In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  26

  A WHO’S WHO OF AMERICANS IN PARIS

  THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT had installed the President in the Villa Murat, a three-story eighteenth-century palace near the Parc Monceau, set back from the street, surrounded by trees, and guarded by sentries. It belonged to the descendants of the Napoleonic cavalry general, marshal of France, and king of Naples for whom it was named. In its luxurious interior, attended by his wife and his physician, Wilson was able to live the secluded life he preferred; while at the same time, there was a direct telephone line between his bedroom and the quarters of Colonel House.

  The French government requisitioned the entire Hotel Crillon on the Place de la Concorde for the use of the American delegation, so that is where the offices and apartments of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace were located, not much more than a mile from the Villa Murat; but Dr. Grayson forbade Wilson to work there with the others.

  House had to bridge the gap between the President and the U.S. headquarters. He would relay news and views from the Crillon to Wilson, and then Wilson would direct him to tell the American delegation what was to be done. So not only the staff but also the other commissioners had to get their orders from House.

  At the Crillon, House occupied space, and headed a staff, larger than those of all three other commissioners combined. The other three were in the awkward position of not knowing what they were supposed to be doing. Lansing asked; and in reply, Wilson sent a message telling him to feel free to make any appointments or plans he chose, as he (the President) had nothing particular in mind for him (the Secretary of State) to do. Commissioner White wondered why he himself was there.

  House recognized that he had been placed in an invidious position, and went out of his way to soothe the hurt feelings of the others. But it was not enough.

  Nor could House solve the basic organizational problem: that Wilson was not acting as chief executive of the American delegation, so nobody was. For nobody would presume to act in the President’s place while the President himself was there.

  The nearest thing to an organizing head was Grew, who dealt with staffing and logistics. At the beginning, the army tried to take over from him, while the navy made a grab for control of communications, but he fought off both of them.

  As Grew’s assistant, House’s protégé, and State’s liaison with the Inquiry, William Bullitt was awarded the choice job of briefing the American commissioners each morning (including White, though he had his own aide, Christian Herter). This made him the conduit on substantive matters between the staff and the commissioners. Bullitt, Grew, and Herter, familiar since Berlin embassy days before the war, had been together at State ever since the war began; unlike some of the other Americans in Paris, they worked together easily.

  The Inquiry was installed a few steps from the Crillon in the Hotel Coislin, where the rue Royale meets the Place de la Concorde. But it also was given space next door, above gaudy Maxim’s, onetime playground of the demimonde, and scene of many frivolous and often scandalous episodes in the Naughty Nineties. The scholars were lodged upstairs, in the individual private rooms in which the restaurant had served clients who chose to do whatever they were doing behind closed doors. These quarters, associated in the popular mind with playboys and courtesans, may well have contributed to the general feeling among the Inquiry scholars that they were not being taken seriously.

  Bullitt seems to have pressured House into giving the Inquiry something to do; for on December 31, House asked the experts to advise on all important territorial questions. At least one of the scholars suspected that this was no more than make-work. The professors had seen nothing of the President in the United States, and aboard the George Washington had seen him only because of Bullitt’s intervention. In Paris at the end of January, the Inquiry scholars formally complained that during their first seven weeks in the French capital they had seen the President only once—for five minutes.

  A long-simmering power struggle among the scholars had climaxed earlier when Isaiah Bowman shoved aside House’s relative Sidney Mezes as leader of the group. Bowman then settled long-standing accounts with Walter Lippmann, who until then had not realized how much he had provoked the older man; as the litany of his misdeeds going back to New York days was recited to him, he finally understood. Seeing no role for himself in Paris, Lippmann, at the end of January, returned to New York and The New Republic.

  Earlier in January, the Inquiry’s head of economic studies, Professor Allyn Young, was surprised to learn that before leaving the United States, the President had appointed another body, the Central Bureau of Research and Statistics in Washington, to provide the economic data for the American delegation to the Paris conference. Young found that twenty-eight-year-old lawyer John Foster Dulles had arrived in Paris as representative of the Central Bureau, and apparently expected to take charge. Conflict was averted when Dulles settled for a compromise in which he and his staff would remain in Paris as the sole liaison between the Central Bureau in Washington and Young’s Inquiry people in Paris. Dulles therefore was able to work in Paris alongside his uncle, Secretary Lansing, and his younger brother Allen, a colleague of Christian Herter’s and an expert on Central European affairs, whom Grew and the State Department had brought up from the Bern legation.

  An economic area of special concern (as the secretary of the treasury warned the President) was the treatment of America’s loans to Europe; so at the President’s request, the secretary early in January appointed and sent over to France an adviser to help deal with such matters. He was Thomas Lamont, the Morgan banker, a Republican, who was renting Franklin Roosevelt’s house in New York City.

  Earlier the President had summoned Bernard Baruch to Paris to help deal with economic issues. The South Carolina financier, a Democrat who made it his business to befriend the powerful, had made a success of heading the War Industries Board in 1918; “You have made yourself indispensable,” the President had written to and of him. On arrival in January, Baruch took up residence in lavish style at the Ritz, assembled a personal staff, and began picking up the bill for some of President and Mrs. Wilson’s extra expenses. A vain man, Baruch later implied that Colonel House felt threatened by him. As it happened, House fell ill with a kidney stone attack and was given up for dead not long after Baruch arrived, so the South Carolinian filled in for the colonel for a time. After House recovered, Baruch joined Mrs. Wilson in putting doubts into the President’s mind about House.

  SOME WEEKS BEFORE, on January 1, 1919, when Bernard Baruch boarded the George Washington to cross to France, he found Assistant Secretary of the Navy and Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt and their party, including Roosevelt’s incorrigible partying companion Livingston Davis, among the mere handful of other passengers. It may have been Roosevelt’s mother who finally succeeded in persuading Secretary Daniels to let him make the trip to Europe, charged with the mission of disposing of naval property overseas. It was evident Roosevelt wanted to go to Paris to be there when the fate of the world was being decided, but his mother was more likely to have been thinking in terms of repairing his shattered marriage to Eleanor.

  It was a heavy sea. Eleanor—who had spent her autumn brooding over the statue in which Henry Adams, after his wife’s suicide, had, through the medium of a chosen artist, personified grief—now spent her hours aboard ship reading the Christmas gift she had given Franklin: the autobiography in which Adams, with a deep sense of futility and failure, told of his search for an education. Published for the first time only months before (from the 1906 private printing, later corrected), The Education of Henry Adams told of a vanished fellowship, the five friends who called themselves Hearts, and of the others to whom they were attached: public figures, most of them, given over to probing the great issues of history and politics, religion and philosophy, while secretly engulfed (though one would not know it from the Education) in personal tragedies, private passions, and hopeless, illicit relations.

  Henry Adams himself had been the last
of the Hearts; he had passed away in his sleep the night of March 26–27, 1918. The youngest in their set, the protégé of Adams’s student Henry Cabot Lodge, was TR, the most dynamic of the characters described in Education.

  Reading about the young TR during the course of her stormy ocean passage, Eleanor must all the more have been shocked when the news, tapped out by wireless to the George Washington in the middle of the voyage, was announced to all on board: the former President—who was widely expected to be elected President again in 1920—had died of a pulmonary embolism in his sleep. In politics, all bets were off now; it would be a new game, played by new men—Franklin Roosevelt, among them.

  THE YOUNG ROOSEVELTS spent thirty-five days in Europe. As Franklin’s naval aide Commander John Hancock ably dealt with the complicated questions they had come to Europe to resolve, Franklin had a good deal of free time.

  In Paris the Roosevelts stayed at the Ritz. The French capital, despite the flu epidemic, the cold, and the rain, was starting to come alive. After the wartime blackout, it was the City of Light once again; and Eleanor, at least at first, was enthralled. “I never saw anything like Paris,” she wrote home. “It is full beyond belief and one sees many celebrities and all one’s friends!” It was something that other young Americans discovered, too; Robert Taft arrived on Hoover’s staff, and found Paris filled with college classmates from Yale. The Paris conference turned out to be a place of American school reunions.

  The streets, restaurants, and hotels swarmed with delegations of every religion and color and nationality from every continent in the world. For most, hotel rooms were unfindable and restaurant meals unaffordable. Shopping was irresistible, and Eleanor admired the courage and self-control with which Franklin surveyed the bills for what she had bought.

  Celebrities were everywhere. Sarah Bernhardt was sighted at luncheon, and young Harold Nicolson had the experience of dining with Marcel Proust at the Ritz. Robert Vansittart, another young British diplomat, later remembered that it was at the Paris conference that the Americans first introduced the British to that modern entertainment, the cocktail party, from which, Vansittart wrote, “women barely tore themselves away in time to undress for dinner.”

  But it was not a social scene to everyone’s liking. For Eleanor Roosevelt, who in any event had fallen ill, the pleasures began to pall. She tried to broaden her tolerance; she condoned the drinking of wine with meals (“The cheer would certainly be too cold without it”). But “the scandals”—the way many of the American men behaved in Paris—“would make many a woman at home unhappy.” When Franklin seemed too much drawn to another woman at a dinner party, she dragged him home early.

  She understood that Franklin and his friend Livy Davis would want to go out on inspection and battlefield trips without her. But after one such trip, she became worried and annoyed. It was on February 8, and he was scheduled to return that afternoon; as he knew, she had planned a dinner at eight that evening, but he did not appear until after midnight.

  The next night was the one too many. Franklin, Livy, and other members of Harvard’s Fly Club held a reunion party from which her husband staggered back in the early hours of the morning.

  Eleanor turned against Europe, as did so many Americans who had an experience of the peace conference. The women of Paris, she decided, were dangerous for her husband; they were brazen, and “you wonder if there are any ladies.” She went further: “I’ve decided there is very little real beauty in France!”

  When the Roosevelts returned to America, Franklin’s companion in dissipation Livy Davis turned over a new leaf: he signed on with Herbert Hoover, whom many hailed as a new savior, to feed the hungry in Czechoslovakia.

  27

  A CLASH BY NIGHT

  THERE WERE MORE THAN 1,000 Americans at the peace conference—perhaps as many as 1,300—and a great many of them later published books describing their experiences in Paris. Indeed, many were preparing from the start to do so. “It is amusing, going about as I do, to discover … [everyone], more or less surreptitiously, keeping diaries …,” Ray Stannard Baker, the journalist who had become head of the American delegation’s press bureau, noted—in his diary, of course.

  Felix Frankfurter, who was there himself, later said that “the best book I know on the Paris Peace Conference is Harold Nicholson’s [sic] Peace Making … and the reason why I say it’s the ‘best book’ is that he gives you the sense of disorderliness, the hubbub, the hallabaloo.…” According to Nicolson, an essential element of the story of the peace conference was confusion; “my study, therefore,” he wrote, “is a study of fog.”

  Nothing had been planned in advance, not even when the conference would begin or how long it would last or what matters it would deal with. Matters, when the time came, were not taken up in a predetermined order, or indeed in any order. Most important of all, it had not been decided whether this was to be a meeting of the Allies and their associates to decide what peace terms they should ask, in which case the terms would be pitched high, as “asking prices” normally are—or whether it was to be a peace conference, in which case the other side, the Germans and their associates, would be invited to attend, and the conference would decide on peace terms that would be accepted by all sides, therefore representing a series of compromises.

  As nobody invited the Germans to attend, one might have assumed that the former was the case, that a preliminary conference was in session, and that what was being drafted was not an agreement, which would take full account of the needs and desires of the other side, but a negotiating position, which would not need to do so. But though nobody got around to thinking the matter through or discussing it, it transpired that such was not the case; for months later, when the drafting was concluded, the document was submitted to Germany not as a proposal to be responded to, but as a treaty to be signed.

  Similarly, those who were about to meet failed to talk through and reach agreement on an agenda; and of the thousands who streamed into Paris for the conference, it seemed at times as though each had an agenda of his own. Wilson, who had decided on a set of priorities, found himself repeatedly elbowed out of the way before he had been given a chance to assert it.

  Herbert Hoover did it first, albeit with the President’s consent. Beginning the week before the Armistice, Hoover had agitated as a first priority for the creation of a program under his direction to distribute American food supplies in Europe. The U.S. government had accumulated large surpluses of food supplies during the war; by donating them to the starving peoples of central and eastern Europe, the government at the same time could protect farm prices at home and keep countries abroad from falling prey to communism. Wilson and House were in agreement with Hoover about this, and about his insistence that the program should be an American one, independent of the Allies: “Let it have our brand,” said Hoover.

  However, the British, who were needed to supply the ships to transport the food, opposed Hoover’s plan: they insisted on maintaining a blockade of Germany, which shocked Americans, who saw no reason to starve German civilians now that a cease-fire was in place and the war was effectively over. The French and Italians, in turn, did not want the United States to win the power that would come with controlling the food supplies: they desired it for themselves, aspiring to monopolize food distribution in the neighboring areas they hoped to bring into their orbits.

  Blunt Herbert Hoover talked tough. “This government,” he proposed to tell the Allies, “will not agree to any programme that even looks like inter-Allied control of our economic resources after peace. After peace over one-half of the whole export food supplies of the world will come from the United States and for the buyers of these supplies to sit in majority in dictation to us as to prices and distribution is wholly inconceivable. The same applies to raw materials.”

  Coming over to Europe for the peace conference, Hoover decided to send an American mission to Germany to report on conditions there. The British government objected to such a mission unles
s they, too, participated in it. Hoover ordered his own men to go anyway, and advised House to tell the British he was doing so. “Do nothing else,” Hoover said to House, telling him not to ask permission from the British; “simply inform them.”

  Lloyd George was afraid, first, that American aid would go to the defeated countries when it was still needed by the Allies, and second, that the Americans would use control of food distribution (as he himself would have done) to achieve political ends. As the British ambassador to the United States put it, the hand that fed Europe would control its destiny.

  In Paris Hoover lobbied Wilson, who sent a note (drafted by Hoover) to the Allies, informing them that because the situation in Europe was desperate, the United States was going ahead on its own to set up a Food Administration for the Continent—and would notify them of what it did so that they could make plans of their own.

  Hoover bullied Joseph Grew into giving his organization thirteen rooms at the Crillon, despite expressions of alarm from the peace commissioners in residence there; threatened to leave Paris if any of the thirteen were taken away; and demanded more rooms. For others of his staff, he found and took over fifty rooms in an apartment house, though some must have been housed elsewhere, for Robert Taft a few months later sublet a furnished apartment for himself at 33, avenue Montaigne. Hoover also went out and recruited some 1,500 American officers from the armed forces. Eventually he agreed to report to an Inter-Allied Council for Supply and Relief (which convened in January 1919) and then to a Supreme Economic Council (which replaced it in February), but he continued to act on his own responsibility as director general of his agency.