John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

He arrived in an ugly mood towards House. The confidential colonel’s plan for a preliminary treaty conflicted with his decision not to sign any treaty that didn’t have the covenant imbedded in it. He was worried, and with reason, for fear Lodge’s round robin would serve as an excuse to shelve the whole plan for a League of Nations. Reports from the British and American newspapers gave him reason to believe a rumor was being circulated that the League was dead.

Edith Wilson never had liked House any better than she liked McAdoo. Now she saw a chance to get rid of him. “A regular jellyfish,” she called him. She kept telling her husband that House was weakkneed; and, besides, he got too much publicity. He was no longer the anonymous adviser. Last spring the President had had to write personally to Doubleday Page, the publishers, suggesting that they quietly drop Arthur Howden Smith’s book called The Real Colonel House. Now House was being written up in the British and American press as the brains of the Peace Conference. His photographs were everywhere. Wickham Stead, one of the foremost British advocates of a League of Nations, was giving House all the credit.

Grayson agreed with Mrs. Wilson. A “yes man,” he called the confidential colonel. The whole presidential party was up in arms against Colonel House. Even the secretservice men were indignant about how he had sold out the President.

House rode down to Brest on Poincaré’s train to meet his affectionate friend. Although House states in his journal for March 14: “I did not go out to the George Washington to meet President and Mrs. Wilson, but met them at the landing stage,” both Mrs. Wilson and E. W. Starling, one of the secretservice men, describe in their recollections a scene in the President’s stateroom aboard the ship.

Starling described, to the journalist who wrote up his story, the President and Colonel House being closeted that night in the President’s cabin.

“… After what seemed like a long time Colonel House emerged from the suite, looking disturbed and walking rapidly. As I stepped inside to close the door I saw the President standing, his eyes fixed on me but showing no recognition … His face was pale and seemed drawn and tired. The whole figure expressed dejection. I closed the door, mentally cursing Colonel House.”

Edith Wilson remembered the scene even more dramatically. “I look back at that moment,” she wrote in My Memoir , “as a crisis in his life, and feel that from it dated the long years of illness, due to overwork, and that with the wreckage of his plans and his life have come these tragic years that have demoralized the world.”

Her account of the scene was vivid: “It was after midnight and very still aboard, when I heard my husband’s door open and the Colonel take his leave … Woodrow was standing. The change in his appearance shocked me. He seemed to have aged ten years, and his jaw was set in that way it had when he was making a superhuman effort to control himself. Silently he held out his hand, which I grasped, crying ‘What is the matter? What has happened?’

“He smiled bitterly. ‘House has given away everything I had won before I left Paris. He has compromised on every side, and so I have to start all over again, and this time it will be harder.’ ”

Wherever the interview took place — Ray Baker writes of it as taking place on the train — it was tense. The President blamed House for having induced him to set the senators up to that dinner; “Your dinner … was a failure as far as getting together was concerned,” House remembered his saying. The senators had been intransigent. The President would have no part of a preliminary peace with Germany. If they forced him he’d insist on a preliminary peace with every one of the belligerents.

House summed up the conversation: “The President comes back very militant and determined to put League of Nations into treaty.”

This time the President and his party put up in the newer quarter of Paris, near the apartment house where Lloyd George and Balfour were lodged. The President didn’t want to be beholden to the French for his residence; the Hôtel de Mûrat was too napoleonic to be comfortable and, besides, he was convinced the French flunkies there were all spies. Eleven Place des Etats-Unis was an art nouveau mansion belonging to a banker named Bischoffsheim. It contained a fine collection of paintings. Edith Wilson’s bathroom was ornamented with enamelled appleblossoms. The lighting fixture was a tangle of birds and butterflies. There were gold faucets at the washstand. On the square outside rose Bartholdi’s sculptured group of Lafayette being received by George Washington.

The President immediately ordered the cluttered parlors cleared for office space. His first act was to have Ray Baker issue a statement to the press:

“The President said today that the decision made at the Peace Conference at its plenary session, January 25, 1919, to the effect that the establishment of a League of Nations should be made an integral part of the Treaty of Peace, is of final force and that there is no basis whatever for the reports that a change in this decision was contemplated.”

The work of the Council of Four became an unremitting grind. Wilson’s insistence on scrapping plans for a preliminary peace meant that many things had to be taken up all over again. It wasn’t long before Clemenceau and Lloyd George and Orlando, each in his particular way, discovered how to handle President Wilson. If they threatened the League of Nations he would make concessions. He would give up anything for the covenant.

The detail work was punishing to everyone concerned. The Council of Four did not suffer from a lack of information. It suffered from the excess of it.

Hordes of specialists, and good ones, were ready to produce statistics on every conceivable subject. Their difficulty was in finding out what use the Big Four were making of their reports. The proceedings, except when some one of the olympians leaked a story to the press for some particular purpose, were shrouded in the blackest secrecy.

The British delegations had the advantage of a discreet summary of developments distributed daily by Sir Maurice Hankey. Wilson never saw fit to inform his various teams of what was going on. Lansing’s men didn’t know what House’s men were up to. Neither group had any consistent contact with Baruch’s commission.

Herbert Hoover, schooled in the troubled waters of international intrigue by his experience in Belgium, went doggedly ahead with Quaker tenacity organizing his relief work where it was most needed; but, although he knew more than anybody about what actually went on among the populations whose fate was being so arbitrarily decided, he was hardly consulted; and his only information about what was being decided upstairs came from occasional chats with Colonel House.

The Secretary of State was reduced to sitting in glum idleness in sessions of the various councils, which went on revolving as a series of fifth wheels after the Big Four had gone into their inner sanctum. Lansing amused himself making sketches of the delegates on his pad. As for Henry White and Tasker Bliss their opinions were never asked. They were reduced to tagging after House’s soninlaw, Auchincloss, for any little hints of news he would vouchsafe them. House was still consulted, but Edith Wilson and Grayson were busy behind the scenes whittling away what little influence he had left.

The President had rolled up his sleeves. There was no one he could trust. He would have to take the whole business on singlehanded. At first he put up a stubborn battle to reduce French demands for the left bank of the Rhine, for a Rhenish republic and for the coalfields of the Saar. None of this could be made to jibe with the pledge of selfdetermination in the Fourteen Points. By the end of March the discussion culminated in a personal row with Clemenceau. Unless France had the Saar, growled the Tiger, he would not sign the peace treaty. “In that event do you want me to return home?” asked the President in the tone he could make like a whip. Clemenceau lost his temper. “I do not wish you to go home, but I intend to do so myself.” He stamped out of the room.