2

COLONEL HOUSE AND PUBLIC RELATIONS

In February 1917 Bullitt interviewed Edward House, President Wilson’s adviser and trusted strategist. A southerner, he was known as Colonel House, though he had never served in the military. A graduate of Cornell, House owned a plantation in Texas. He was also a writer. He shared with Bullitt his fear that the war would lead to an aggressive pact between Germany, Japan, and Russia. The specter of this tripartite alliance was “no more evanescent nightmare; it is the subject of constant speculation in every Foreign Office in Europe,” House said. This century, he predicted, would be the bloodiest in human history because of an alliance between Russia, Germany, and Japan—the “league of the discontent.” This coalition would be directed against Britain, France, and the United States.¹

The encounter would define Bullitt’s career. His mentor in politics and diplomacy, House continued to support him over the long term; fifteen years later, House introduced Bullitt to Franklin Delano Roosevelt who had just started his first presidential campaign. A major player in American foreign policy during the First World War, House was a secretive man and a mysterious thinker. His novel, Philip Dru, Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, reveals his ideals and objectives better than his diplomatic correspondence. Written in 1912, the utopian fiction imagined a second civil war in America in 1920. The protagonist, Philip Dru, is a military academy graduate. Endowed with superhuman abilities, Dru uses them to lead a national revolt against a corrupt American president whose policies have impoverished the middle class. Interestingly, it is the new technology that triggers the revolution—“a dictagraph to record what was intended to be confidential conversations,” which is used by the president’s banker to blackmail opponents. It was a very modern device: “The character of the instrument was carefully concealed. It was a part of a massive piece of office furniture,” which answered for the negotiation table as well. The administration uses this “dictagraph” to consolidate its power. But when the records of their negotiations are leaked to the newspapers, these records push the people over the edge, igniting rebellion. Led by Dru, the rebels win a decisive victory over the presidential troops in a major battle. Dru takes Washington by force, suspends the American Constitution, and declares himself the “Administrator” in charge of the country.²

Dru’s methods of governance enact socialist ideas using dictatorial methods. In an attempt to eliminate unemployment, he introduces a progressive tax for the rich (up to 70 percent) and redistributes funds for the benefit of the poor. He gives workers shares of company profits and seats on corporate boards, but he deprives them of the right to strike. He replaces the constitutional separation of powers with an “Emergency Committee” that appoints managers according to their “efficiency,” and he undermines the sovereignty of states. At the same time, the new Administrator introduces universal suffrage and institutes federal pensions for the elderly, farm subsidies, and mandatory health insurance. Dru protects freedom of trade and eliminates customs tariffs. In foreign policy, he starts a new war in Mexico to extend his rule over Central America. But he invites European powers, including Germany, to take part in a trade coalition, giving them all equal access to colonial resources and thereby eliminating reasons for war.³

House reached the pinnacle of his career at the end of the First World War, lived through the Depression and the New Deal, and died on the eve of the Second World War. He had many chances to re-think his old novel. Still, the political program of his protagonist was extraordinary. Combining the incompatible, it surprises the reader of the twenty-first century by its bold socialist initiatives combined with cynical authoritarianism. Drawing upon European dreams to overcome human nature and specifically American disappointment with democracy, House’s utopia resembles an earlier and more successful novel by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1887). But in contrast to Nietzsche or Bellamy, House practiced real politics.

Dru sounds a bit like Lenin, but on the whole he is closer to Mussolini. He does not aim to eliminate capitalism but wishes to subordinate it to his imperial aims. The author does not condemn or ridicule his hero—in general, the novel lacks irony. It expresses a sincere dissatisfaction with democracy, admiration for technical progress and a naive hope for a superhuman politician. In this novel House combined two European utopias: the Nietzschean dream of the Übermensch and the Marxist dream of socialism. An American Zarathustra, Administrator Dru shifts the area of super-humanhood from aesthetics to politics, and even to practical policy.

Anticipating a major war, Colonel House imagined that it would resemble the Civil War in America; shrewdly, he argued for the moral and strategic necessity of fair treatment for the enemy. After the Union army’s victory, the North turned the South into the impoverished and uneducated part of the country, and there had been no southerner in the presidential office, House argued.⁴ Woodrow Wilson, the first southern president in half a century, was the governor of New Jersey when Philip Dru was published, and pondering his presidential chances. House’s arguments helped him decide to run. Advising President Wilson, House also headed his second campaign in 1916. Until the very end of the Paris conference in 1919, when the two experienced their final conflict, House had unrivaled access to the president. Freud and Bullitt wrote later that Wilson listened to House’s arguments and appropriated them, sincerely believing them to be his original thoughts; when he repeated them back to House, the diplomat agreed eagerly. Wilson’s economic innovations realized those of House’s dystopian novel, albeit in a weakened form. According to Freud and Bullitt, Wilson’s “notable legislative programme of the years 1912 to 1914 was largely the programme of House’s book Philip Dru, Administrator.” As a result, Wilson’s “domestic policies produced distinguished results and by the spring of 1914 the domestic programme of Philip Dru had been largely embodied in legislation.” In contrast, Wilson’s foreign politics revealed his own “unconscious desires” of a messianic nature, and “the international programme of Philip Dru remained unrealized.”⁵

In House’s novel, when the heroic Administrator completes his political agenda, he decides to leave office rather than remain dictator for life. Dru plans his departure as precisely as he planned his ascendance to power: together with his faithful girlfriend, he heads for the California coast, where a yacht is waiting to take them across the ocean. Their destination is left unmentioned, but readers learn that during his last year in America, Administrator Dru learned “one Slavic language” and taught that language to his girlfriend. Thus in the end of the novel we learn that Dru is determined to repeat his exploits in Russia. Five years later Colonel House oversaw the formulation of the Fourteen Points, Wilson’s program for peace. The program considered relations with Russia an “acid test of good will” for the international community.

The intensity of House’s dream was unusual, but he foreshadowed the search of those professors and gentlemen who served as American diplomats in the early twentieth century and were also, like House, infatuated with Russia. In the mid-1930s George Kennan (a protégé of Bullitt, who was in turn a protégé of House), wrote in his diaries how he would amend the Constitution in order to give special rights to selected members of the American elite so that they would be able to enact their own executive orders. Kennan, a rank-and-file American diplomat, did not dare make that idea known to the public but was eager to share his ideas with his former boss, Bullitt. In 1936 Kennan wrote Bullitt that after years in Moscow, he returned to the United States “almost a complete convert to the horrors of capitalism.” But what he found in America worried him. He sounds like Dru when he writes, “It seems to me that this country does not want government. . . . I know that our geographical position is wonderfully favorable, . . . but no oceans can spare us the internal consequences [of our anarchism]. The only alternative to strong central power (far stronger than the present constitution would allow) is the increased power and willfulness of private groups.”⁶ Later, this discontent with democracy enabled Kennan to construe the emerging Cold War as an implacable yet fruitful challenge: in America, this challenge would produce a new form of state power. As he wrote in 1947, “the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin’s challenge [but] will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence,” which confronted the American people with “the responsibilities of moral and political leadership.” To counter the threat, Kennan wrote, democratic states had to become “no less steady in their purpose” than the Soviet Union. The totalitarian challenge could not be countered by a politics based on “the momentary whims of democratic opinion”; American society needed “self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit.” In defense of democracy, America had to become less democratic.⁷

Adjusting inherited truths to political realities, Wilson and his entourage believed in the superiority of Western civilization and universality of its values. In the twentieth century, they thought, global progress would follow the democratic, though uneven, development of post–Civil War America. They celebrated their success in peaceful rebalancing the political power of the American South and the overindustrialized, imperialist North.⁸ Righting the mistakes of the past wars, their “progressive” and “idealistic” agenda meant self-determination for the oppressed nations of Europe, decolonizing Asia and Africa, and including all democratic states, old and new, in a global organization that would comply with international law.

Wilsonian idealists were not competing with Germany, Britain, or France for colonies and their resources. Instead, they rejected “imperialism” as something foreign and archaic. In contrast to this “idealism,” political realism recognized the variety of national interests, which could not be resolved by rational arguments. Created by these idealists, the League of Nations failed to prevent the Second World War. Decades of military confrontation between superpowers defined the triumph of their opponents, the political realists. But American politicians and diplomats have not forgotten their idealistic heritage. The liberal universalism of American policy during the Cold War and the neoconservatism of the twenty-first century sprang from Wilson and House’s particular breed of idealism. Richard Nixon hung Wilson’s portrait over his White House desk.

Despite his idealism Colonel House was also concerned about mundane affairs. He was inclined to promote his relatives and friends, a traditional practice that shocked the unusually honest Wilson. When House selected the Inquiry, a group of 150 American professors who formulated the Fourteen Points program, he appointed Sidney Edward Mezes, a professor of philosophy from Texas and House’s brother-in-law, to be the group’s chair. He also appointed his son-in-law, Gordon Auchincloss, to serve as his secretary. When the US delegation sailed to France in 1919, President Wilson forbade members of the delegation from bringing their wives. However, on board of the luxurious steamer, the SS George Washington, Wilson met House’s sister and daughter, who were married to Mezes and Auchincloss respectively.⁹ Secretary of State Robert Lansing, his permanent opponent, accused House of creating a “secret society” within the Wilson administration, which turned the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference into a closed club.

The principle of national self-determination belonged to Wilson, but its implementation required a detailed knowledge of Europe, which only professors had. Many of them came to Paris as members of the Inquiry, and Wilson, a professor himself, told his colleagues, “Tell me what is right, and I will fight for it.”¹⁰ However, the pace of events made all these experts rather helpless; in fact, very few people could tell Wilson what was right, and by the end of the conference, there were no such people around.

The executive director of the Inquiry, Walter Lippmann, was a young left-wing journalist and a lifelong opponent of Bullitt. Graduating from Harvard together with John Reed and T. S. Eliot in 1909, he was a founder of the Harvard Socialist Club and later, of the New Republic. Lippmann argued that the power of the press and other institutions such as schools, universities, churches, and trade unions shape the “common sense” that defines democratic politics. In his books A Preface to Politics (1913), The Stakes of Diplomacy (1915), and Public Opinion (1922), he turned the focus of political criticism from the “common man” to the intellectual elite and its creation, public opinion. He rejected the classic idea that the sense of the common man defines public good, and that political institutions should respond to the diversity of these common voices. Influenced by these ideas, Wilson created his Committee for Public Information, but he went with a safer choice than Lippmann. The journalist George Creel formed a huge organization with thirty-seven departments, hundreds of employees, and thousands of volunteers. At the beginning of 1917 Bullitt worked in this structure, and Lippmann took part in military preparations: with young Franklin D. Roosevelt, he organized training camps for the Navy. His former classmate John Reed, the rising star of the American Left, publicly accused Lippmann of betraying the radical ideals of their common youth. Reed was then in Mexico, where he wrote enthusiastic reports about the revolutionary troops of Pancho Villa, who fought with the US imperialists.¹¹ Lippmann outlived Reed for decades. A liberal journalist with a particular interest in socialism and Russian affairs, Lippmann coined the term “Cold War” and became a public advocate for the Soviet Union in the 1950s. He opposed the idea of containment, and a fierce controversy broke out between him and Bullitt on the subject. One of the last successes of Lippmann’s career was his 1961 interview with Nikita Khrushchev.

The era of Wilsonian idealism promoted disenchantment with democracy among those who supported the history professor turned wartime president. The disenchantment took many forms. Some were irritated by the opacity of social reforms. Others were critical of government interventions into the public sphere and the market, which in the twentieth century became a mandatory aspect of executive policies. Others lacked faith that democracy—not only in sinful Europe but also in a fresh, mighty America—could confront the new kinds of despotism that were developing in Russia and Germany. These opinions led to disappointment with the moral meaning of political action. Human nature itself, with its limited faculties of autonomy and solidarity, seemed inadequate for the “idealist” democratic politics.

This new, particularly American sentiment differed from both the Russian nihilism that sprang from inescapable alienation from power and the German resentment that responded to weakness in the face of the enemy. American thinkers were looking for practical ways of maintaining political life in conditions where democracy was failing, ways that would hopefully remain within the framework of the American constitution but could go beyond it as well. House’s Philip Dru demonstrates how far those American dreams could go.

Lippmann understood this situation as a springboard for a new social science. In democratic politics, he argued, people do not react to the facts—they react to the news. Journalists, editors, and experts play a decisive role in the political process. But in contrast to the political machine with its parties, laws, and separation of powers, the information work is not organized from the top down. In 1920 Lippmann ran a major study of how the New York Times reported the revolutionary events in Russia. Having analyzed almost four thousand articles on the topic, Lippmann and his coauthors traced the cycles of unjustified optimism about the Russian Revolution, which were later displaced by waves of frustration and calls for intervention. The paper’s reports did not match the few facts firmly known about the events in Russia, such as the stabilization of the Bolshevik regime. In general, Lippmann characterized the coverage of the Russian Revolution by the leading American newspaper as “nothing short of disaster.” Misleading news was worse than none at all, he said.¹²

Lippmann proposed a bureaucratic solution to the problem. He suggested creating Expert Councils, which would organize the flow of information in every department of the administration. Individually, people cannot reach beyond their casual experiences, wrote this disciple of William James; but human limits could be transcended by the organized construction of bureaucratic “knowledge machines.” Lippmann’s speculations coincided with the first formal studies of public opinion, popularity ratings, and polls. Since public opinion is so important to democratic politics, and since experts comprehend this opinion better than the voters and journalists, these experts should play special roles in forming public opinion.

Edward Bernays—Sigmund Freud’s nephew and an Austrian immigrant to America—brought this vision to business. A graduate of Cornell, he became a staff member of the Committee for Public Information and took part in the Paris Peace Conference. Influenced by Lippmann’s ideas about public opinion, Bernays invented his own term, “public relations,” and in 1919 opened the first PR consultancy. He devised advertisements for soap and clothing, women’s cigarettes, and anti-smoking campaigns. All his life he promoted Freud, turning him into “the mentor of Madison Avenue.”¹³ Bernays visited his uncle during his visits to Europe, maintained a constant correspondence with him, and often referred to Freud in his work. It was probably Bernays who introduced Bullitt to Freud in the mid-1920s, and it seems likely that Bernays was Freud’s source for what he knew about Wilson.

Having left the war in November 1917, the Bolsheviks published the “Secret Treaties”—documents signed by the leaders of the Entente powers that would give Constantinople to Russia and some other parts of the world to other members of the Entente. Wilson had long ignored these agreements, acting as though they never existed. But in a partial response to the publication of the “Secret Treaties,” the Committee on Public Information (CPI) published documents indicating that the Bolsheviks’ revolution had been supported by German money. A member of the CPI, Edgar Sisson, traveled to Russia in the winter of 1917–1918. There, he distributed one million copies of Wilson’s Fourteen Points and brought back documents testifying that the Bolshevik leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, were German agents. The sensational documents reached President Wilson in May 1918, and in September the New York Times made them public. In the pro-communist Liberator, John Reed published an extensive analysis of Sisson’s documents, highlighting many unaccountable mistakes and accusing Sisson of forgery. Bullitt did not trust these papers, either; following in Bullitt’s footsteps, George Kennan later argued at length that they were fabricated. But Wilson seemed to believe in their authenticity, and his partners in the Paris Conference trusted them too; the Russian-German treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which was very generous to the Germans, gave credence to these suspicions. Publicizing these documents was a major success for Sisson; after returning from Russia with the discovery in his hands, Sisson was promoted to head of the Foreign Section of CPI.

In contrast, Colonel House believed then that the Bolsheviks had come to power not because of German money but because they had satisfied the only real demand of the Russian peasants: the redistribution of land.¹⁴ Using British intelligence officers in Moscow as mediators, House and Trotsky played with the idea that the Bolsheviks might reject the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in exchange for American aid. Wilson refused to make such a commitment, but House counted on “national revival of Russia, such as that which was seen in the time of Napoleon”: this time, Russia’s revival would be directed against the Germans. To some extent, Bullitt shared these hopes.¹⁵ Trying to clarify the events, on November 18, 1918, Bullitt suggested that the Department of State send a query to the incoming German president, Friedrich Ebert, seeking to publish the names of those who had been hired by the German General Staff to spread Bolshevik propaganda in Russia. Coming from Ebert, “such [a] publication would reveal and discredit the leading Bolshevik propagandists throughout Europe.”¹⁶

Much later, in 1936, Ambassador Bullitt wrote a diplomatic cable to the State Department about a former employee of the CPI, Kenneth Durant, who “witnessed” Sisson fabricating his documents. This Durant was “a curious fellow whom I have known from childhood,” Bullitt wrote, from “an excellent Philadelphian family.” Durant was another one of John Reed’s classmates at Harvard who later became Edward House’s aide at the Paris Peace Conference, and there his paths crossed with Bullitt’s. As it happened, Durant was on the payroll of the Soviet government well before Bullitt opened diplomatic relations between the two countries. Starting in 1923, and for at least the following twenty years, Durant worked for the Soviets as the official representative of the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) to the United States. In a December 1936 memo from Durant to the head of TASS, Durant criticized Bullitt’s work in Moscow; he wrote that he knew Bullitt from childhood and understood his “peculiarities.”¹⁷ For his part, Bullitt explained Durant’s dramatic transformation by the fact that “he became violently disgusted with the publication by the American government of the forged ‘Sisson documents,’ which purported to prove that Lenin and Trotsky were both in the pay of the German Government.” These documents were “palpably false,” Bullitt wrote, and their dissemination by the CPI had the adverse effect on “people who care for fair play”: for one, “Durant became so incensed that he swung over completely to the revolutionary point of view.”¹⁸

Kenneth Durant is all but forgotten now, but the choice he made in life demands explanation. Writing in 1936, when Durant became his political opponent, Bullitt seemed to believe that Durant had been incensed to witness Sisson’s fabrication and that working for the Soviet Union had redeemed him in some way. This is a complex psychological hypothesis; what is certain is that the Soviet authorities did support Durant for decades.

The origin of Sisson’s documents and Durant’s connection to them remains obscure. What is clear, however, is the foundational role these papers, whether forged or partially true, played in the development of the most successful institutions at managing public opinion in the twentieth century—the CPI and TASS. Substituting America’s democratic institutions, new methods of manipulating the public opinion aspired to return power to the educated, well-financed elite of experts and administrators. These new methods ceaselessly referred to their “scientific” origins but trafficked in obscure areas of emotion, innuendo, and deception.

Controlling information flows, the authorities acquired superhuman traits that were projected onto the leader. This was a third way between idealism and realism, and I venture to call it “political demonism.” In Europe it led to dictatorships and new wars, but in America it remained in the background, beneath the fabric of democratic politics. Colonel House’s novel about Dru, Administrator, Bullitt’s disjointed words, and Kennan’s forgotten drafts all reveal the covert popularity of these anti-democratic ideas even among those who helped define the Progressive agenda. Later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who also started his service in the Wilson administration, became the peerless master of manipulating the public. “In the invention of political mechanisms and expedients, President Roosevelt was in a class by himself,” Bullitt wrote. “In ability to handle American public opinion he was unrivaled. At his best, he was a political genius. This was a great asset to our country when the policy the President wanted to follow was in our national interest. But his very ability enabled him to lead our country toward disaster when he was wrong.”¹⁹