his diary. “Auchincloss has shown me the President’s draft. It is most inartistically drawn and I believe will be riddled in its present form.”
Secretary Lansing had disagreed with the President once too often. From now on he was held at arm’s length. “Lansing is a man one cannot grow enthusiastic over,” House noted, “but I do think the President should treat him with more consideration.”
Two days later House was taken ill with a kidney ailment. He had a high fever and was in great pain. He had two nurses in attendance. The story got about that he was dying. Obituaries were actually published in the American press.
With Lansing mortally offended and his confidential colonel incapacitated, Wilson, who paid scant attention to the prolixities of General Bliss or to Henry White’s diplomatic anecdotes, and who didn’t even have a competent secretary, was left to struggle singlehanded in his initial bout with a group of the most astute political operators in Europe and Asia.
The Council of X
The leaders of the British delegation arrived in Paris on January 11. Lloyd George, fresh from his smashing victory at the polls, came surrounded by some of the ablest men in the United Kingdom. All political factions were represented except for Asquith’s Liberals. Arthur Balfour embodied the philosophy of the Conservative gentry in its most rarified form. Bonar Law could speak for the financial and manufacturing and mercantile interests, George Barnes for the trade unions. Cecil and Smuts, who were to be the godfathers of the British Commonwealth of Nations, stood for an international idealism as radical as Woodrow Wilson’s.
As a second string, Lloyd George, who was as skilled, as Wilson was deficient, in the art of using other men for his own purposes, had the premiers of the selfgoverning dominions: Hughes from Australia, Massey from New Zealand, Sir Robert Borden from Canada. Each of them represented the majority parties of their respective electorates. Smuts and Botha, at that moment, had all factions in South Africa behind them. In the background was a bevy of emirs and maharajahs, each animated by a knowledgeable Foreign Office adviser, from India and the Oriental protectorates. To organize and synchronize the work of the delegations came the accomplished Sir Maurice Hankey, fresh from a similar job for the Imperial War Cabinet. Largely because the Americans could not present anyone equally competent, Hankey became confidential secretary of the inner circle of the Peace Conference, and the only reporter of the most secret meetings of the Allied leaders.
The British prime minister arrived in Paris at th
The French, as hosts of the British and American delegations, had the advantage of being on their home ground. The Quai d’Orsay was almost as wellfurnished with brains as the Foreign Office. Clemenceau had the Chamber of Deputies under his thumb. Through Mandel’s alternating censorship and subsidy, he could play like an organist on all the varied political pipes, right, left and center, of the French press.
Though the Tiger found Foch and his generals even more troublesome in victory than they had been in defeat, he could give them their heads from time to time when he needed a fait accompli.
British observers noticed how much slower the Americans were than the Europeans in the give and take of repartee in committee work.
Although the prime ministers had been meeting right along in the guise of the Supreme War Council or at less formal interallied conferences, and had already established a set of rules by which they hoped to keep control of proceedings, the British and French looked forward with misgivings to the first plenary meetings of the representatives of all the Allied and Associated Powers. They knew that Lansing’s project was for the United States to marshal the smaller nations against what the Americans considered the evil designs of the Europeans, and they feared that, in the absence of the understanding Colonel House, he might carry President Wilson along with him.