In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Of the stars of Yale’s graduating class of 1913—Cole Porter, Averell Harriman, and William Bullitt—Porter was the most shameless in avoiding military service. Apparently disregarding the law that required him to register for selective service, he boarded an ocean liner to France and spent the war living in Paris, where he dressed in Foreign Legion and other French military uniforms, leading everyone to assume that he was serving as an army officer. He kept up the charade in front of his friend and college classmate, the future actor Second Lieutenant Monty Woolley, and in front of Archibald MacLeish, who was to fight in the second battle of the Marne. MacLeish, a close friend of Porter’s Harvard roommate, Dean Acheson, had left Harvard to join the army, while Acheson stayed on to finish law school before enlisting (as it happened, just before the Armistice brought the war to an end).

  MORE THAN ANY OTHER AMERICAN, Theodore Roosevelt stood for the proposition that one should risk one’s life for one’s country. And as always, he set the example. A few years earlier his body had been practically destroyed in an expedition in Brazil that searched for the source of the River of Doubt. Yet when war was declared, TR, though physically a wreck, nearly sixty, and half-blind, desperately sought permission to lead a volunteer unit to France to fight. President Wilson rejected his offer, in patronizing terms that foreshadowed the partisan spirit in which the chief executive would conduct the war and the peace.

  Wilson hated TR and was jealous of him. TR despised Wilson. As he came out of his meeting with the President, the ex-President encountered Colonel House and complained of the reception he had just received. As Winston Churchill later told the story, Theodore Roosevelt said: “ ‘Wilson was very rough with me. After all, all I asked was to be allowed to die.’ House (in his silkiest tones): ‘Did you make that last point clear to the President?’ ”

  As soon as war came, all four of TR’s sons enlisted in the army. But cousin Franklin did not. TR told Roosevelt, “You must resign.” He said, “You must get into uniform at once!” Not merely did he say it, he said it often. Eleanor Roosevelt remembered that TR “was always urging Franklin to resign.”

  Roosevelt did offer to resign, but dropped the matter when Josephus Daniels told him that Wilson wanted him to remain in his position. His old daydream of being another TR—of winning glory on the battlefield—seems to have flamed up only fitfully and then to have fizzled out. He seems, too, to have been torn between a feeling that it looked wrong for him not to enlist and a strong desire to stay where he was. Despite his athletic appearance, he was not robust; he suffered from frequent colds. He could well take the view that he was making a greater contribution to the war effort as assistant secretary of the navy than he could make as a fighting man. He also had strong inducements to stay put: His political life in Washington was fulfilling. So was his personal life; he and twenty-six-year-old Lucy Mercer, once his wife’s secretary, were in love. At last he had found a woman who suited him physically, temperamentally, and socially. Their clandestine affair was facilitated by her employment for a time at the Navy Department. But Washington was a small town, and though the lovers were discreet, there were those who noticed and who gossiped. Daniels seems to have learned of the affair, and in October 1917 terminated the employment of Yeoman Second Class Mercer. But Roosevelt did not break with her, despite Daniels’s unspoken disapproval; the liaison, whatever may have been its nature, continued.

  In this he was encouraged by his cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth, TR’s daughter and Washington’s most brilliant hostess. Franklin and Lucy had taken an automobile drive in the country one day. Alice happened to see them and, looking at the expression on Franklin’s face, guessed all.

  “You didn’t see me,” she teased her cousin later. “Your hands were on the wheel but your eyes were on that perfectly lovely lady.”

  “Isn’t she perfectly lovely?” he agreed.

  Alice proceeded to be helpful. Whether out of sentiment or mischief, she provided a cover: when Eleanor was out of town, she would invite the lovers to dinner, giving them a place to meet and be together.

  A lifetime later, when Alice was eighty-three but still known for her malicious wit, she was asked about the role she had played in the affair. She defended herself. Franklin, she said, “deserved a good time. He was married to Eleanor.”

  Despite cousin TR’s often-voiced exhortations, the charming young assistant secretary of the navy lingered in Washington, far from the sea battles of the North Atlantic.

  13

  FOCUSING ON THE PEACE

  WILLIAM BULLITT, who was often a step ahead, had grasped the importance of focusing on foreign policy in 1914, years before even such brilliant contemporaries as Walter Lippmann had seen that events in Europe might involve the United States. By 1917 he had made himself into an outstanding Washington journalist and foreign correspondent. His longtime plan had been to trade his firsthand information about European affairs into a high position in the Wilson administration. America’s entry into the war enabled him to do it.

  The President’s adviser Colonel House had come to value Bullitt’s views. On July 15 Bullitt wrote to House that “the unhappy results of an appendicitis operation make it impossible for me to do active military service” and that he wished to serve on the White House staff. By the end of the year, House managed to obtain for Bullitt—who was only four years out of college—an appointment as assistant secretary of state. The State Department then requested that he not be inducted into military service.

  At State, Bullitt continued to communicate directly with Colonel House, although in theory he was to report to and through Joseph Grew, the State Department’s chief of the Division of Western European Affairs. Grew, who had served as number two at the U.S. embassy in Berlin until war came, had gone on to a brief stint at the embassy in Vienna before being brought back to the United States. He was not physically eligible for the armed forces because he was partially deaf—able to make out what was said to him face-to-face, but not what was said if he turned away.

  Bullitt had known Grew at the Berlin embassy, and Christian Herter, too, who finally had dealt with his fiancée’s objections to his leaving her for public service by marrying her. Rejected by the army as underweight for his enormous height, Herter had become a State Department officer. Among the other draft-age officials of the department was austere, forbidding Sumner Welles, a Groton boy, Harvard ’14, a page at Franklin Roosevelt’s wedding, recommended by Roosevelt for the foreign service in 1915, who had been posted to the embassy in Tokyo.

  THIRTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD Felix Frankfurter, professor of law at Harvard, became an assistant to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker when the war began, and as such was exempt from the draft. Walter Lippmann, twenty-seven, wrote to Frankfurter and to Secretary Baker as well to ask if he, too, could obtain an exemption from military service. “What I want to do is to devote all my time to studying and speculating on the approaches to peace and the reaction from the peace,” Lippmann wrote. “I am convinced that I can serve my bit much more effectively than as a private in the new armies.”

  Baker agreed, and appointed Lippmann one of his special assistants. For Lippmann, this meant leaving The New Republic and New York City. Frankfurter and a handful of other brilliant young bachelors already were in residence at the Washington house of a friend at 1727 Nineteenth Street, and Lippmann (and his wife, for he had just married) moved in, too.

  The redbrick house was an intellectual center pulsating with the vitality of young men on the move. A frequent visitor, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, teasing them for their seriousness and sense of self-importance, dubbed their residence the “House of Truth.” Holmes, who had served with gallantry in the Civil War, was a survivor of a more robust era in which young men were not always so high-minded.

  At first Lippmann, like Frankfurter and Roosevelt (all of whom now had offices in the State, War and Navy Departments Building), was drawn into administrative work, notably dealing with labor questions (wages
, working conditions, and the like) in docks and arsenals. In the course of these proceedings Lippmann, as army representative, met Franklin Roosevelt, the navy’s man, who had been detailed to such committee work for years. But the two did not get to know each other or to form any particular bond.* For one thing, Roosevelt often was absent from committee meetings; his assistant, Louis Howe, frequently showed up in his place, for the assistant secretary tended to focus instead on public appearances. Lippmann, in turn, did not remain in his War Department job long.

  For Lippmann’s star was rising. When on August 1, 1917, Pope Benedict XV called upon the warring countries to stop the war and to make peace on the basis of disarmament, arbitration of disputes, no annexations or indemnities, and a return by all parties to wherever they started from in the summer of 1914, President Wilson turned to Lippmann to supply an explanation of why the United States was rejecting the appeal. The pope was proposing the “peace without victory” that Wilson himself, only months before, had asked all belligerents to accept. But now that the United States was in the war, the President wanted to remake the world of 1914, not return to it. Lippmann responded with a draft reply to the pope that said that in order to prevent a recurrence of the war, Germany had to be changed. Just going back to July 1914 would solve nothing, for it would mean that someday, August 1914 would come again.

  Lippmann’s memorandum (for his chief, the secretary of war) in August 1917 was a somewhat muddled attempt to think through the President’s policy toward Germany. “We are conducting the war,” Lippmann began, “on the assumption that there is a distinction between the German government and German people. The question is: Why had the German people supported this government in the past and why do they continue to?” Lippmann’s answer was that Prussian militarism had won for Germany things that matter—national security, prosperity, respect from others—and that the Germans had been led to believe that only the kind of government they had could get these things for them.

  It followed, Lippmann argued, that “if the German people are to be weaned from their governing class they must be made to believe that they can be safe, prosperous, and respected without dependence upon the government as it exists.” Lippmann did not say how this could be done. Nor did he mention the obvious corollary of his proposition: that the United States should fight on until the power of Germany’s military ruling class was broken. If Germany were beaten badly enough, her people might be persuaded that Prussian militarism did not provide safety, prosperity, or respect—and therefore might be induced to opt for a different kind of regime.

  Lippmann urged Wilson to say that Germany was not a fit partner with which to establish a peaceful world. He explained that “by a fit partner we understand a Germany in which control of foreign policy and of the military machine has passed to the representatives of the people. We go on the assumption that it is possible to deal in good faith with a democracy.”

  But that contradicted what he had said about the German people having been deluded into believing that only Prussian militarism could secure the country’s legitimate objectives. If they went on believing that, the German people would be no more fit than Germany’s government to work with America in designing a peaceful and disarmed world.

  Nonetheless Wilson was impressed by Lippmann’s memorandum. “Lippmann is not only thoughtful,” the President said to the secretary of war, “but just and suggestive.” Wilson went on to reply to Pope Benedict along lines Lippmann had suggested, emphasizing the distinction between the German people and their government.

  THE NEED TO REPLY TO THE POPE focused attention on the question of American war goals. Even before the United States entered the war, House had suggested to Wilson that a body of experts should be convened to supply American delegates to the future peace conference with the information they would need. Then, shortly after the pope’s appeal in August 1917, Felix Frankfurter, visiting Paris, reported to Lansing that the French had assembled several committees to plan ahead for the peace. Frankfurter suggested to Lansing that the United States should do likewise. Frankfurter’s report was forwarded to Wilson, who wrote to Lansing that he had read it “with a great deal of interest.”

  House, who had heard from Frankfurter directly, was worried that little or nothing was being done to follow through. In fact, Lansing, in September 1917, had made a start, though not a particularly ambitious one. He asked Joseph Grew and two others to draft secret memorandums that would help in thinking about peace terms, and to begin by describing and analyzing the development during the war of “the aims and desires of the present belligerents.” A William Bullitt or a Walter Lippmann would have jumped at this chance to design a new world, but with a bureaucrat’s weariness, Grew wrote that “my share of this seemingly colossal task includes Germany, Austria-Hungary, England, France, Belgium, and Portugal.” After searching in vain for somebody to draft the memo for him, Grew decided that he could do it himself if State would give him a week’s leave of absence.

  But the President took the inquiry into war goals away from the Department of State. At the time, professional foreign and consular services were only just being established by the United States—indeed, Grew was to become (in the words of the Council on Foreign Relations) “the first American to manage a complete foreign service career”—and it could well be argued that the department lacked the expertise, experience, and manpower to plan a global peace conference. In any event Wilson’s was a personal style of government. On the occasions when foreign policy issues drew his attention, he decided them himself; the rest of the time—which was most of the time—he wanted his alter ego, Edward House, to deal with them. So it was in character for him, when the issue of peace terms arose, to instruct House to secretly assemble a group of experts—bypassing the State Department—to help formulate America’s plans for the postwar world. The group was to be located in New York in order to preserve secrecy, which proved to be a convenience for House, who resided there.

  Wilson suggested that members of the team should be recruited mainly from the academic world and that names might be solicited from the president of Harvard and from the editor of The New Republic. The group, anonymous for the moment, later was to be code-named “the Inquiry.” To ensure his continuing personal control of it, House appointed as its director his wife’s brother-in-law, Sidney Mezes, president of the College of the City of New York.

  At the end of September 1917, House visited Washington and came by the War Department. He invited Walter Lippmann, for some months special assistant to Secretary of War Baker, to a stroll with him and a talk, in the course of which he revealed the secret project and asked Lippmann to be part of it. It was exactly what Lippmann wanted. It validated his decision to stay out of combat and save himself to make more important contributions to his country’s cause—contributions that he uniquely was capable of making.

  As soon as House returned to New York, Lippmann wrote to him that “the work outlined is exactly that which I have dreamed of since the very beginning of the war, but dreamed of as something beyond reach. I’d literally rather be connected with you in this work in no matter what capacity than do anything else there is to do in the world.”

  So it was that a mere five months after arriving in Washington to work in the War Department, Lippmann, who had just turned twenty-eight years old, returned to New York to focus his extraordinary intelligence on the problems not of war, but of peace. He rented an apartment at 21 East Fifty-seventh Street for himself and for fun-loving Faye Albertson, whom he had married in the late spring, and immersed himself in questions of high politics—which bored his wife, but gave meaning to his life.

  There were five of them in the inner group: Mezes, the head; Lippmann, who became general secretary; James Shotwell, a historian from Columbia University; attorney David Hunter Miller, a law partner of House’s son-in-law; and Isaiah Bowman, director of the AGS (the American Geographical Society). At first the Inquiry made its headquarters at the New York Public Librar
y on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street. Later Lippmann and his colleagues moved to the premises of the AGS at Broadway and 155th Street.

  The AGS provided professionally drawn maps that were outstanding. Nonetheless, the Inquiry’s other productions tended to be amateurish. There was a comic side to the notion of assembling a group of academics, many of them unworldly or impractical, a number of them narrow specialists in obscure and irrelevant fields, some of them historians of long-dead peoples and remote times, and asking them to resolve all the questions facing the twentieth century.

  Yet for a moment it seemed to be the best club in the world. Felix Frankfurter longed to join, but Lippmann, on House’s instructions, wrote: “The job goes well, but it has not reached a point where you can be drafted into it with any fairness to the work you are now doing.” One of the great American jurists, Judge Learned Hand, suggested that he might join the Inquiry, and the educator John Dewey wanted in, too, but House and his lieutenants fended off the volunteers.

  It was heady stuff: Lippmann was one of the mere handful of people in their twenties who had the luck to be engaged in the remaking of the world. TR’s children who had become Woodrow Wilson’s offspring, they had been shown the way by a President who was priest and prophet. TR had summoned them to make war, but Wilson, whom they now followed, summoned them to make peace. This, they had come to believe, was their destined mission as young Americans growing up with the twentieth century. Only a handful of them could represent their generation in fulfilling its historic task. It was their privilege to be among that handful.