White, acting on his own while the president was still at sea, had cabled Lodge to ask what changes the senator wanted. Reporters learned about White’s cable, and the New York Sun contacted Lodge before he received it. Lodge immediately met with Brandegee and sent an intermediary to consult Root. In a reply to White drafted by Root—which Lodge used verbatim—the senator stated: “The President expressed no willingness to receive any communication from the Senate when that body was in session. If he now wishes to have amendments drafted which the Senate will consent to, the natural and necessary course is to convene the Senate in the customary way.” Cold reactions like those did not make prospects for cooperation with leading Republicans look promising.16
As before, cooperation with the Allied leaders was more immediately pressing and equally vexing. While Wilson was away, Lloyd George had gone back to London to attend to parliamentary business, and Clemenceau was recuperating from the assassination attempt on February 19 by a deranged anarchist—one shot hit the premier in the chest between the ribs, leading him to joke about “a Frenchman who misses his target six times out of seven at point-blank range.” House had sat in Wilson’s place at the Council of Ten and planned to use the time to speed things up. Just before Wilson left, House had told him he could “button everything up in the next four weeks” by reaching a preliminary agreement that dealt with such matters as boundaries, colonies, and reparations: the colonel asked the president “to bear in mind while he was gone that it is sometimes necessary to compromise in order to get things done.”17
If Wilson did agree to the colonel’s plan, he was sowing seeds of misunderstanding. While he was away, House and Arthur James Balfour conducted negotiations concerning German boundaries. They attempted to deal with French efforts to tear away and possibly annex the Rhineland, which Wilson adamantly opposed. They grappled with the conundrum posed by the Bolsheviks in Russia. Churchill, Marshal Foch, and others were pushing for large-scale military intervention against them, which Wilson also opposed. Others wanted to expand tentative, low-level talks with them. Under House and Balfour’s direction, the council approved sending the junior American diplomat William Bullitt to Moscow—a move that would later backfire and harm Wilson and his program. Most sensitively of all, House proposed, with Cecil’s and Balfour’s backing, that the League of Nations start to function at once. This may have been a ploy to separate the League from the peace treaty, and Wilson had cabled that the plan bothered him and would offend the Senate.18
How House’s doings in his absence sat with Wilson is a matter of dispute. Edith later wrote that her husband’s appearance after his first meeting with the colonel on their return shocked her: “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.” When she asked what the matter was, he said with a bitter smile, “House has given away everything I had won before we left Paris.” That account may have been skewed by Edith’s long-festering dislike of House and her memories of her husband’s later attitude toward him. Yet Wilson’s gibe at House about “[y]our meeting” with the congressional committees was consistent with her account, and the two men had talked for only a short time on the train from Brest to Paris. Grayson also noted that the next day Wilson reproved the delegation—meaning House—“for apparently failing to keep the League of Nations covenant to the fore” and for not maintaining a firm stand on German boundaries. Ray Stannard Baker and others who later studied this relationship would conclude that things were never the same between them again. There was no dramatic break at this point or later, but Wilson was now in a frame of mind that allowed him to believe the worst about his onetime intimate friend.19
Other circumstances added to his troubles on his return to Paris. The Wilsons did not resume residence at the Murat Palace but had to move to a house at 11 place des États-Unis. The location, with its statue of Lafayette and Washington, had a nice symbolism, but as Grayson noted in his diary, “The new quarters were by no means so commodious and were far less comfortable.” Edith, however, remembered the house as “less ornate … and more homey.” She particularly liked the garden outside her husband’s window and her bathtub, which was “almost like a small pool” and had faucets made of gold.20 Wilson’s rooms included a comfortable study with a fireplace, which would become the most important meeting place of the conference. These new quarters were across the street from the residence assigned to Lloyd George, who came over as soon as the Wilsons arrived and stayed for more than an hour. After lunch, Wilson spent the afternoon at the Crillon with the American delegation, and in the evening he met with Premier Orlando, who as usual pressed Italian claims to the Dalmatian coast, and with Admiral Sims, who discussed naval aspects of the settlement. The work and the tension had resumed without a missing a beat.
During Wilson’s first full week back in Paris, the Council of Ten met three times, the Supreme War Council twice, and the League of Nations Commission once. These sessions proved as protracted and fruitless as ever. The Council of Ten resorted to the delaying tactic of deferring consideration of Poland’s borders with Germany until an investigative commission could issue a report. “It is hard to keep one’s temper when the world is on fire, and we find delegates, such as those of the French, blocking all of the proceedings,” Wilson told Grayson. “It is bad enough to waste time just talking but these men give us no constructive suggestions whatever. They simply talk.” In the League Commission, he was able to get the right of withdrawal specified in the Draft Covenant, but he did not yet propose an exemption for the Monroe Doctrine. Cecil privately broached that question to Lloyd George, who objected strongly and planned to use the matter as a bargaining chip. This dickering quickly undid the good effects of the voyage on Wilson. “The President looked worn and tired,” House noted, but his sympathy sprang from more than concern for the president’s health: he thought negotiations were moving too slowly, and he could not decide questions “on my own initiative as I did when the President was away.” He told Lansing, “It was a mistake for [Wilson] to come at all. However we must make the best of it.”21
Self-serving though House’s complaints were, the colonel made a point that the president and others had already grasped. On March 19, Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau decided to constitute the Council of Four, comprised solely of them and Orlando. This council replaced the Council of Ten, which met for the last time on March 24, and excluded foreign ministers and advisers and, at first, even a secretary to take minutes. For a while, only one other person sat with them: because Orlando spoke no English, Professor Paul Mantoux of the Sorbonne interpreted into French what Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau (when he was speaking English) said. At the middle of April, Orlando brought in a senior Italian diplomat, Count Luigi Aldrovandi Maresotti, to serve as his own interpreter. On Clemenceau’s orders, Mantoux secretly kept notes of the meetings, which were the only record of the discussions until mid-April, when the negotiators decided to call in the secretary to the British cabinet, Sir Maurice Hankey, to take minutes. During the next three months, this group would meet 148 times—almost every weekday, frequently twice or three times a day, and sometimes on Sundays—mostly in Wilson’s study in the house on la place des États-Unis. Wilson normally sat upright in an armchair; Clemenceau wore his gloves and lounged back in his chair while Lloyd George fidgeted, gesticulated, and often stood up. Those three were on one side of the fireplace, while on the other side, next to Mantoux and Aldrovandi Maresotti, sat Orlando, looking at the others and taking less part in the discussion. Except for drafting the Covenant of the League of Nations, this Big Four, as they were soon dubbed, did the real work of peacemaking in 1919.22
Wilson got their meetings off to a brisk start. First, he proposed taking up reparations, French security, and the Adriatic coast. Reparations sparked a clash between Clemenceau, who held out for big, undefined payments spread over many years, and Wilson, who wanted prompt payment of a fixed sum of between $25 billi
on and $35 billion. Lloyd George played an equivocal game, holding out for big indemnities but also circulating a memorandum that deplored an overly harsh peace with Germany. French security proved even more fractious, as Clemenceau held out for both taking away the Rhineland and annexing the coal-rich Saarland. When Wilson maintained that the League of Nations would provide security, Clemenceau scoffed that America was “far away, protected by an ocean,” and derided the “excellent intentions of President Wilson.” The president responded by noting the worldwide “passion for justice” and declaring, “I wish to do nothing that would be said of us, ‘They profess great principles, but they admitted exceptions everywhere.’ ”23
These clashes struck House and Lansing as unnecessary. The colonel told Lloyd George that Wilson was “the most difficult man I ever knew when aroused.” The prime minister asked him to try to soothe Wilson, but House evidently did not, because the next day the president said to Grayson over lunch that “it was a time for courage and audacity” and that he intended to confront both Lloyd George and Clemenceau that afternoon. He must have been letting off steam, because the notes of that afternoon’s meeting do not record any confrontation. Rather, the four discussed the Baltic port of Danzig, which had a German population but provided an outlet to the sea for Poland; Hungary, where Bolsheviks led by Béla Kun had seized power; and reparations again, with questions raised about what damages to compensate.24
In fact, Wilson was working toward compromises with the French over their security and the German borders. He suggested that the left bank of the Rhine and fifty kilometers beyond the right bank be demilitarized, and he proposed a “military guarantee” by Britain and the United States to France. In his own hand, he wrote out and signed a statement pledging himself “to propose to the Senate of the United States … an engagement, subject to the approval of the Council of the League of Nations, to come immediately to the assistance of France in case of unprovoked attack by Germany.” On the Saar, he soon suggested turning administration of the coal mines over to the French for a period of time. Along with Lloyd George, he proposed that Danzig become a free city under League of Nations administration. He resisted efforts by Clemenceau and Lloyd George to demand that the Dutch turn over the former German emperor for trial and likely execution. Wilson responded, “He has drawn universal contempt upon himself; is that not the worst punishment for a man like him?” The French did not warm to these proposals, and their reserve frustrated the president.25
Grayson noted the stress caused by this frustration, and he had cause to worry. The Council of Four was making the strain and an already difficult workload even worse for Wilson. On March 31, Ray Stannard Baker had breakfast with him at eight and commented in his diary, “He is working fearfully hard.” The press secretary noted that the president’s schedule that day included two hours of correspondence, two meetings of the council, lunch with House, evening meetings with him and Secretary of the Navy Daniels, who was visiting Paris, and at the end, “[s]tudying maps & reports of experts &c &c.”26 Such a schedule left no time for golf, and Wilson could take only an occasional evening ride in a limousine with Edith.
Besides French security and reparations—which involved reports from and meetings with financial advisers—and Hungary, the council took up Russia, Poland, and Italy’s claims in the Adriatic. Russia caused a flare-up in the press at home when anti-administration newspapers published garbled stories about Bullitt’s mission to Moscow, with allegations that Wilson was planning to recognize the Bolsheviks. The Adriatic question brought Orlando out of his usual silence to argue passionately for his country’s right to annex Fiume and a large slice of the Dalmatian coast, on top of other border claims from the South Tirol up to the Brenner Pass.
Wilson’s health gave out on April 3 during an afternoon meeting of the council. He abruptly left the room and summoned Grayson. He had made himself sit through most of the meeting in spite of intense pains in his back, stomach, and head, but he had given in to an uncontrollable coughing spell. Grayson found that the president was running a fever of 103 degrees, and he coughed violently throughout the night. Grayson avoided the word influenza until he issued a statement to the press two days later, yet it seems clear that this was what ailed Wilson. It was almost certainly not the notorious Spanish flu of the pandemic that had raged worldwide in recent months. Unlike much of the White House staff, the president had escaped that plague the previous autumn, but his fatigued condition now made him susceptible to a different strain. He spent the next four and a half days confined to his bedroom, the first two in bed. He did not attend sessions of the Council of Four, although he did meet with Bernard Baruch and called in House, Lansing, White, and General Bliss for a two-hour conference on Sunday, April 6.27
As he usually did when forced to be idle, Wilson brooded. He told Grayson he was fed up with the French, and he thought he might have to threaten to leave the conference: “And when I make this statement I do not intend it as a bluff.” He asked Grayson to get the navy to send the George Washington to Brest: “When I decide, doctor, to carry this thing through, I do not want to say that I am going as soon as I can get a boat. I want the boat to be here.” Reports of the order to bring back the George Washington immediately appeared in the press—probably because Grayson leaked the story to a New York Times reporter—stirring consternation in some quarters. But Baker welcomed the move: “He will fight for his principles. … He has reached the point where he will give no further.”28
Not wanting to delay the negotiations while he was sick, Wilson designated House to sit in his place at the Council of Four. This could have been taken as a sign of trust, but it was not. Wilson said to him, “[I]t is very hard not to go to the full length with you in concessions.” House did not make significant concessions during the president’s illness, but his contrasting style was such that Baker commented, “The colonel sides with the group which desires a swift peace on any terms.” House indiscreetly made his differences with Wilson public when he told reporters that the order to bring over the George Washington was, in fact, a bluff, a gesture for home consumption. According to Grayson, this ploy of the colonel’s backfired with the newspapermen, and the doctor had to discourage one of them from writing an article about House titled “The Great American Acquiescor.” Yet Grayson noted that “no one has yet heard Colonel House say NO … and in any event he never refuses.”29
None of this was lost on the man in the sickbed, and Grayson’s view of House reflected his patient’s attitude. Grayson also wrote that when Edith asked whether House should telephone the other delegates about the Sunday conference in the sickroom, Wilson emphatically said no, because House would have his son-in-law, Gordon Auchincloss, do it, “and he (Auchincloss) has such an exalted opinion of himself these days that I don’t care to have him do any business in my name.” The next day, Wilson asked Grayson, “Do you see any change in House; I don’t mean a physical change; he does not show the same free and easy spirit; he seems distant with me as if he has something on his conscience.” Wilson later added that House, “whose specialty had been saying YES,” had allowed the French to staff his and Edith’s new residence with spies.30
Although Wilson was what Grayson called “‘wabbly’ [sic] on his feet” and “markedly showing the effects” of his illness, he insisted on rejoining the Council of Four on the afternoon of April 8. They met in his bedroom rather than the study, but that was the only concession he or anyone else made to his recent indisposition. Wilson again resisted Lloyd George and Clemenceau’s push to bring the former German emperor to trial. “The worst punishment will be that of public opinion,” he said—to which Clemenceau shot back, “Don’t count on it.” Turning to the Saar, the president continued to stand against tearing the region away from Germany while once more offering the French control of the coal there. This meeting and the one the next morning in the study took a toll on Wilson, who told Grayson he felt tired, but he was pleased that he had worked out a compromise on t
he matter of bringing the emperor to trial: his surrender would be “requested” but not demanded from the Dutch, who were not likely to comply; any trial would not be for “a violation of the criminal law, but as a supreme offense against international morality and the sanctity of treaties,” and no penalties would be specified. In the afternoon, Wilson presented a proposal drafted by British and American experts to place the Saar under French rule for fifteen years, to be followed by a plebiscite to determine ultimate sovereignty; Clemenceau seemed receptive to this approach, although he later appeared to renege.31
Notwithstanding those apparent agreements, neither the pace nor the emotional tenor of the discussions was doing Wilson any good. The problems included what struck him as a contradictory back-and-forth about whether to set a fixed sum for reparations. “I must confess I do not know where I am,” he said. The League Commission meeting also troubled him, as he had to make an impassioned plea for amending the Draft Covenant to recognize the Monroe Doctrine as a regional understanding unaffected by the League. Then the Japanese reintroduced their racial-equality amendment; Jan Christiaan Smuts was not present, and Cecil, as he later wrote, had “to grapple with the Japanese as best I could, which was not very well.” Eleven members of the commission voted for the amendment, with Cecil and the Polish delegate voting against it. Wilson ruled that the motion failed because it had not carried unanimously. Cecil privately faulted him for not showing “quite as much courage as I could have hoped in resisting the amendment” and called him “a very curious mixture of the politician and the idealist. … He is not to me very attractive.”32
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