CHAPTER XIX

THE BULLITT AFFAIR

The foregoing chapters have related to subjects which were known to President Wilson to be matters of difference between us while we were together in Paris and which are presumably referred to in his letter of February 11, 1920, extracts from which are quoted in the opening chapter. The narration might be concluded with our difference of opinion as to the Shantung Settlement, but in view of subsequent information which the President received I am convinced that he felt that my objections to his decisions in regard to the terms of the peace with Germany extended further than he knew at the time, and that he resented the fact that my mind did not go along with his as to these decisions.

This undoubtedly added to the reasons for his letter and possibly influenced him to write as he did in February, 1920, even more than our known divergence of judgment during the negotiations.

I do not feel, therefore, that the story is complete without at least a brief reference to my views concerning the Treaty of Versailles at the time of its delivery to the German delegates, which were imperfectly disclosed in a statement made by William C. Bullitt on September 12, 1919, at a public hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. As to the conduct of Mr. Bullitt, who had held a responsible position with the American Commission at Paris, in voluntarily repeating a conversation which was from its nature highly confidential, I make no comment.

The portion of the statement, which I have no doubt deeply incensed the President because it was published while he was in the West making his appeals to the people in behalf of the Treaty and especially of the League of Nations, is as follows:

"Mr. Lansing said that he, too, considered many parts of the Treaty thoroughly bad, particularly those dealing with Shantung and the League of Nations. He said: 'I consider that the League of Nations at present is entirely useless. The Great Powers have simply gone ahead and arranged the world to suit themselves. England and France have gotten out of the Treaty everything that they wanted, and the League of Nations can do nothing to alter any of the unjust clauses of the Treaty except by unanimous consent of the members of the League, and the Great Powers will never give their consent to changes in the interests of weaker peoples.'

"We then talked about the possibility of ratification by the Senate.

Mr. Lansing said: 'I believe that if the Senate could only understand what this Treaty means, and if the American people could really understand, it would unquestionably be defeated, but I wonder if they will ever understand what it lets them in for.'" (Senate Doc. 106, 66th Congress, 1st Session, p. 1276.)

It does not seem an unwarranted conjecture that the President believed that this statement, which was a.s.serted by Mr. Bullitt to be from a memorandum made at the time, indicated that I had been unfaithful to him. He may even have concluded that I had been working against the League of Nations with the intention of bringing about the rejection of the Covenant by the Senate. If he did believe this, I cannot feel that it was other than natural in the circ.u.mstances, especially if I did not at once publicly deny the truth of the Bullitt statement. That I could not do because there was sufficient truth in it to compel me to show how, by slight variations and by omissions in the conversation, my words were misunderstood or misinterpreted.

In view of the fact that I found it impossible to make an absolute denial, I telegraphed the President stating the facts and offering to make them public if he considered it wise to do so. The important part of the telegram, which was dated September 16, 1919, is as follows:

"On May 17th Bullitt resigned by letter giving his reasons, with which you are familiar. I replied by letter on the 18th without any comment on his reasons. Bullitt on the 19th asked to see me to say good-bye and I saw him. He elaborated on the reasons for his resignation and said that he could not conscientiously give countenance to a treaty which was based on injustice. I told him that I would say nothing against his resigning since he put it on conscientious grounds, and that I recognized that certain features of the Treaty were bad, as I presumed most every one did, but that was probably unavoidable in view of conflicting claims and that nothing ought to be done to prevent the speedy restoration of peace by signing the Treaty. Bullitt then discussed the numerous European commissions provided for by the Treaty on which the United States was to be represented. I told him that I was disturbed by this fact because I was afraid the Senate and possibly the people, if they understood this, would refuse ratification, and that anything which was an obstacle to ratification was unfortunate because we ought to have peace as soon as possible."

It is very easy to see how by making a record of one side of this conversation without reference to the other side and by an omission here and there, possibly unintentionally, the sense was altered. Thus Mr.

Bullitt, by repeating only a part of my words and by omitting the context, entirely changed the meaning of what was said. My att.i.tude was, and I intended to show it at the time, that the Treaty should be signed and ratified at the earliest possible moment because the restoration of peace was paramount and that any provision in the Treaty which might delay the peace, by making uncertain senatorial consent to ratification, was to be deplored.

Having submitted to the President the question of making a public explanation of my interview with Mr. Bullitt which would in a measure at least correct the impression caused by his statement, I could not do so until I received the President's approval. That was never received. The telegram, which was sent to Mr. Wilson, through the Department of State, was never answered. It was not even acknowledged. The consequence was that the version of the conversation given by Mr. Bullitt was the only one that up to the present time has been published.

The almost unavoidable conclusion from the President's silence is that he considered my explanation was insufficient to destroy or even to weaken materially the effect of Mr. Bullitt's account of what had taken place, and that the public would believe in spite of it that I was opposed to the Treaty and hostile to the League of Nations. I am not disposed to blame the President for holding this opinion considering what had taken place at Paris. From his point of view a statement, such as I was willing to make, would in no way help the situation. I would still be on record as opposed to certain provisions of the Treaty, provisions which he was so earnestly defending in his addresses. While Mr. Bullitt had given an incomplete report of our conversation, there was sufficient truth in it to make anything but a flat denial seem of little value to the President; and, as I could not make such a denial, his point of view seemed to be that the damage was done and could not be undone. I am inclined to think that he was right.

My views concerning the Treaty at the time of the conversation with Mr.

Bullitt are expressed in a memorandum of May 8, 1919, which is as follows:

"The terms of peace were yesterday delivered to the German plenipotentiaries, and for the first time in these days of feverish rush of preparation there is time to consider the Treaty as a complete doc.u.ment.

"The impression made by it is one of disappointment, of regret, and of depression. The terms of peace appear immeasurably harsh and humiliating, while many of them seem to me impossible of performance.

"The League of Nations created by the Treaty is relied upon to preserve the artificial structure which has been erected by compromise of the conflicting interests of the Great Powers and to prevent the germination of the seeds of war which are sown in so many articles and which under normal conditions would soon bear fruit. The League might as well attempt to prevent the growth of plant life in a tropical jungle. Wars will come sooner or later.

"It must be admitted in honesty that the League is an instrument of the mighty to check the normal growth of national power and national aspirations among those who have been rendered impotent by defeat.

Examine the Treaty and you will find peoples delivered against their wills into the hands of those whom they hate, while their economic resources are torn from them and given to others. Resentment and bitterness, if not desperation, are bound to be the consequences of such provisions. It may be years before these oppressed peoples are able to throw off the yoke, but as sure as day follows night the time will come when they will make the effort.

"This war was fought by the United States to destroy forever the conditions which produced it. Those conditions have not been destroyed. They have been supplanted by other conditions equally productive of hatred, jealousy, and suspicion. In place of the Triple Alliance and the Entente has arisen the Quintuple Alliance which is to rule the world. The victors in this war intend to impose their combined will upon the vanquished and to subordinate all interests to their own.

"It is true that to please the aroused public opinion of mankind and to respond to the idealism of the moralist they have surrounded the new alliance with a halo and called it 'The League of Nations,' but whatever it may be called or however it may be disguised it is an alliance of the Five Great Military Powers.

"It is useless to close our eyes to the fact that the power to compel obedience by the exercise of the united strength of 'The Five' is the fundamental principle of the League. Justice is secondary. Might is primary.

"The League as now const.i.tuted will be the prey of greed and intrigue; and the law of unanimity in the Council, which may offer a restraint, will be broken or render the organization powerless. It is called upon to stamp as just what is unjust.

"We have a treaty of peace, but it will not bring permanent peace because it is founded on the shifting sands of self-interest."

In the views thus expressed I was not alone. A few days after they were written I was in London where I discussed the Treaty with several of the leading British statesmen. I noted their opinions thus: "The consensus was that the Treaty was unwise and unworkable, that it was conceived in intrigue and fashioned in cupidity, and that it would produce rather than prevent wars." One of these leaders of political thought in Great Britain said that "the only apparent purpose of the League of Nations seems to be to perpetuate the series of unjust provisions which were being imposed."

The day following my return from London, which was on May 17, I received Mr. Bullitt's letter of resignation and also letters from five of our princ.i.p.al experts protesting against the terms of peace and stating that they considered them to be an abandonment of the principles for which Americans had fought. One of the officials, whose relations with the President were of a most intimate nature, said that he was in a quandary about resigning; that he did not think that the conditions in the Treaty would make for peace because they were too oppressive; that the obnoxious things in the Treaty were due to secret diplomacy; and that the President should have stuck rigidly to his principles, which he had not. This official was evidently deeply incensed, but in the end he did not resign, nor did the five experts who sent letters, because they were told that it would seriously cripple the American Commission in the preparation of the Austrian Treaty if they did not continue to serve.

Another and more prominent adviser of the President felt very bitterly over the terms of peace. In speaking of his disapproval of them he told me that he had found the same feeling among the British in Paris, who were disposed to blame the President since "they had counted upon him to stand firmly by his principles and face down the intriguers."

It is needless to cite other instances indicating the general state of mind among the Americans and British at Paris to show the views that were being exchanged and the frank comments that were being made at the time of my interview with Mr. Bullitt. In truth I said less to him in criticism of the Treaty than I did to some others, but they have seen fit to respect the confidential nature of our conversations.

It is not pertinent to the present subject to recite the events between the delivery of the Treaty to the Germans on May 7 and its signature on June 28. In spite of the dissatisfaction, which even went so far that some of the delegates of the Great Powers threatened to decline to sign the Treaty unless certain of its terms were modified, the supreme necessity of restoring peace as soon as possible overcame all obstacles.

It was the appreciation of this supreme necessity which caused many Americans to urge consent to ratification when the Treaty was laid before the Senate.

My own position was paradoxical. I was opposed to the Treaty, but signed it and favored its ratification. The explanation is this: Convinced after conversations with the President in July and August, 1919, that he would not consent to any effective reservations, the politic course seemed to be to endeavor to secure ratification without reservations. It appeared to be the only possible way of obtaining that for which all the world longed and which in the months succeeding the signature appeared absolutely essential to prevent the widespread disaster resulting from political and economic chaos which seemed to threaten many nations if not civilization itself. Even if the Treaty was bad in certain provisions, so long as the President remained inflexible and insistent, its ratification without change seemed a duty to humanity. At least that was my conviction in the summer and autumn of 1919, and I am not yet satisfied that it was erroneous. My views after January, 1920, are not pertinent to the subject under consideration. The consequences of the failure to ratify promptly the Treaty of Versailles are still uncertain.

They may be more serious or they may be less serious than they appeared in 1919. Time alone will disclose the truth and fix the responsibility for what occurred after the Treaty of Versailles was laid before the Senate of the United States.

CONCLUSION

The narration of my relations to the peace negotiations as one of the American Commissioners to the Paris Conference, which has been confined within the limits laid down in the opening chapter of this volume, concludes with the recital of the views which I held concerning the terms of the Treaty of Peace with Germany and which were brought to the attention of Mr. Wilson through the press reports of William C.

Bullitt's statement to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on September 12, 1919.

The endeavor has been to present, as fully as possible in the circ.u.mstances, a review of my a.s.sociation with President Wilson in connection with the negotiations at Paris setting forth our differences of opinion and divergence of judgment upon the subjects coming before the Peace Conference, the conduct of the proceedings, and the terms of peace imposed upon Germany by the Treaty of Versailles.

It is evident from this review that, from a time prior to Mr. Wilson's departure from the United States on December 4, 1918, to attend the Peace Conference up to the delivery of the text of the Treaty to the German plenipotentiaries on May 7, 1919, there were many subjects of disagreement between the President and myself; that he was disposed to reject or ignore the advice and suggestions which I volunteered; and that in consequence of my convictions I followed his guidance and obeyed his instructions unwillingly.

While there were other matters of friction between us they were of a personal nature and of minor importance. Though they may have contributed to the formality of our relations they played no real part in the increasing difficulty of the situation. The matters narrated were, in my opinion, the princ.i.p.al causes for the letters written by President Wilson in February, 1920; at least they seem sufficient to explain the origin of the correspondence, while the causes specifically stated by him--my calling together of the heads of the executive departments for consultation during his illness and my attempts to antic.i.p.ate his judgment--are insufficient.

The reasons given in the President's letter of February 11, the essential portions of which have been quoted, for stating that my resignation as Secretary of State would be acceptable to him, are the embarra.s.sment caused him by my "reluctance and divergence of judgment"

and the implication that my mind did not "willingly go along" with his.

As neither of these reasons applies to the calling of Cabinet meetings or to the antic.i.p.ation of his judgment in regard to foreign affairs, the unavoidable conclusion is that these grounds of complaint were not the real causes leading up to the severance of our official a.s.sociation.

The real causes--which are the only ones worthy of consideration--are to be found in the record of the relations between President Wilson and myself in connection with the peace negotiations. Upon that record must rest the justification or the refutation of Mr. Wilson's implied charge that I was not entirely loyal to him as President and that I failed to perform my full duty to my country as Secretary of State and as a Commissioner to Negotiate Peace by opposing the way in which he exercised his const.i.tutional authority to conduct the foreign affairs of the United States.

THE END

APPENDIX I

THE PRESIDENT'S ORIGINAL DRAFT OF THE COVENANT OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS, LAID BEFORE THE AMERICAN COMMISSION ON JANUARY 10, 1919

PREAMBLE