In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  As guests of the German government, the young Bullitts traveled to Belgium in midsummer 1916. There they moved about freely enough so that Ernesta could report, of the Belgian people, that “their confidence that the English will soon be back to rescue them never dies.… They think the English are gods and tell you stories of their bravery.” Americans were much loved, too, for the wonders accomplished by Herbert Hoover and his American Committee for Relief in Belgium in feeding the population. “Mr. Hoover,” Ernesta discovered, “is considered by Belgium … the greatest American alive today, and they fully expect him to go home and move to the White House when the war is over.”

  “I wish I knew how this war started,” mused Ernesta. “If one knew whether Germany knew beforehand of the Austrian note to Serbia one would know better just how deliberately Germany went into this.” That, indeed, was a question that Americans wanted to have answered, and born journalist that he was, Bullitt contrived to find the answer. The Bullitts traveled to Austria and Hungary, meeting government leaders there, and when they returned to Berlin September 17, Bullitt, in an interview with German foreign minister Gottlieb von Jagow, pretended to have uncovered a good deal more than he had. When Bullitt asked what were Jagow’s intentions in writing the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia, Jagow, protesting innocence, said, “I did not have a hand in preparing that note. I saw the note for the first time at eight o’clock the night before it was presented in Belgrade.” So the German foreign minister had seen it beforehand.

  Bullitt discussed a question even more important to Americans with Walter Rathenau, the brilliant industrialist and socialist who became the director of the German economy during the war. The question was whether Germany would resume unrestricted U-boat warfare—whether, in other words, the United States would be brought into the war. Rathenau, who personally was opposed to the war (“the most absurd, mad thing that has ever happened”) and to resuming the U-boat war (“It would make us the most hated people on earth and would prolong the war indefinitely”), told Bullitt that nonetheless there was “an even chance” that those who favored submarine warfare would win out in the Reichstag in the spring of 1917. He reasoned that after a winter of intense hardship for the German people, politicians would find it difficult to resist the military chiefs when they argued that it would be foolhardy for Germany to refrain from using the one weapon that could win the war for her.

  ON RETURNING TO BERLIN, the Bullitts had found an agreeable new arrival at the American embassy. He was lanky, twenty-one-year-old Christian Herter, who still had not decided what to do in life but had come over as a volunteer clerk to help out the overworked foreign service. Harvard but not Groton, Herter had been sent by a college friend to be interviewed by Grew, who had agreed to take him on.

  Making excuses to his fiancée for leaving her—indeed, in his letters protesting so much that one gets the impression he did not expect her to believe him—Herter had crossed over in late July on a Dutch liner. His job was to help the embassy staff in the work of representing Allied interests in the enemy country—which meant visiting prisoner-of-war camps to see whether inmates were being treated correctly. The whole business of the war appalled him; “I can only pray to heaven we won’t ever get mixed up in it,” he wrote his fiancée.

  Herter enjoyed the company of the American newspapermen in Berlin, Herbert Bayard Swope of the New York World and Raymond Gram Swing of the Chicago Daily News. Above all, he was entertained by the dazzling Bullitts. Bullitt, a born storyteller, had wonderful stories to tell of his travels. It is not clear whether young Herter’s outlook on German affairs had an influence on Bullitt.

  All through the autumn—and the Bullitts departed halfway through it—Herter was in the process of becoming privy to secret information about German politics. His contact was Kurt Hahn, a German Jewish employee of the German government’s press office. Hahn belonged to a small group of liberals who looked for guidance to the great military historian Professor Hans Delbruck. Hahn may have misunderstood Delbruck, or Herter may have misunderstood Hahn; in any event, Herter came to believe that, through Delbruck, it might be possible for him to work for a negotiated compromise peace between England and Germany. Though he and his closest embassy friend held secret meetings with the Germans without informing their superiors, Herter found occasion in mid-October to compose a background memo for Grew in which he outlined the views, as he understood them, of the Delbruck group.

  Though nothing came of them, the secret meetings were exciting. At twenty-one, Herter was being much like his friend Bill Bullitt in imagining that he could play a lone hand that would bring peace to the war-torn world.

  BULLITT STORED UP the information he gathered from his interviews and travels, and in October 1916, when he and Ernesta returned from their honeymoon, his articles on the European crisis made the front pages of the Public Ledger. The Bullitts had returned to America on the same ocean liner as had Ambassador Gerard, traveling from Berlin to Washington amid a swirl of rumors that he brought with him a peace proposal from Kaiser Wilhelm; and Bullitt reported in the Ledger “with absolute certainty” that the ambassador brought with him no such message.

  Bullitt gave his readers a firsthand account of what was happening: “… at the present moment Germany is thinking a great deal less about peace via the United States than about war with the United States.” He told them of the political tension in Germany between Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and the military chiefs, and warned that it was “a struggle whose outcome will determine whether or not the United States is to be drawn into the war.”

  Bullitt elaborated on this theme for a wider audience later in the month. In the October 28, 1916, issue of The New Republic, Walter Lippmann published an article by Bullitt that addressed the question of whether there was any point in trying to distinguish between “worse or better Germany.” In it Bullitt wrote that almost all Germans believed in Germany being supreme; believed, too, in maintaining strong armed forces to keep the peace; and did not believe in international organizations to keep peace (such as the league of nations that William Howard Taft had proposed and that Woodrow Wilson recently had espoused)—did not believe, that is, that Germany could disarm and safely entrust the defense of her frontiers to such an organization. Nonetheless, argued Bullitt, there was an important difference between the liberal Germany represented by the chancellor and the conservative Germany that followed wherever the military led. The United States had to “bother about distinctions between Germans,” he wrote, because “we cannot continue to enjoy our … neutrality unless Bethmann remains Chancellor. The day conservative Germany overcomes liberal Germany, sinking without warning will be recommenced, and we shall be drawn into war.”

  Bullitt brought back information not meant for publication, including reports of statements made to him in confidence by foreign leaders, which he offered to Frank Polk, counselor and second in command at the Department of State. Transferred to the Washington desk of his newspaper in November, Bullitt became a valuable source of authentic information for State and later for the President’s adviser Edward House. On the basis of his own observations, Bullitt was able to alert the government to such significant developments as the growing disintegration of the Russian army.

  Bullitt tended to discuss events in terms of personalities, which makes for lively journalism but not always for accurate analysis. In focusing his readers’ hopes on Bethmann-Hollweg’s survival in office, he gave insufficient weight to what Walter Rathenau had told him: that if the war continued, political pressures would mount on the German government—any German government—to employ the only weapon that seemingly could bring victory. In the autumn of 1916, Bullitt was reporting that it was still an open question whether or not to resume U-boat warfare. Meanwhile, Joseph Grew, who headed the Berlin embassy while Gerard was on home leave, wrote to Edward House warning that the pressures on the chancellor were overwhelming and that “our Government should therefore be fully prepared for an eventual res
umption of the indiscriminate submarine warfare against commerce in violation of the rights of neutrals on the high seas.”

  BY AUTUMN 1916 German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg no longer believed that Germany’s armed forces could win the war. Falkenhayn’s battle of Verdun had been the last army action that Bethmann-Hollweg, and even Falkenhayn, had been able to see as offering a breakthrough to victory, yet like earlier campaigns, it had ended in stalemate—though at a staggering cost in lives lost. Falkenhayn’s excuse was that the navy had not done its job and that the decision to discontinue submarine warfare—a decision with which he had gone along at the time—was what had robbed him of victory at Verdun. Bethmann-Hollweg did not believe this, and feared that resuming submarine warfare would bring the United States into the war and cause Germany’s defeat. In August 1916 he allowed Washington to understand that he would welcome President Wilson’s efforts to mediate an end to the war. He believed that it was time for Germany to quit while she could; but he also may have figured that if Germany fell in with Wilson’s peace views while the Allies did not, the President might be moved to stand aside and not enter the war should Germany later decide to resume submarine warfare.

  Winning approval from Kaiser Wilhelm for a peace bid at last had become possible. When Romania joined the Allies in August 1916, Germany’s mercurial monarch, breaking into tears, suddenly decided that the war was lost and that his country had no option but to sue for peace. But Bethmann-Hollweg believed that to protect themselves politically in seeking a compromise peace, he and the kaiser would need the support of the chief of the General Staff. Falkenhayn would have to be replaced. Bethmann-Hollweg looked around for an army leader of sufficient weight to be nominated for the job and on whose political support he could depend.

  In the east, great victories won by General Erich Ludendorff had been credited to Ludendorff’s superior, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who had become a popular hero. Duped into believing that Hindenburg was in favor of negotiating peace, Bethmann-Hollweg persuaded the reluctant kaiser to bring back Hindenburg to replace Falkenhayn and to take command of the armies. The kaiser seems to have sensed that this was a step on the road to abdication, and that Hindenburg, as the nation’s hero, along with the inevitable Ludendorff, would take command not only of the army but of the government.

  It was in August 1916 that the kaiser installed Hindenburg in office, and from then until the end of the year, as the power of decision slipped away from the monarch and his civilian prime minister into the hands of the new military chiefs, Bethmann-Hollweg’s foreign policy was more and more a race against time. In one area after another, Hindenburg and Ludendorff trespassed on civilian territory, even in foreign policy, with apparent support from the Reichstag. In October the German parliament directed the chancellor—even though the constitutional authority to decide was his—to follow the guidance of the military chiefs on whether to resume submarine warfare. By December, a mere five months after the chancellor discussed installing a new chief of the General Staff, the chief was holding discussions on the installing of a new chancellor.

  No longer able to keep on waiting for Wilson to step forward as mediator, Bethmann-Hollweg dispatched a note to the United States on December 12, 1916, proposing to talk peace but not specifically offering any concessions—for he dared not reveal how stiff were the peace terms on which Hindenburg would insist.

  AS BETHMANN-HOLLWEG RACED against time in Berlin, so did Woodrow Wilson in Washington. Sometime during the last half of 1916, he became fixed in his idea that if the war continued, the United States was going to be dragged into it. He concluded that America, in her own national interest, ought to step in to bring the war to an end—whether the belligerents wanted her to do so or not.

  House told the President that the Allies would consider it an unfriendly act for America to come forward to stop the war just as they were starting to win it, and advised him to continue waiting until the Allies were ready. But Wilson rejected the advice. Soon after being reelected, the President sat down at his typewriter to tap out a note to the belligerent powers.

  Though perhaps not fully aware of how financially vulnerable Great Britain had become, the President was conscious of the Allied dependency on the United States. In fact, England was running out of money, and John Maynard Keynes, speaking for the British Treasury, of which he had become an important official, told the cabinet in London in 1916 that by the end of that year, “the American executive and the American public will be in a position to dictate to this country.” In December 1916 Wilson interfered with a J. P. Morgan financing for Britain, underlining his point that the Allies must bend toward the American viewpoint in the matter of making peace.

  Wilson had decided on a strategy of asking the belligerents to state their minimum peace terms, in hopes of then narrowing the distance between them. He had almost finished drafting his proposal when Bethmann-Hollweg’s note arrived, stealing Wilson’s thunder and causing complications. If Wilson dispatched his own note at once, it might look to the Allies like collusion; but if he waited, they might already have rejected Bethmann-Hollweg’s note as uncompromising, thus aborting the peace process. So Wilson sent his own note without delay.

  Germany could not reply responsively to Wilson’s questions about war aims without revealing how unyielding her position had now become, and accordingly, in answer, stated only that she was prepared to talk. The Allies—to some extent hoping that what House and Robert Lansing said reflected Wilson’s hidden thoughts, and therefore that the American note really called upon them to propose attractive goals that would convince the United States to rally to their cause—articulated some new and popular objectives. These included the freeing of the Christian and other peoples of the Middle East from the tyranny of the Ottoman Empire, which of course had nothing to do with why the war had started in Europe or why it still was being waged.

  The Allies did not know how far away from House’s thinking the President had moved. House was thinking of war, Wilson of peace. By the end of 1916 Wilson was more determined than ever to keep the United States out of war, more pacifist in his mood, less sympathetic to the Allies, and more convinced that the European powers were motivated by nationalist or imperialist objectives he deprecated. On the other hand, House, who thought in terms of American intervention, worried in his diary (December 14, 1916) “that my worst fears as to our unpreparedness were confirmed.… I am convinced that the President’s place in history is dependent to a large degree upon luck. If we should get into a serious war and it should turn out disastrously, he would be one of the most discredited Presidents we have had.… We have no large guns. If we had them, we have no trained men who would understand how to handle them. We have no air service, nor men to exploit it; and so it is down the list.” On January 2, 1917, House quoted a remark that the President’s frame of mind was disturbing in that he was “for peace almost at any price.”

  Seeing, from the response to his note, that the belligerents were unwilling to envisage realistic peace terms, Wilson decided to advocate his own. House credited himself with the suggestion that he should do so. Wilson’s note asking the belligerents to define peace terms had been the first step on the road to imposing America’s vision on the European world; this was the second.

  The President spent the first weeks in January 1917 drafting his statement: his last chance of persuading Germany and the Allies to make peace before they forced America to make war. He then, unexpectedly, sent a letter asking the Senate for permission to appear before it at once to make a statement. Other than Edward House and Secretary of State Lansing, William Stone, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was the only political figure to be given the document to read in advance. After reading it, the senator had looked “stunned,” Wilson told House.

  WHILE WILSON WAS TYPING DRAFTS of his address, Germany’s vice chancellor was at work drafting for the chancellor a document exposing fallacies in the argument for resuming unrestr
icted U-boat warfare, for that argument once again was being made. On January 8 Bethmann-Hollweg received a telegram from Hindenburg asking him to attend a meeting to discuss the U-boat issue at the military’s Supreme Headquarters at the distant castle of Pless.

  It should instead have been the chancellor who summoned the military chiefs; he must have been apprehensive as he traveled to the frontier at their call. Pless,* a historic Silesian river town on a tributary of the Vistula, was some 300 miles from Berlin. It was situated at the southeastern edge of the kaiser’s European domains, where the borders of the German empire marched with those of the Russian empire and of the Austro-Hungarian empire: the meeting place of the Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, and Hapsburgs—three dynasties, centuries old, whose continued existence had come to be staked on the outcome of the European war.

  In the castle of Pless on January 9, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and the naval chief, Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, discussed who should become chancellor if Bethmann-Hollweg should fail to accede to their wishes when he arrived the following day. They discussed, too, the obtuseness of the kaiser (Holtzendorff: “His Majesty doesn’t understand the situation.” Ludendorff: “Absolutely not”). For them the conference on the submarine issue was no more than a formality, and Hindenburg seemed to have forgotten why they were going to the trouble of convening it. Reminded that the chancellor was due to arrive on the morrow, the field marshal asked: “What’s troubling him now?” Though nobody had told Bethmann-Hollweg or the other politicians, the decision to launch unrestricted submarine warfare already had been reached. The key advocates, Admirals Reinhard Scheer, commander in chief of the German High Seas Fleet, and Adolf von Trotha, chief of Naval Staff, having concluded that the army now made all decisions, had bypassed their own naval chief and also the kaiser (who “had vision but lacked nerve,” said von Trotha). At year’s end the two had taken their case directly to Ludendorff at Pless, who had decided in their favor.