The Illusion of Victory (79 page)

By the time FDR took the oath of office for a third term in 1941, this malevolent dictator had achieved power beyond the kaiser’s wildest dreams. He had destroyed the French army and driven the British army back to England, a shattered remnant. On the other side of the world, he had allied Germany with a Japan that sought to dominate Asia. Still Roosevelt feared that a call for intervention would have been defeated in Congress. Instead, he adopted a strategy of provoking Germany and Japan into attacking the United States. He finally succeeded with Japan, though he never imagined that it had the daring or skill to devastate the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
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During World War II, Woodrow Wilson enjoyed a renaissance of sorts. Numerous writers told Americans that there would have been no Hitler, no Mussolini and no Stalin if Americans had taken Wilson’s advice and joined the League of Nations. The Democratic Party campaigned on this proposition in the Congressional elections of 1942—and suffered a ruinous defeat that left Roosevelt on the political defensive for the rest of the war. It would have been more accurate to argue that a genuine peace of reconciliation on the basis of the Fourteen Points might have created a liberal Germany that would have forsworn war and transformed Europe.

The climax of this spate of Wilsonian adulation was the 1944 Darryl Zanuck film
Wilson
, which cost more than
Gone with the Wind
to produce. Portraying Wilson as a prophet tormented by evil isolationists, the movie’s climax was the president’s final speech at Pueblo, Colorado, in which the movie Wilson predicts a second world war. When the U.S. Senate approved the Charter of the United Nations in 1945, President Harry S. Truman declared that Woodrow Wilson was vindicated.
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These belated compliments were another Wilsonian illusion. A close look at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s conduct of World War II reveals a man who spent a good deal of time and effort avoiding Wilson’s blunders. In 1940, before he ran for a third term, FDR invited two leading Republicans, Henry L. Stimson and Frank Knox, to join his cabinet as secretaries of war and the navy. When the utopian idealism of vice president Henry Wallace, who called for a “New Deal for the World,” disturbed voters, FDR jettisoned him and accepted realistic Harry S. Truman as his vice presidential candidate in 1944.

When Roosevelt sought a name for the new international organization he envisioned at the end of World War II, he chose United Nations, the term Henry Cabot Lodge had used in 1915, when he had been a bold proponent of international cooperation. Roosevelt was almost certainly unaware of its origin. But the unintentional conjunction proved to be prophetic. As Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., noted, the new organization was modeled on Lodge’s philosophy, not Wilson’s. FDR made this even clearer when he spoke of the postwar world being patrolled by the “Four Policemen,” England, the United States, Soviet Russia and China—the concert of great powers that Wilson abhorred. There was very little idealism in this global vision.

Soviet Russia, the problem Wilson had failed to solve, soon disrupted Roosevelt’s precarious peace. Within two years of FDR’s death, President Harry Truman’s joint chiefs of staff and his secretary of state, General George C. Marshall, were telling him that “the ability of the United Nations . . . to protect, now, or hereafter, the security of the United States” was virtually nil. George C. Kennan, the deepest foreign policy thinker of the era, suggested that “the whole idea of world peace has been a premature, unworkable, grandiose form of daydreaming.” In short, the realist side of the great American dichotomy had reasserted itself, as the UN’s weak
nesses turned into virtual paralysis throughout the long decades of the Cold War.
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On July 15, 1959, the one hundredth anniversary of the kaiser’s birth, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) produced a film about Wilhelm II. Five days before it was broadcast, its producer, Christopher Sykes, published an article about it in
Radio Times
. He admitted that in his boyhood, even the mention of the kaiser sent “tremors of appalled horror through my nerves.” this was not unusual for any Briton who grew up during the era of World War I. The myth of the wicked kaiser had been propagated so relentlessly by British newspapers, even otherwise intelligent political leaders reacted with revulsion when they heard Wilhelm’s name.

The film was remarkable as much for what it did not say as for what it said. There was no attempt to explain how the myth of the wicked kaiser came into being. Wellington House got a free pass as usual. The myth was merely stated as a fact that endured for at least ten years after World War I. Meanwhile, a parade of distinguished Britons such as Sir Harold Nicolson exonerated the kaiser from the charge of starting the war. The German ruler’s responsibility was described as small compared to leaders in Russia and Austria-Hungary.

The VIPs described meetings with the kaiser before the war and in his postwar years of exile in Holland. Everyone burbled about his amiability and sincerity. There was much talk about his love of England and his devotion to his grandmother, Queen Victoria. The film closed with discussions of Wilhelm’s old age and death in 1941, with flattering comments on the way he displayed no bitterness toward those who had slandered him so viciously.

Some pundits speculated that the explanation for the film was the Cold War. Some of the British press were still Germanophobic heirs of Lord Northcliffe. They continued to slander the Germans at every opportunity. Not a few Germans suspected these attacks reflected British government policy. The BBC film may have been sponsored by London to strengthen the British-American alliance with Germany against Soviet Communism. Whatever the motive, the film achieved at least an approximation of the historical truth. One commentator said it also demonstrated what little reliance can be placed on contemporary opinion.
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In 1962, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., circulated a poll among historians, asking them to rate the presidents in categories from greatness to failure. One of the recipients was John F. Kennedy, partly because he was a published historian and partly because Schlesinger’s son, Arthur, Jr., was working in the administration.

Kennedy wrote the senior Schlesinger that a year ago he would have responded with confidence to the poll. But after twelve months in the White House, he was not so sure. To make a judgment on all but the obvious big names, he would have to subject them to “a long scrutiny after I left this office.” Later, talking to the younger Schlesinger, Kennedy added, “How the hell can you tell? Only the President himself can know what his real pressures and his real alternatives are.”

Nevertheless, Kennedy was intensely interested in the results of the poll. He was delighted that Harry Truman made the “near great” class and wryly amused that Dwight Eisenhower, whose administration he had fiercely criticized in the 1960 campaign, was near the bottom of the “average” list. But he was shocked that the poll gave such a high rating to Woodrow Wilson—fourth in the list of greats, ahead of Andrew Jackson. Kennedy strenuously pointed out that Wilson had made a botch of his Mexican intervention in 1914, edged the United States into World War I for “narrow legalistic reasons” and catastrophically messed up the fight for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. This was not the record of a great president.
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The broken man who left the White House in 1921 spent the next three years in a comfortable brick and limestone house on tree-lined suburban-like S Street in Washington, D.C., brooding over his defeat. Wilson never admitted making any mistakes in Paris or anywhere else. His mood oscillated between self-pity and consuming bitterness, mixed with occasional delusions of power.

“What else could I have done?” he cried, defending his conduct in Paris during an interview with historian William E. Dodd.“I had to negotiate with my back to the wall. Men thought I had all the power. Would to God I had had such power.” worst of all, he added, was the way the “great people at home” criticized him.
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Around the same time, a devoted admirer, Edward Bok, the influential editor of the
Ladies Home Journal,
called on the Wilsons. Bok began a sympathetic discussion of the defeat of the treaty and the league. Wilson erupted in a near frenzy, damning Lloyd George and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in sulfurous language that shocked the highly proper Bok. In the midst of the tirade, the former president slumped in his wheelchair in the throes of a cerebral spasm. For fifty minutes there was serious concern that he might die.
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Wilson clung fiercely to shreds of his presidential power, insisting that he was still the leader of the Democratic Party. When old Senate enemies such as James Reed of Missouri ran for reelection, Wilson called them vicious names and recommended their defeat. He tried to exercise a veto power over the Democratic nominee for president in 1924, publicly rebuking Tumulty for implying he supported James A. Cox.
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In 1921 the former president persuaded no less a ghost writer than Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis to help him draw up “The Document,” a statement of principles for the Democratic Party, binding it inextricably to the League of Nations. It gradually became apparent that Wilson planned to use the statement to launch himself as the candidate for the nomination in 1924. He still believed triumph and ultimate vindication were within his grasp.

When Wilson’s associates from the Paris Peace Conference visited the United States, they included a stop at S Street in their itineraries. Lloyd George, dismissed as prime minister by the ruling conservatives, called in 1923 and told the press, with his usual indifference to the truth, that he was amazed by Wilson’s alert mind and intense interest in European affairs. In private, the former prime minister deplored Wilson’s vituperative comments on the French and the Italians. Wilson had called French president Raymond Poincaré “a cheat and a liar,” repeating the phrase “with fierce emphasis.” For good measure, Wilson had thrown in a denunciation of Calvin Coolidge, who had just become president after Warren Harding’s sudden death, calling him a nobody. Lloyd George concluded that illness had not changed Wilson much.“Here was the old Wilson with his personal hatreds unquenched right to the end of his journey.”
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Nor did Edith Galt Wilson’s animosities subside. When her husband died on February 3, 1924, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was chosen by the Senate to head a delegation to the funeral. Edith wrote the senator a letter, telling him not to come because his presence would be “embarrassing to you and unwelcome to me.” also barred by Edith’s order was the man who had done so much to create Woodrow Wilson the world-reforming politician, Colonel Edward Mandell House. Another victim of her pettiness, the ever-faithful Tumulty, was admitted only at the insistence of William Gibbs McAdoo, via a last-minute telephone call.

Beyond and beneath weighty questions of foreign policy and Woodrow Wilson’s hard fate lie the battles the men and women of 1917–1918 fought in France. Whether one considers the war foolish or wise, they dignified it, even sanctified it, with their courage. As a historian I felt obligated to visit the places where so many died—Cantigny, Soissons, Belleau Wood, Saint-Mihiel—and, above all, the Argonne. I spent five days traversing the great valley, imagining it with German shells raining down from three sides.

I labored to the summit of Montfaucon, where a statue of a woman symbolizing liberty stands on a lofty pillar, surveying the rugged rolling terrain, dotted with woods and slashed by ravines, over which the Germans and the Americans fought for seven savage weeks. On another day, I prowled the shallow still-visible trenches in the dim heart of the Argonne forest, where Charles Whittlesey and his Lost Battalion fought so stubbornly. On yet another day, I stood on a road with the forest looming in the distance and pondered a metal pylon engraved with hundreds of names of the First Division’s dead. More than once I remembered Shirley Millard’s description of the cocky doughboys in their tilted helmets going to their first battle calling,
Hey, listen, where is all this trouble anyway?

I also visited cemeteries in the Argonne and Champagne, where mute rows of white Carrara marble crosses testify to a soldier’s ideals, courage and brotherhood. Each cross was a wound torn in the lives of wives, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, sisters or brothers. Did these grieving survivors think it was worth the sacrifice of these beloved dead to procure Woodrow Wilson a seat at the Paris peace table? Somehow, I doubted it. On the contrary, it would not be surprising if many of them thought it was only right that the president too was called upon to pay a heavy price.

General John J. Pershing’s last public statement in France was on Memorial Day, 1919, at the Argonne Cemetery, where 14,200 Americans still lie. It was the best speech this laconic soldier ever gave. The closing words evoked echoes of another orator on a battlefield in Pennsylvania, trying to make sense out of an earlier war. But this was a soldier’s view of a citizen’s responsibilities.

It is not for us to proclaim what they did, their silence speaks more eloquently than words, but it is for us to uphold the conception of duty, honor and country for which they fought and for which they died. It is for the living to carry forward their purpose and make fruitful their sacrifice.

And now, Dear Comrades, Farewell. Here, under the clear skies, on the green hillsides and amid the flowering fields of France, in the quiet hush of peace, we leave you forever in God’s keeping.
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