Dr. Grayson immediately felt the chill in the air and realized that the President was relying on him for more than medical advice. Grayson and Tumulty had periodically used each other to relay information to the President; and just that week Grayson intuitively asked Tumulty to “communicate freely with me, giving me any pointers and suggestions that you may see fit.” The doctor monitored the President’s every move and watched Clemenceau and Poincaré as they welcomed Wilson’s train at the Gare des Invalides. The President told the old Tiger that he hoped he was not feeling any ill effects from the recent shooting. “On the contrary,” said Clemenceau, “I think it did me good.”
The Wilsons settled into a new “White House” at 11 Place des États-Unis, on a quiet block between the Étoile and the Seine. Although it came lavishly furnished—with pictures by Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Goya—it felt “more homey” than the Murat Palace. Its only drawback was that the bedrooms were on the ground floor. The President’s, in the back, along with a study, faced a garden, while Edith’s was streetside, facing a park with a Bartholdi statue of Lafayette and George Washington. As if to compensate for its exposure to the street, it came with a gold-fixtured bathroom so lavish it made her giddy. A grand hall and staircase led to a second floor of public salons; the third floor had five bedrooms and plenty of secretarial space; and quarters on the fourth floor could accommodate twelve servants. The President would have preferred to pay for his lodging, but Clemenceau insisted upon the Republic’s hosting its distinguished guests. “This house,” Edith recalled, “was suddenly transformed into a workshop as the President, without an hour’s delay, laid about him to win back what had been surrendered by Colonel House.”
Wilson assessed the damage, first by spending an hour with his neighbor Lloyd George, who spoke not only of the daily trials at the conference table but also the tribulations he faced at home—railway workers were threatening to paralyze all of England, while miners were urging government seizure of their industry. After lunch, Wilson visited the American Commissioners, who were bivouacked at the Hôtel de Crillon, and dressed them down for failing to protect the League and the Germans’ basic territorial rights. The French had already announced the creation of a Rhenish Republic, which Wilson described as nothing less than a personal “embarrassment.” From three to five in the afternoon, he met with Clemenceau and Lloyd George in Colonel House’s room. And after dinner at his residence, Wilson conferred with Premier Orlando, who described his private war with his cabinet ministers, many of whom were insisting on claims along the Adriatic coast, where Jugoslavs were already agitating.
The next morning, Wilson met again with Clemenceau and Lloyd George and asserted that any thought of a preliminary treaty without inclusion of the League was simply unacceptable. It contradicted the initial plenary session, at which the delegates agreed that the League was integral to the peace settlement—indeed, “the initial compelling paragraph of any peace treaty.” Wilson insisted that “there were so many collateral questions which must be referred to the League of Nations . . . that its creation must be the first object, and that no treaty could be agreed upon that would deal only with military, naval and financial matters.” The Premiers got the message. By day’s end, Ray Baker had disseminated a statement denying all reports of a separate treaty with Germany that excluded the League. “It will cause a fluttering in the dove-cotes,” Baker wrote in his diary, noting further: “Here is a man who acts: and has audacity.”
Colonel House rendered a different picture of Wilson. Having occupied the seat of power for several weeks, he resented being put back in his place. His quiet petulance slowly surfaced. The next day, House and Lord Cecil met with Wilson to discuss how the Covenant might be amended, clarifications the Colonel thought would “make the Covenant a better instrument” and remove the Senate’s objections. “The President, with his usual stubbornness in such matters, desires to leave it as it is, saying that any change will be hailed in the United States as yielding to the Senate,” House wrote, “and he believes it will lessen rather than increase the chances of ratification.” Again, House assured Cecil that the President would make “considerable concessions.” Still inebriated with power, House wrote, “My main drive now is for peace with Germany . . . and I am determined that it shall come soon if it is within my power to force action.” Days later, he soberly lamented, “I have no authority to decide questions on my own initiative as I did while the President was away.”
“All to do over again,” Woodrow grumbled to Edith. Through the month of March, six days a week, Wilson sat in one meeting after another, caroming from the Quai d’Orsay, where the Supreme War Council, the Council of Ten, and the League of Nations Commission met, to the Hôtel de Crillon, and then back to his private study, where the Council of Four convened, often twice a day. There, answers to all questions were always close at hand from experts who could run down the stairs from the great ballroom, which had been converted into a vast office. Typewriters clattered day and night.
On the surface, the conferees in Paris were united in their initial task of reindustrializing and revitalizing the world. Toward that end, the United States had sent an American Commission that included more than one hundred of the nation’s most distinguished men, current and future leaders among them: Samuel Gompers advised the labor panel; Bernard Baruch worked on economics and commerce; Herbert Hoover oversaw food and provisions, Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan & Company and Secretary of State Lansing’s nephew John Foster Dulles assisted the banking and finance committee. The latter’s brother, Allen, served as a technical adviser. Among the younger men were Ulysses S. Grant’s grandson, Colonel House’s son-in-law, Gordon Auchincloss, and Christian Herter. The specialists who had been part of the initial Inquiry—historians, geographers, and experts on Western Europe, the Orient, Italy, the Balkans, Russia, and Poland—continued to report to House’s brother-in-law, Sidney Mezes. The delegations from other nations were just as prodigious—what with John Maynard Keynes advising the British delegation and Jean Monnet the French. A thirty-year-old protégé of French Minister of Commerce Étienne Clémentel, Monnet was already espousing an expansion of inter-Allied economic councils with which he had worked, creating the nucleus of what he called “the Economic Union of Free Peoples.” The other participants were dealing with too many immediate problems to consider such an enormous proposal, but Monnet believed the notion of a European Economic Community would have its day. Wilson’s constant challenge remained getting his peers to put long-term global needs ahead of immediate national interests.
His conscience was his guide, especially when it came to reparations. But there were countless factors to debate, mostly the Allies’ unconscionable demands. The British wanted to bill the Germans for damage to civilian life and property and also wanted compensation for “improper treatment of interned civilians.” The French sought compensation for the loot of food, raw materials, livestock, machinery household effects, and timber. In addition, they wanted compensation to French nationals who had been deported and forced into labor camps. Panels had to determine to what extent Germany’s co-belligerents—Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey—were liable. Then all those bills had to be stacked alongside the Central Powers’ ability to pay.
A Sub-Committee of the Commission on Reparation of Damage was created to crunch the numbers. During the spring of 1919, this panel met thirty-two times, analyzing scores of reports on the assets of two continents—determining how much of the enemies’ money was in cash, securities, or receivables in foreign countries and deciding how much might be paid in raw materials “of which each of the Allied States had most need and which the enemy might be required to deliver in part payment.” The degree of detail approached ridiculousness. The fourth meeting of this subcommittee, for example, was devoted to the resources of Bulgaria. Investigators counted its grains in hundreds of millions of tons and its livestock and poultry into the billions—all 9.5 billion chickens,
405 million geese, 210 million turkeys, and 162 million ducks. The statisticians determined how many hectares were owned by peasants, schools, monasteries, and farmers’ banks. Because rose-growing was a specialty of Eastern Roumelia—the flowers’ extract being a valuable commodity—the subcommittee counted the number of petals that particular Bulgarian province yielded. The ninth meeting of the subcommittee examined the foreign securities owned by Germany. Copious tables listing the number of canal boats sunk during the war, the Portuguese worker’s daily consumption of “albuminous substances,” and the appraisal of artworks were all summarized in dizzying specifics, though sometimes the assessors pulled numbers from the sky. The subcommittee noted that enemy vessels destroyed 2,479 British mercantile vessels, the replacement costs of which could be figured at $150 per gross ton; but when it came to evaluating the loss of cargoes, Keynes said, it was “almost entirely a matter of guesswork.” Adding the costs of soldiers’ pensions and allowances, the total assessment against Germany came in around $40 billion, though the French claimed it was really twice that much and that Germany could afford $100 billion, if not twice that sum.
With so many vying interests at the Peace Conference, no problem had a perfect solution. Every financial formula contained an X factor of human complications. Much of Germany’s wealth, for example, lay in its natural resources—particularly in coal, the mines of which sat in territories that could not simply be annexed to other countries. The Saar Valley, on the west bank of the Rhine, was German in every trait; but the French wanted its coal for their iron fields in Lorraine. Upper Silesia had a mixed population of Germans, Czechoslovakians, and Poles, all of whom also wanted its coal and iron ore. Keynes noted, however, that economically it was “intensely German,” and that those resources fired the industries of eastern Germany. Their loss would flatten the economic structure of the German state, inhibiting Germany’s ability to pay the very restitution the Allies sought. Where prior peace congresses allowed victors to grab their spoils, Wilson pled with the Big Four to settle their differences rationally, considering the historical, geographic, ethnological, and economic implications.
While restitution was an essential component of the peace talks, reconstitution of the fallen empires held equal importance. On March 20, 1919, the Council of Four (minus Orlando) met in Lloyd George’s flat, where they opened the century’s biggest can of worms—the Arab portions of the old Ottoman Empire that stretched from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. The region held the resource that would fuel the next century—oil. The opening discussion about the area just coming to be called “the Middle East” had two primary goals: creating an Arab Confederation of States detached from Turkey; and arbitrating the claims of Great Britain and France to that territory. Both issues were complicated by an early agreement the Arabs had struck with the British, parts of which conflicted with yet another of those well-kept secret treaties.
During the war, French diplomat François Georges-Picot and English adviser Sir Mark Sykes had sought to strengthen the bond between their two nations by anticipating victory and dividing the Ottoman Empire among themselves and Russia (before that nation’s surrender) into spheres of influence. Essentially, the French would control Syria and Lebanon and the northern regions of modern Iraq; Great Britain would control Mesopotamia and Palestine, including what would become Jordan; and the Russians would obtain Armenia and Kurdistan. The remaining desert would be surrendered to the Arab empire as zones under British or French influence. The agreement was signed in May 1916. All but ignored in the agreement, of course, were the Arabs themselves, who had recently found a dynamic champion in a diminutive British army officer named Thomas Edward Lawrence. Transfixed by the region, Lawrence hoped to transform it, as he helped organize the Arab armies behind Faisal—a charismatic son of the Grand Sharif of Mecca—in their revolt against the Ottomans. At the same time, he led a diplomatic charge against his own country in promoting Arab independence. Even though England, France, and the Arabs had been joined in opposing the Turks, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which Lawrence learned about only after it was signed, was an affront to the Arabs. And the following year, the Balfour Declaration complicated matters further by acknowledging Britain’s support for establishing an independent Jewish state.
The concerned parties descended upon Paris in 1919, with “Lawrence of Arabia” escorting Faisal, in full desert garb, into the salons of the Allied diplomats. Lawrence himself often appeared similarly robed, drawing attention to his cause. Wilson joked that Sykes-Picot sounded like a blend of tea, but the problems it created were no laughing matter. Lloyd George told the Council of Four that if Damascus, for example, fell under French administration, the British would have “broken faith with the Arabs.” General Allenby topped that, suggesting that French imposition upon an unwilling Syria would surely lead to war. Wilson argued that France and Great Britain’s positions were moot since they had accepted his Fourteen Points, which superseded all prior agreements.
In a further complication, shortly before the peace talks, Faisal had signed an agreement with Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization. It honored the Balfour Declaration and encouraged development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It suggested both parties—scions of the same Semitic family tree—felt like outsiders and needed each other in order to sustain harmony in their mutual quest for independence. Wilson had long believed compromise could prevail when even ancient enemies sat together at the same table. He hoped to establish Faisal’s place in the Conference and argued further that because one of the parties to the Sykes-Picot Agreement—Russia—was no longer a participant, that agreement was nullified. Believing in “the consent of the governed,” the President said establishing Middle East mandates would depend on the Syrians accepting French oversight and the Mesopotamians accepting that of Great Britain. Similar conundrums appeared daily, and the revelation of one secret treaty after another only contributed to what Harold Nicolson called “an atmosphere of discord and disorder.”
“An undeniable tone of pessimism prevails here,” Ray Baker wrote in his diary the day that Syria was first discussed. And the problems in the Middle East were the least of it. He worried about the instability in Germany and the industrial situation in England, to say nothing of the mounting attacks on Wilson and the League at home. But the problem in Paris was more fundamental than all that.
Each day, Wilson realized to a greater degree that he and the other world leaders approached the world with differing visions. Taking a macro viewpoint, Wilson looked at the entire forest; his fellow peacemakers examined the micro situations for their own countries, seeing only the trees. The President believed in doing everything possible to see that self-determination might prevail in the new nations but increasingly saw that he would have to keep placating the great powers in order to protect the lesser ones. It was a delicate balance, for at any given moment a world leader could simply walk out on the entire proceedings. And France increasingly revealed less interest in self-determination than in the simple castration of Germany.
The American Commission remained especially mindful of Poland, which it considered a keystone to a reconstructed Europe. Its land had been seized and partitioned for years; its people were struggling to establish themselves as a democratic state; and it provided a crucial buffer between Germany and Russia, a firewall between Communism and Western Europe. Secretary Lansing and his colleagues advised Wilson to appoint an Ambassador to the wobbly republic as soon as possible, which he did. In the meantime, Hungary underwent a series of revolutions, one of them organized by Communist Béla Kun. He promptly declared himself dictator, launching a Red Terror, confiscating property, and murdering thousands of his own people. Communism also seeped into the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. In Riga, a Latvian Soviet Republic took hold, releasing thousands of prisoners who, with the Communists, looted stores, homes, and banks. They used machine guns to mow down innocen
t citizens, those deaths matched by starvation and disease. American food supplies seemed the best antidote to the raging ills and instability.
Twelve days after Wilson returned to Paris, William Bullitt came back from his Russian expedition. He had met Lenin himself, who charmed the young diplomat. “The Soviet government is firmly established, and the Communist Party is strong politically and morally,” Bullitt reported. His fellow traveler Lincoln Steffens would later remark to Bernard Baruch, “I have seen the future, and it works!” Bullitt promptly submitted a white paper urging recognition of the Red regime. On March 28, the altruistic but pragmatic Herbert Hoover, while acknowledging the massive number of deaths due to hunger in Russia, insisted, “We cannot even remotely recognize this murderous tyranny without stimulating actionist radicalism in every country in Europe and without transgressing on every National ideal of our own.” Furthermore, he asserted, “I feel strongly the time has arrived for you again to reassert your spiritual leadership of democracy in the world as opposed to tyrannies of all kinds.” He suggested an examination of Bolshevism from its political, economic, humane, and criminal points of view. Having more sway with the President than Bullitt, he urged Wilson to understand the movement’s “utter foolishness as a basis of economic development.” Hoover had no doubt that real democracy was the straighter road to “social betterment.”
Increasingly, Wilson realized the Conference was becoming less about such humanitarian issues as feeding hungry peoples than it was about politics. That was mostly because of the French, with their endless political ploys. Clemenceau, who constantly reverted to positions he had already surrendered, became Wilson’s bête noire. Repeatedly the President explained that much of the world’s sympathy toward France was the result of their believing she had been wronged by Germany. “Now if the policies are to be carried out which you are advocating, and which wrong the German people,” he tried reasoning with the French Premier, “the world must naturally turn against you and France, and through sympathy alone it may be likely to forget Germany’s crimes.” In talking about the Rhenish buffer state the French sought, Wilson finally convinced Clemenceau. But, as he confided to Lord Cecil after dinner on March 18, talking to the French was like pressing a finger into an India rubber ball: “You tried to make an impression,” Wilson said, “but as soon as you moved your finger the ball was as round as ever.” Wilson said that he would never consent to dividing the country on the west bank of the Rhine from Germany, but he was prepared to agree to something “in the nature of an alliance between England and America and France to protect her against sudden aggression, in addition to the protection which she would already have by the League of Nations.” That appealed to the European leaders in the abstract, but one could never overestimate Clemenceau’s insatiable desire for security and revenge.
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