by G. J. Meyer
The beaming Wilson, slim and dapper and handsome in a way both boyish and austere, rested and at ease after nine days on calm seas, was led to a horse-drawn open carriage and joined there by Poincaré. The pert and pretty Edith Galt Wilson followed in a second carriage with Madame Poincaré. The two chiefs of state and their ladies formed the centerpiece of a grand procession. Led by a regiment of cavalry in full regalia, it made its slow way through the Place de la Concorde, past the statue representing the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine from which a black shroud had recently been removed to mark their recovery from Germany, up a Champs-Élysées lined with captured German guns to the Arc de Triomphe. The carriages soon filled with thrown flowers. The multitudes roared as again and again Wilson raised his silk top hat.
Huge banners were everywhere. Vive Wilson, they declared. Vive l’Amérique. Wilson le Juste.
The Wilsons were delivered at last to the Murat Palace, which was to serve as their residence during the short time they expected to be in France. They were given a quick tour by its owner, Prince Joachim Napoleon Murat, descendant of one of Napoleon I’s great marshals and the emperor’s sister Caroline. In size the palace rivaled the White House, with more privacy thanks to the high walls surrounding its wide gardens and an infinitely more exquisite interior. Meanwhile the president’s retinue, including the teams of scholars and experts who had been brought along to help him put the world right, was moving into the magnificent Hôtel de Crillon, adjacent to the American embassy. Everything possible was being done to make them happy to be in Paris, to show them that they were among friends.
By early afternoon Wilson was settled in the splendid study adjacent to his equally splendid bedroom on the palace’s upper floor. No one was with him except the only man he wanted with him, wily little Edward House, not only his closest confidant but nearly his alter ego. “My second personality,” Wilson called him, “my independent self: his thoughts and mine are one.” House had been in Europe since October, known to all as the president’s personal representative, explaining his objectives and gathering information on his behalf. He called himself “Colonel” and expected to be addressed as such, although he had never served in any army. He said it was a geographic rather than a military title, having been conferred on him by a governor of his native Texas.
House and the president had much to discuss. First were the preparations for the peace conference that was soon to begin, and that had brought Wilson to Europe. House would have been eager to share the latest news about the leading participants—about who thought what, and what kinds of difficulties they were likely to create. Beyond that were all the grand plans that the two of them had spent months and even years perfecting for Europe and the world.
So there sat Wilson in regal splendor, once the obscure son of a southern preacher, now the idol of what was coming to be called the Free World, preparing to rescue the world’s unfree portions. Still not sixty-two years old, he was at the midpoint of his second term in office and entirely justified if he regarded himself as the most famous, most admired, most important human being on the planet.
And why not? There was nothing in such a claim to make Wilson wince. If he had always been ferociously ambitious, declaring as an undergraduate that youngsters like himself should “acquire knowledge that we might have power,” he had wanted power only in order to do good. So he told himself, at least. From his Parisian palace, he could look back on a career in which he had done much good, and not only after reaching the White House: as an educator, too, and as an author, governor of a major state, one of the master orators of his time, and leading figure in that irruption of American reformist zeal known as the Progressive Movement.
His whole life, but especially the past ten years, could be seen in retrospect as an arrow shot straight at this climactic moment. In the three astonishing years that ended with the election of 1912, he had vaulted from the presidency of Princeton University to the presidency of the United States. The war had then made him the man who, as Winston Churchill would write, “played a part in the fate of nations incomparably more direct and personal than any other.” Finally he had been brought here, to a Europe that (he saw ample reason to believe) needed him terribly. Could there be a more certain confirmation that he had been destined from eternity to do “high-minded things”? That God had singled him out?
Again: why not? Not even his adversaries—which, being a supremely successful politician, he had in abundance—could have denied that he was brilliantly gifted, impeccably upright, and guided by high ideals. But of course he was also human, which is to say he was limited, and among his limitations was a blindness of a kind that is perhaps not all that unusual among extraordinary men of a certain type. Often right about important things, he was inclined to think himself always right about everything. He found it difficult—could find it impossible—to imagine that those who disagreed with him might sometimes be right. Might be acting in good faith, at least. Among his talents was the ability to deceive himself, about his own actions and motives above all, and then to deceive others while remaining certain of his own integrity. These were dangerous traits in the most important man on the planet, at a time when humanity stood on the brink of momentous decisions. Those who do not see what is real are generally doomed to collide with it.
President Wilson, his new wife Edith, and Colonel Edward House
A vision of harmony, but with bitter troubles to come.
In Paris five weeks after the end of the Great War, some things were being concealed from Wilson not only by his own blindness but by other people as well. He had no way of knowing how much, despite the extravagance of the welcome they had prepared for him, Clemenceau and Poincaré did not want him in France, or that England’s prime minister, the “Welsh Wizard” David Lloyd George, likewise wished he had stayed home and hoped he would soon return there.
These men led nations that had barely survived fifty months of the most ruinous war in European history, had buried hundreds of thousands of their sons, and had impoverished themselves in carrying on the fight. America’s troops, by contrast, had been in combat for barely six months, had operated as an independent army for a mere two months, and in the end had lost only half as many men as Romania or Serbia (never mind France or Britain, or Russia or Germany or Italy).
Against this background, it is understandable if Clemenceau and Lloyd George were inclined to find it not only ridiculous but offensive that an American should now come across the Atlantic for the purpose of showing them how to make peace. Both men had spent their lives in political combat, fighting their way from modest beginnings to the top of the greasy pole. Woodrow Wilson, by comparison, was little more than an amateur, a newcomer, a professional academic who had entered politics at an elevated level a mere eight years before and appeared to regard himself as teacher to the world. The Europeans were accustomed by now to his lofty preachments, and not particularly grateful for them.
Yes, victory would have been long delayed if not impossible without the contribution of the United States. America’s vast wealth had come to the rescue just in time to save Britain and France from collapse. By pouring in food and war matériel and an endless flood of fresh troops, America had driven Germany to the desperate measures that hastened her collapse.
But still…
It was difficult for America’s “associates” (Wilson refused to call them allies, wanting to make clear that his country was operating on its own distinctly higher plane) not to see the president as presumptuous, absurd, perhaps even contemptible. Some of his ideas seemed not only foolish but intolerable. He wanted to guarantee freedom of the seas to all nations even in times of war; this made the British, whose great navy had saved them from starvation while starving their enemies, wonder what the point of that navy was supposed to be if another war came. Wilson also wanted a peace without reparations or retribution; for the French, who saw themselves as innocent victims of aggression and had been left with a wide swath of devastation that
cut through their heartland like a bleeding wound from the Belgian border to the Swiss, this was outrageous. As for the League of Nations that Wilson envisaged as the centerpiece of his beautiful postwar world, the Italians may have been especially artful in feigning more enthusiasm for it than they felt, but they were far from alone in their skepticism.
But still…
America had been indispensable, and all the unsubtle hints from the French and the British had not sufficed to keep Wilson on his own side of the ocean. Now that he was in Paris, there was nothing to do but to make the best of it. If that meant pretending to be sympathetic to his seemingly numberless proposals, displaying the patience that one would extend to an ignorant and stubborn child, so be it. If it required trying inch by inch to expose him to the realities of postwar Europe, stalling for time while doing so, that was hardly the greatest challenge that his fellow victors had faced in recent months.
Where Wilson’s blindness was most willful as 1918 ended was in the realm of domestic politics. Many of the Americans best qualified to judge—Secretary of State Robert Lansing, leading members of Congress from both parties, even Colonel House—had tried to dissuade him from going to Europe. After all, the transatlantic telegraph was now an established fact, so he could direct America’s part in the peace conference from the White House. People with his best interests at heart argued that there was no need for him to become so directly involved in what could only be extremely difficult negotiations, thereby putting so much of his own political capital at stake. Some who were not so friendly complained that it was irresponsible for a president to put a wide ocean between himself and Washington. What if there were a national emergency?
But no, Wilson said, he had to go. It was a courageous and arguably a selfless decision, proof of his willingness to take risks for the sake of the just and lasting peace that he had promised. But it was something else as well: an expression of his egotism, his vision of himself as the indispensable man, the one voice able to speak for the freedom-loving people not only of the United States but of the world.
The dangers of such a self-image are apparent in the president’s explanation of why he could not stay at home. The people expected him to go, he said. They looked to him as the man who could make certain that the high and pure objectives for which America had plunged into history’s greatest bloodbath were going to be achieved. He could accomplish this only by personally taking a seat at the bargaining table, face-to-face with his fellow victors. It was his duty to go—a sacred duty.
In this there was nobility and folly. The folly was rooted in the illusions that had always been part of Wilson’s understanding of himself.
Had the American public ever been strongly behind him in his decision to go to war? That was an arguable if not a downright dubious proposition.
And was he, in December 1918, in a position from which to speak for the people even of his own country? Theodore Roosevelt did not think so. From a hospital bed in New York, as the George Washington carried Wilson to France, the former president had issued a statement. “Our allies and our enemies and Mr. Wilson himself,” it declared, “should understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority to speak for the American people at this time.”
TR was far from impartial. He had long disliked Wilson, and by now he hated him. He had lost the 1912 election to Wilson, fuming in exasperation as the Democrats won the White House for the first time in twenty years despite getting only 42 percent of the vote. Later, Wilson’s slowness in going to war convinced Roosevelt that he was weak and cowardly, a deplorable example of how America was becoming effete. Despite his age and infirmities, TR resented Wilson’s refusal to allow him to lead a division to the Western Front. And he blamed what he saw as the incompetence of Wilson’s War Department—specifically its failure to produce satisfactory aircraft—for the death in France of his adored youngest son, a pilot shot out of the sky.
But about the Wilson who was steaming to France, Roosevelt was not entirely wrong. A month before he issued his statement, 1918’s election had become a referendum on the Democratic Party under Wilson’s leadership, on the administration’s policies and practices at home and abroad, and inevitably on the president himself. It was Wilson who made it so. He injected himself into one congressional contest after another, calling upon voters to rally under his banner and purge those who had failed to support him even if they had strongly supported the war. Midterm elections are usually unhappy experiences for the party of a sitting president, especially a president in his second term. But for the Democrats, the election of November 1918—held, as it happened, in the very week when Germany conceded defeat and the president could claim total vindication of his war policies—was no ordinary setback. When the polls opened on Tuesday, November 5, the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress: the House of Representatives narrowly, the Senate by a commanding margin. A day later the Republicans had majorities of forty-four seats in the House and two in the Senate. There is no way of knowing if the Democrats might have suffered even worse losses if Wilson had not injected himself into the campaign. But perceptions matter in politics as much as in any human enterprise, and the dominant perception as Wilson took ship for France was that he had gambled on the support of the public and lost badly.
In Washington therefore he was suddenly the lamest of lame ducks, a seemingly repudiated leader. The Republicans, jubilant, had no reason to fear or follow him. Conservatives of both parties had always been leery of Wilson the progressive, and across the country millions of liberals were now alienated from him because of the harshness with which his administration had sought to suppress opinions that it found unacceptable. The president urgently needed to repair relations not only with the resurgent Republicans but with important elements of his own party, including those progressive Democrats who had once been his most ardent supporters. But he gave little sign of understanding this, or of caring.
Instead, he proceeded as if nothing had happened. This was nowhere more obvious than in his choice of delegates to the peace conference. There were four of these aside from Wilson himself, and among them were no members of Congress from either party. One was a nominal Republican, the wealthy and semiretired diplomat Henry White, who had supported Wilson both before and after the U.S. entry into the war, had never held elective office, and at nearly seventy years of age was not even on the margins of his party’s centers of power. The others were Colonel House, Secretary of State Lansing, and General Tasker H. Bliss, already in Europe as Wilson’s military representative on the Allies’ Supreme War Council.
It was said, in mocking tones, that in assembling this delegation, Wilson had simply chosen copies of himself four times. If this would keep things simple in Paris, ensuring that none of the delegates would oppose him to any troublesome extent, politically it was shortsighted. The Republican Party, given no voice in whatever was going to happen at the conference, would have little political stake in its success. The same would be true even of many Democrats in Congress, aware as they were of how recently the nation’s voters had seemingly washed their hands of the president.
Thus the Woodrow Wilson who arrived in Paris was in a far weaker position than the cheers of the multitudes suggested. At home he was widely seen as a spent force. Here in Europe, his supposedly grateful fellow victors regarded him as trouble, an obstacle standing between them and their own objectives. In spite of the immense sums they owed the United States, in spite of their continued dependence on American largesse, they were going to prove far less tractable than Wilson expected them to be.
So that if December 1918 was for the president a grand apotheosis, the fulfillment of a proud man’s most flamboyant dreams, it was also the beginning of the end.
Wilson had reached his zenith. What awaited was nemesis.
Background
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How It Happened
It is a rare American who can explain, except in the vaguest terms, how the killing of a man who was not the leader or rule
r of any country could possibly have caused a war in which some twenty million human beings perished.
This is as it should be, actually, because the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to Austria-Hungary’s imperial throne, did not cause the war at all. It is more usefully understood as having lit a fuse that blew up a keg of gunpowder. The keg was the Europe of 1914. The gunpowder was the system of balance-of-power politics that had separated Europe’s most powerful nations into two camps, each fearful that the other was bent on its destruction and therefore desperate not to fall behind in an arms race that in retrospect can seem barely sane.
The fuse was a long one: five weeks of excruciating diplomatic contortions separated Franz Ferdinand’s assassination from the unleashing of the armies. It had many twists and loops, barely smoldering at first but later burning hot and fast. There were points at which it might have been snuffed out. These opportunities were missed not because the nations involved wanted to make war but because they feared what might befall them if they appeared to be unwilling to do so. Fear, not aggression, is the theme that runs through the whole story.
Everyone had reason to be afraid. France certainly did; though she had a peacetime standing army of 700,000 men (instantly expandable to 3 million upon mobilization), she shared a long and disputed border with Germany, whose forces totaled 782,000 men in peacetime, 3.8 million upon mobilization. But Germany, too, had reason for fear. Though she had Austria-Hungary on her side (400,000 troops peacetime, 2.25 million mobilized), this could seem almost trivial in light of France’s alliance with Russia. Russia’s standing army included 1.3 million troops, with 3 million reserves subject to mobilization. The tsar had 25 million male subjects of military service age—for all practical purposes, an infinite resource.
