February 9th

One might assume that with all his tremendous responsibilities the President would not find the time for the petty attitudes and gestures which disfigure his character as they do, I fear, so many great men. But, unfortunately, he finds the time. He takes every opportunity of sowing ill feeling between House and Lansing, and they deserve great credit in refusing to participate in a personal feud, which the President apparently seeks to provoke.

Why the President brought Mr. Lansing to Paris is an enigma, unless it was with the malicious purpose of heaping indignities upon him and seeing him squirm. But Lansing does not squirm. He overlooks the slights, he ignores them, or, more probably, he pretends to. During his frequent absences in England, Lloyd George is always succeeded by his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Balfour, who takes his place. But Wilson always demotes Lansing and chooses House to represent him-a course which is not according to protocol and a mortification for Lansing. Again, when Orlando is away, Sonnino takes his place, and when Clemenceau was invalided, Pichon rattled around in his shoes. From the moment of his arrival in Paris, the President ignored his fellow delegates, and this must have been especially galling to Lansing who, as Secretary of State, was next in the line of succession to the presidency, after the Vice-President. From the earliest day after his arrival the President always came to the Colonel’s rooms on the third floor of the Crillon. When, as rarely happened, their signatures were wanted, the President would summon the delegates to House’s office and then dismiss them. The commissioners, being human, did not like this. Of course their personal reaction was not very important, but this treatment was damaging to their prestige as delegates who were called upon at times to sit on important committees. House thought that the commissioners should not be treated as office boys, and as the results of these snubbings became apparent, he spoke to the President on the subject. He suggested that what had happened was through inadvertence, and he asked the President to hold the meetings of the commissioners, if not as was usual, in the office of the Secretary of State, at least alternatively in the rooms of the delegates, Lansing, White, and Bliss. The President agreed to the suggestion, although he said public comment had but little weight with him. Finally, he did agree to hold all the commission meetings in Lansing’s office; however, he spaced them so that they only took place once or twice a month!

This evening M. Bourgeois came to the meeting in an unusually jovial mood, but as he brought with him a fat sheaf of manuscript I braced my bronchial cords for a long speech. He showed several pages to Larnaude, and as they chuckled and said “Vi Ison-Vi Ison” a number of times it was evident they had something on the President and expected important, even devastating, results from the discovery. Some days ago I had heard that Tardieu had received from New York a consignment of ten cases filled with copies of Mr. Wilson’s prewar and later speeches, and putting two and two together it did not require clairvoyance to divine what was coming. . . . When he was given the word Bourgeois began in as near a mellifluous tone as his raucous voice permits of:

“As it has a very direct bearing on the subject which we have so frequently discussed here, unhappily without reaching any satisfactory result down to the present, I wish to remind our distinguished, our most distinguished guest, and our presiding officer, of the noble words he spoke, which all Frenchmen treasure in their hearts, when our horizon was perhaps darker but I fear not more filled with dangers, yet to be conjured, than it is today. In May 1916, when the war was still far from America, you said, M. le Président, ‘We are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world. The interests of all nations are also our own. We are partners with the rest of the world.’”

Then, raising a menacing finger, M. Bourgeois continued: “In September of that year you said ‘we can no longer indulge our traditional provincialism. We are to play a leading part in the world drama whether we like it or not.’ A few weeks later, M. le Président, you went still further in your encouragement to those of us who were in the toils of ruthless barbarian invaders. In November (1916) you said, and how we hung on your words, ‘It does not suffice, as some would have us, as some suggest that we do again what we did when we were provincial and isolated . . . for now we are in the drift of humanity which is to determine the politics of every country in the world.’ Then, M. le Président, allow me to recall the noble words with which you entered the war, words which gave hope and courage to every French man or woman, however sorely tried they were. These words were, ‘The new world order must make provision for common action against aggressors.’ And you added, ‘If the moral force will not suffice, the physical force of the world shall.’”

Pausing for several moments of silence which he evidently regarded as most dramatic, M. Bourgeois concluded with, “And now today you are asking my countrymen and all the devastated lands of our Allies to be content with the shield of a Covenant without striking arms but merely illuminated with the noble words and the notes which you hurled against the invaders—but to stop them you needed force, and it was, at last, forthcoming. I beseech you to look at the situation once again. Without military backing in some force, and always ready to act, our League and our Covenant will be filed away, not as a solemn treaty but simply as a rather ornate piece of literature.”

It was not easy to put back into English, for the President and House, Mr. Wilson’s speeches, but as most of them I knew by heart my retranslation, from the Gallic version, was received with an indulgent smile and with only one minor correction from the author of these noble words. Evidently the President at first was not inclined to make any reply, but after a short whispered conversation with House he said, I am grateful to the French delegate for his gracious comment on words which came from my heart, were ever on my lips when the world was in the stress of desperate war. Need I assure him that my attitude has not changed, but the situation has, and to meet it I think it wise to now proceed to examine a number of questions on the agenda which have long awaited our close attention.”

I thought the President extricated himself very adroitly from a situation which was not an enviable one. Evidently M. Bourgeois thought so too. He, with a despairing gesture, slumped back in his chair, and at least an hour elapsed before he and M. Larnaude went into a huddle to prepare another pitfall for their distinguished but wary guest.