5

RESIGNATION

Bullitt and Steffens returned from Moscow along with Arthur Ransome, a British writer and agent who was working for the Secret Intelligence Service. They could not have found a better interlocutor. A biographer of Oscar Wilde, Ransome moved to Russia in 1913 to report for British newspapers. He was in Petrograd during the First World War and both Russian revolutions, befriended Karl Radek, the founder of the Communist International, and had a relationship with Trotsky’s personal secretary. Officially, Ransome was interested in Russian fairy tales, which he was collecting for a book project, but he also sent reports about the Bolsheviks’ plans and military developments to his contacts in London. A left-wing activist who lived in the world of fantasy, he would later become involved in smuggling Russian diamonds to Europe to finance the Comintern. Allegations arose that he was a double agent.¹ Politically, he differed from other British agents in Russia, who were vehemently anti-Bolshevik; with his leftist leanings and Russian sympathies he had more in common with Bullitt and Steffens. “Shakespeare looked different after Russia, and, unlike some other authors, still true,” he told Steffens while they were heading to England in 1919. But they talked mostly about the Bolsheviks, whom Bullitt and Steffens also saw differently after their short trip to Russia.² Ransome eventually married Trotsky’s former secretary, and he published many collections of fairy tales, most of them invented from scratch. Also a storyteller, Steffens depicted the new Bolshevik state in a famous formula: “I have been into the future, and it works.”³

Bullitt’s arrival back in Paris was less fortunate. Colonel House greeted him and reported to Wilson that Bullitt had arrived with “news of supreme importance”: this news, he said, would bring peace where there still was war. Wilson asked Bullitt to brief him the next day. For his part, Lloyd George was pleased to have breakfast with Bullitt; he listened to the amazing details of the negotiations with the Bolsheviks and seemed to approve of them. Clemenceau, as planned, was kept in the dark. Then, however, events started to unfold brutally and inexplicably, just as if Bullitt was inside a Russian fairy tale. The president had a headache and canceled the meeting. He told House that he could not think about Russian affairs because he was so caught up with German issues: he had a “one-track mind,” Wilson explained, as if he was proud of it. The president asked House to make decisions about Russia. Also tasked with mitigating France and Britain’s demands on Germany at the time, House told Bullitt to prepare a draft of a political declaration, rehashing the provisions Bullitt and Lenin had agreed upon. The declaration was to be signed by the Allied Powers and would serve as the Paris Peace Conference’s official response to the Bolshevik proposal.

In the meantime, the British secret service interviewed Steffens about his trip to Russia. The intelligence officers were more competent than Steffens had expected. When the conversation ended, Steffens praised their knowledge of Russia: “You have proved to me that my government is honest and yours is not.” They were startled, and so he continued: “Well, your government, like mine, talks lies, but evidently your government knows the truth. Mine does not. My government believes its own damned lies.” Despite his fondness for the Bolsheviks, Steffens was happy to get back to Paris. Surprised, Bullitt asked him why. Steffens thought deeply and responded: “because, though we had been to heaven, we were so accustomed to our own civilization that we preferred hell.”⁴

On April 4, Wilson fell ill. Although the president’s illness was concealed from the public, all negotiations stopped. His ailment may have been the first of several strokes or a flaring up of old neurological problems. He had a fever and severe coughing fits and could not move the left side of his body. Years later, Freud and Bullitt would try to prove that Wilson’s symptoms were psychosomatic responses to his feelings of failure and guilt—a bodily reaction to his neurotic inability to make decisions at crucial moments. “He faced alternatives both of which were horrible to him,” they argued. “He could break his promises and become the tool of the Allies, not the Prince of Peace, or he could hold to his promises, withdraw the financial support of the United States from Europe, denounce Clemenceau and Lloyd George, return to Washington and leave Europe to—what? and himself to—what?”⁵

The Bolsheviks’ April 10 deadline for an agreement was fast approaching. Bullitt reminded House about this deadline daily, but House understood the risks of signing such a declaration or asking the Allies to do so. He clearly did not want to make the decision alone; it was also the moment when his relationship with Wilson deteriorated sharply. The president was only seeing his doctor at this time, so House was not able to confer with him. On April 6, Bullitt was able to convince the president’s physician, Admiral Cary T. Grayson, to ask Wilson about the Russian proposal. The president did not respond. On the same day, Bullitt asked Moscow to extend the deadline to April 20. He also sent a personal letter to Wilson:

You are face to face with a European revolution. . . . For the past year the peoples of Europe have been seeking a better way to live for the common good for all. They have found no guidance in Paris. They are turning towards Moscow. To dismiss this groping of the peoples for better lives—this European revolution—with the word “Bolshevism” is to misunderstand it as completely as Lord North misunderstood the American Revolution. The peoples turn towards Moscow; but the impulses which drive them are remote from theoretic communism. . . . Six months ago all the peoples of Europe expected you to fulfill their hopes. They believe now that you cannot. They turn, therefore, to Lenin, and in so doing they are as honorable and as deserving of sympathy as when they turned to you.

Responding to the revolution with military force and an economic blockade “would only spread famine, chaos, and bloody class war over the whole of Europe.” Indeed, Bullitt wanted the American government to aid the Russian Revolution rather than suppress it. Challenging the president, Bullitt put his career on the line. “Today you may still guide the Revolution into peaceful and constructive channels,” he wrote. In conclusion, Bullitt asked Wilson for an urgent meeting: he wanted fifteen minutes to explain to the president that no question was “heavier with possibilities of good and evil [than] the peace with the European revolution.”⁶ Again, Bullitt received no answer.

But on the same day, April 6, 1919, Wilson went to war one last time with Clemenceau and Lloyd George. First, he ordered that the transfer of credit to America’s allies be stopped, though the funds for the next six months had already been disbursed. Then, he ordered that his steamer, the George Washington, be readied to bring him back to Washington. “It is a bluff, isn’t it?” Clemenceau asked Admiral Grayson. “He hasn’t a bluffing corpuscle in his body,” Wilson’s physician replied earnestly.⁷ A few days later, the president surrendered; his mood changed again, and he now accepted the French and British demands, which he had resisted for months. He had neither the time nor the energy for the new agenda that Bullitt’s mission had proposed.

Harold Nicolson, an ambitious British diplomat, talked to Bullitt on the dramatic day of April 10, 1919, and found “a young man with beliefs.” They talked about the Bolsheviks: “Bullitt says that the only danger for Lenin comes from the left extremists, not the Whites.” Bullitt also predicted that the Russian question would become “one of the great problems of my middle age.” Nicolson was “agnostic” about the Bolsheviks, but he liked the American delegation. “Had the Treaty of Paris been drafted solely by the American experts it would have been one of the wisest as well the most scientific documents ever devised,” he wrote. But the British delegation was also very strong, featuring Arnold Toynbee and John Maynard Keynes. These brilliant intellectuals were smart enough to understand the failure of the Paris Conference. As for Wilson, Nicolson could only wish “that the final clouding of his brain spared him the horror of understanding what he had done for Europe.”⁸

Bullitt was in a rush, but so was everyone in Paris. Wilson needed the League of Nations to come together to ensure his legacy. British and French leaders hastened because they knew that their annexations and indemnities depended on Wilson’s survival. Still unknown to the public, Lenin’s proposal expired on April 10, 1919. Four days later, the Allied Powers agreed on the Versailles treaty and sent it to the Germans. The German government declared that it could not accept the treaty. It had signed the armistice on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but the treaty left most of those points unrealized. However, Germany did eventually sign the treaty after French troops began a new offensive.

The Allies did little to change their policy toward Russia. After a massive anti-Bolshevik riot on the Volga, and Admiral Kolchak’s US-backed spring offensive across the Urals, there was renewed hope among the Allies that the Bolsheviks would be defeated: indeed the Red Army was at its weakest in March and April 1919 when Bullitt brought the peace proposal to Wilson. This was no coincidence: the Bolsheviks had also agreed to make peace with the Germans in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty because they were negotiating from a position of weakness. For the same reason, the participants of the talks in Paris felt “very lukewarm,” as Bullitt diplomatically put it, about negotiations with the Bolsheviks; they hoped that the Russian problem would take care of itself. Had they accepted or even considered Bullitt’s plan in any meaningful way, the British and American governments would have had to revise their commitments to the White Army. Knowledgeable members of these governments understood that the preservation of the Russian Empire was a central aim of the Whites; though partially financed and supplied by the Allies, the anti-Bolshevik leaders—also “idealists” in their own way—would have rejected any proposal to dismember Russia. Bullitt had managed to get Lenin’s consent, but nobody knew how long it would take to bring Denikin to negotiations in Oslo, or what would happen if Trotsky met Kolchak there.

Thus, Bullitt’s mission failed, but there were some positive takeaways from this mission, including the release of Roger Calver Treadwell, the American consul in Tashkent, who had been arrested by local Bolsheviks; in Moscow, Bullitt had negotiated his discharge. After his release, Treadwell reported from Stockholm on May 2, 1919: “The dictatorship of the Bolsheviks has simply succeeded that of the Czar bureaucracy. . . . The loss of individuality, the absence of all moral force, and the present inertia of the intelligent class, are the greatest obstacles in the way of helping the Russian people.”⁹

Bullitt first acknowledged his failure in a letter to his former companion Captain Pettit. On April 18, he wrote to Pettit that he was “rather ashamed” of the results of the mission. In this letter Bullitt’s sentiments closely resembled later, more polished statements. He wrote that though Lloyd George was hesitant about the plan because he was afraid of backlash from the conservative press on the eve of parliamentary elections, it was Wilson who had refused to discuss the Russian peace project.¹⁰ Bullitt also blamed House’s son-in-law and secretary, Gordon Auchincloss, and David Hunter Miller—the commission’s legal expert and a partner in the same law firm as Auchincloss—for blocking the proposal on legal grounds. Bullitt went so far as to call Miller “the blackest reactionary we have here.” Auchincloss wanted to send a mission to supply food to Russia in exchange for certain concessions from the Bolsheviks; he wanted them to give control over ports and railroads to the Allies. Auchincloss wrote up the proposal for the mission and Bullitt rewrote it, but Clemenceau refused to sign that version. Later they agreed to a compromise that Bullitt found unrealistic; he was right, it did not work. As he wrote to Pettit, “the fact is that everyone in Paris, except the French, knows that we ought to make peace with the Soviet government, but the old gentlemen who are running the things simply have not the courage, nor the straightforwardness, to go at peace via a direct route.”¹¹

Unlike some of his counterparts, Wilson had a relatively sophisticated understanding of Bolshevism. Clemenceau compared it to a contagious disease and warned that an epidemic loomed, but Wilson saw Bolshevism as the wrong answer to the right questions, which his progressive agenda also raised. As he put it at the Paris Peace Conference, “capital and labor in the United States are not friends. Still they are not enemies. . . . But they are distrustful, each of the other. Society cannot go on that plane. . . . The whole world was disturbed by this question long before the Bolsheviks came into power. Seeds need soil, and the Bolsheviks seeds found the soil already prepared for them.”¹² Although Wilson wanted the Reds to be defeated, he did not want the tsar’s archaic regime to be reestablished. Most of all, Wilson was concerned that the Bolsheviks’ violent revolution would spread into Europe, and this concern was the reason that he ultimately acceded to the French and British demands. Freud and Bullitt wrote later about the terrible “word pictures” that crossed Wilson’s mind when he imagined what would happen if he withdrew from the Paris conference. “He described the French army marching into Germany, obliterating whole cities by chemical warfare, killing women and children, conquering all Europe and then being submerged by a Communist revolution.”¹³

Robert Lansing, Wilson’s conservative secretary of state, believed during the Paris Peace Conference that a proletarian revolution across the continent was imminent, and that Moscow was financing agents and plotters in Europe. In hindsight, he acknowledged that his fears were exaggerated: “the peoples of the Central Empires possessed a greater power of resistance to the temptations of lawlessness and disorder than was presumed in the winter of 1918–1919,” Lansing wrote after his resignation.¹⁴ The Allies thus overestimated the influence of the Reds in Europe and, having seen how easily Lenin’s government had ceded territory to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk, underestimated their strength inside Russia. These misperceptions made the Allies’ policy toward Russia singularly unsuccessful. Counting on the Whites, fearing a Red revolution in Europe, and declaring Russia irrelevant for the peace, the Allied leaders committed one grave mistake after another.

In Western Europe, hostilities ceased, but the situation in the East was changing with terrifying speed. Exhausted and suddenly very cautious, the great powers could not and did not want to keep up with these changes. Unhappy with Kolchak’s monarchic ideas, they stopped giving him aid precisely at the moment when his victory was most likely. When Kolchak was defeated, the British sent a mission to support General Denikin—who was no less a monarchist than Kolchak—but he was also defeated. Nobody expected success from Trotsky and his inexperienced armies, but the sporadic interference and non-interference of the British and American governments certainly contributed to this success.

In their call for world revolution, the Bolsheviks did indeed give Western governments cause for concern. Trotsky’s emissaries, including John Reed and Arthur Ransome, did smuggle diamonds and gold to finance the Bolshevik activities in Europe. Echoes of the socialist uprisings in Munich and Budapest could be heard in many European capitals, from London to Rome. By the end of 1919, Trotsky achieved a decisive breakthrough in the war. Bringing revolution to Europe with whips and bayonets, the Red Cavalry launched a victorious offensive in Poland in the summer of 1920. Only the “Miracle on the Vistula,” the Polish victory in the Battle of Warsaw, stopped this advance. If Polish Lieutenant Jan Kowalewski had not cracked the Red Cossacks’ radio code in late 1919, they would have seized Warsaw and advanced on Berlin, igniting the unrest there. The negotiators in Paris could not have known about these potentialities. Rushing to make peace because of the seeming inevitability of Bolshevik influence in Europe, the Allies missed an opportunity to isolate the revolution in Russia, where it had started.

Writing together in the mid-1920s, Bullitt and Freud reflected on these missed opportunities: Wilson’s rejection of a deal with Russia may have been “the most important single decision that he made in Paris,” they wrote.¹⁵ Had Bolshevik Russia been reduced to a few provinces around Moscow but recognized as a legitimate state, the entire course of the twentieth century would have been different. Perhaps the USSR would not have emerged and the Stalinist terror would not have happened; perhaps there would have been no Nazi Germany, no Second World War, and no Holocaust. Of course, Moscow’s rulers could have disregarded any agreement they signed; at will, they could have resumed the civil war or started a new war in Europe. In 1920, Lenin told a British reporter that when he “proposed a treaty to Bullitt, a treaty which left tremendous amounts of territory to Denikin and Kolchak,” he did so only because of his “knowledge that if peace were signed, those Governments could never hold out.”¹⁶ But of course nobody then could have had such “knowledge.” In 1919, even the Bolsheviks underestimated their own strength, organizational capacity, and the attractiveness of their ideology; so it should come as no surprise that Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Wilson also underestimated them. The victors of the Great War could do nothing but let the massive, deeply troubled Russian Empire consolidate under the Bolsheviks’ radical rule. This crucial mistake shaped the future of the century.

How might international relations have unfolded differently in the 1920s in light of the emergence of a dozen new states in northern Eurasia, all fiercely competing to find trading partners and political allies in Weimar Germany, Japan, France, the new Poland and Turkey, the British Empire, and the United States? This possible world seems far more attractive than what Europe and America actually found after the Versailles treaty. Imagine, for example, a Siberian state, with its huge resources and potential markets, and its prospects as a political ally and trading partner for both the United States and Japan, which were still allies at the time. The Great Depression and Pearl Harbor could have been avoided in this imaginary world. Much else besides would have occurred there, but this is where I stop this little experiment in counterfactual history.

Back in London, Lloyd George reported the results of the Paris talks to the British Parliament. Asked about the secret negotiations with Russia, the prime minister denied he was aware of Bullitt’s mission. In response, a few months later on the floor of the American Senate, Bullitt said that Lloyd George was guilty of “the most egregious case of misleading the public.”¹⁷ Clemenceau was scared of the Bolshevik “contagion,” Lloyd George was afraid of the British conservative press on the eve of elections. But at that moment, in the spring of 1919, both men were enjoying great success. They had managed not only to defeat their enemies on the battlefield but also to convince the international community that it was these same enemies who were responsible for the war. Although France and England had won that war with much help from America and Russia, their diplomatic victory in Paris meant that Clemenceau and Lloyd George reaped most of the rewards. Russia and the United States sacrificed a great deal but received very little in return; all annexations and indemnities went to France and Britain. Freud and Bullitt emphasized Wilson’s role in these events, using the strongest imagery they could conjure: “The whole stream of human life may be deflected by the character of a single individual. . . . All life would have been a different thing if Christ had recanted when He stood before Pilate.” Blaming Wilson for betraying his own convictions, Freud and Bullitt were unforgiving: “Wilson preached magnificently, promised superbly, then fled. . . . The Western world will not find it easy to wipe from memory the tragic-comic figure of its hero, the President who talked and ran.”¹⁸

On May 17, 1919, Bullitt resigned his post in the State Department, breaking protocol and submitting his resignation directly to Wilson:

I was one of the millions who trusted confidently and implicitly in your leadership. . . . But our Government has consented now to deliver the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjections, and dismemberments—a new century of war. . . . Russia, “the acid test of good will,” for me as for you, has not even been understood. Unjust decisions of the Conference . . . make new international conflicts certain. It is my conviction that the present league of nations will be powerless to prevent these wars, and that the United States will be involved in them. . . . I am sorry that you did not fight our fight to the finish and that you have so little faith in the millions of men, like myself, in every nation who had faith in you.¹⁹

Bold and touching, it is one of the most eloquent documents in the history of international relations. On the same day Bullitt wrote a letter to House, the man who hired him. He wrote that his resignation was a protest not against the fact that Wilson had ignored his Russian project but against the Versailles treaty as a whole. House asked Bullitt to stay on at the State Department, but Bullitt refused. Wilson did not respond, of course, and Bullitt passed his letter on to the newspapers. The New York Times reported him saying that he was heading to the French Riviera and there, lying on the sand, would be watching the world going to hell.

Bullitt received a formal approval of his resignation from Lansing. Although not happy with his subordinate’s decision, Lansing was also, like Bullitt, disappointed with the outcome of the Paris talks. Writing about Bullitt’s resignation in his memoir, Lansing said that the five leading members of the American delegation had also sent him letters protesting the treaty. Wilson and House shaped their foreign policy staff to fight for a peace that would end all wars, because only this idea could justify America’s participation in the war. Unsurprisingly, their staff was unhappy when the treaty fell short of this goal, but Bullitt was the only American who actually resigned over it. According to Bullitt’s memo, Lansing told him, smiling: “I really believe that there is very little difference between our points of view on the treaty.” When Wilson proclaimed that the League of Nations would correct any shortcomings of the peace, even Lansing objected, noting that because Wilson’s charter gave the great powers the right to veto, the League would be helpless were any great power to violate the peace. The League, Lansing said, would not make the world better than the Paris Conference did. He resigned less than a year after Bullitt, in February 1920.²⁰

But one member of the British delegation, John Maynard Keynes, made the same choice as Bullitt, and for similar reasons. Keynes quit Paris nine days after Bullitt and explained his decision in his extraordinary work, Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). Keynes depicted the peace conference as a “nightmare”; like Bullitt, he personally blamed Wilson for betraying the peoples of Europe. Keynes also argued, like Bullitt, that Germany and her allies had signed not an unconditional capitulation but a truce that was conditioned on Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Moreover, Keynes pondered the fact that, during the Paris talks, the European allies were entirely dependent on American aid for both food and loans. For all his idealism, Wilson had real power over Europe at the end of the war. Keynes was able to demonstrate that Germany would not pay its indemnities because it simply could not. Like Bullitt, Keynes predicted that the peace that had been signed in Versailles would cause a new, bloody war in Europe. And Keynes’s response to the “nightmare” of the Paris Peace Conference was also personal and tragic: “A sense of impeding catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene; the futility and smallness of man before the great events confronting him . . . —all the elements of ancient tragedy were there.”²¹

Rarely has a political prognosis been more accurate. A witness of the debates in Paris, Keynes suggested that Wilson had not stood a chance against the experienced strategist, Clemenceau, or the ruthless manipulator, Lloyd George. Both these politicians had overwhelmed the American leader, who had been forced to take refuge in his eloquence. Keynes psychoanalyzed Wilson earlier than Freud and Bullitt did, producing similar results: “In the language of medical psychology, to suggest to the President that the Treaty was an abandonment of his professions was to touch on the raw a Freudian complex. It was a subject intolerable to discuss, and every subconscious instinct plotted to defeat its further exploration.” Uncharacteristically, Keynes did not temper his feelings about Wilson: “The President was not a hero or a prophet; he was not even a philosopher.”²²

Keynes and Bullitt shared so many insights about Wilson’s role in Europe that it is difficult to believe they did not discuss the matter in Paris. In any case, Bullitt published a detailed and glowing review of Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes was “an authentic master of English language and he has depicted the scene with the skill of a great artist. No more truthful picture has ever been drawn. No more tragic acts have ever been recorded,” he wrote.²³ Years later, Bullitt gave a copy of Keynes’s book to Freud; it was probably from Keynes that Bullitt and Freud adopted the idea of Wilson’s “moral collapse” and garnered some statistical detail about America’s leverage over Europe. But Bullitt and Freud produced sharper and more bitter responses to this “collapse”; unlike Bullitt and Freud, Keynes had never been captivated by Wilson, whom he viewed as a hypocrite and a provincial. In his review of Keynes’s book, Bullitt compared the Paris Peace Conference to the Congress of Vienna, which decided the fate of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon, and drew an analogy between Wilson and Alexander I, another well-meaning leader who “talked and ran.” These three authors, different in so many respects, all regretted that the most intellectual of the American presidents had failed to take advantage of the exceptional situation at the end of the First World War. “Never had a philosopher held such weapons wherewith to bind the princes of this world,” Keynes wrote.²⁴

The Treaty of Versailles had to be ratified by the US Senate for it to enter into force. The Republicans had a majority at the time. Ratification would provide a non-American body with the right to decide on matters of American military intervention. The Senate guarded its prerogatives ferociously, but Wilson refused to compromise on this point. His popularity was high, and his victory in the war widely admired. In September 1919, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations invited Bullitt to testify about his trip to Russia and subsequent resignation; one of Wilson’s leading detractors, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, chaired the hearings. As their long exchange revealed, Bullitt and Lodge agreed about the futility of the Versailles treaty, and Lodge was particularly interested in Bullitt’s mission to Russia. The members of the Senate committee took delight in hearing about the incompetence of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. According to the official record, “laughter” interrupted this part of the hearings four times. Bullitt accused Lloyd George of dissembling to the British people; divulged private conversations with Secretary of State Lansing; and revealed deep dissatisfaction with his former duties. “The League of Nations at present is entirely useless,” said Bullitt, citing Lansing. “The great powers have simply gone ahead and arranged the world to suit themselves.”²⁵

Moreover, Bullitt recited Lansing’s remarks in which the secretary of state described some senators who were present at the hearings. On May 19, 1919, Lansing had told Bullitt in Paris that if the Senate could only understand what the Versailles treaty actually meant, the treaty would have been defeated “unquestionably”; but, according to Lansing, nobody could understand the treaty except Senators Lodge and Knox.²⁶ On September 12, 1919, Bullitt repeated Lansing’s words to a committee hearing in Washington at which Knox and Lodge were present. He cited Lansing as having said that Mr. Lodge would probably understand the treaty but that his “position would become purely political, and therefore ineffective.” At this point, the chair of the committee, Senator Lodge, calmed the audience: “I do not mind,” he said. After another burst of laughter, Bullitt asked “to be excused from reading any more of these conversations.” Senator Frank Brandegee said, “We get the drift,” and the committee erupted again. Providing a comic twist to his understanding of what had happened in Paris, Bullitt seemed to deliberately spark a scandal. At the end of the hearings, Knox asked Bullitt what he was going to do next. “I expect to return to Maine and fish for trout, where I was when I was summoned by the committee,” Bullitt answered.²⁷

He was glad to learn in November that the Senate had failed to ratify the treaty. However, Bullitt’s testimony in the Senate had spoiled his relationships with many people in power. During this testimony, Wilson was still president, Lloyd George was British prime minister, and Lansing was secretary of state. Interestingly, Bullitt’s revelations did not target Colonel House, who at this point had also lost his faith in Wilson’s diplomacy. Shortly after the hearings, Bullitt published a book, The Bullitt Mission to Russia, which compiled the documents related to his trip, concluding with the notes of the hearings before the Senate committee. The advertisement for his book read, “If you would know how near the world was to peace with Russia, how Lloyd George, Col. House and others all favored it, how Lenin met all the Paris proposals, and how the whole affair was then abandoned—read Mr. Bullitt’s startling testimony that has set two continents talking.”²⁸ In response, the New York Times published a long and hostile essay by Edwin James, “The Fall of Bullitt,” which accused the former diplomat of excessive ambition and naive trust in the Bolsheviks. Another newspaper clipping, which Bullitt also preserved in his papers, compared him to a typical Henry James protagonist, an ambitious and dishonest American in Europe. In fact, the cosmopolitan, multilingual Bullitt was the opposite of James’s provincial fools. An editor of the Nation, Lincoln Colcord, wrote to Bullitt on May 29, 1920, that he was pleased by Bullitt’s letter to the president and by the fierce discussion that it provoked. Later, on September 16, Colcord lamented the fact that their mutual friends believed Bullitt was a “dishonorable young man. . . . I can imagine that you will run into this kind of criticism everywhere in the crowd in New York which calls itself liberal. Don’t for Heaven’s sake take this seriously.”²⁹

President Wilson and his beloved creation, the League of Nations, had many enemies. But Bullitt was the first American diplomat to publicly criticize the injustices of the Versailles Treaty and predict that it would lead the world into a new war. Bullitt’s testimony helped conservative senators prevent the ratification of the Versailles treaty and the Charter of the League of Nations. The United States did not become a member of the League, and without America the organization was unable to advance peace or prevent war. Although this was not the only factor, Versailles’s humiliation of Germany contributed to the next world war. Freud and Bullitt were probably right that Wilson’s refusal to consider the Bolshevik peace proposal was the most significant mistake made at the Paris Peace Conference. But the United States learned from its mistakes and eventually ended the Second World War completely differently from the way it had ended the First World War. America and its allies—with the exception of the Soviet Union—refrained from seizing territory and demanding compensation; the Bretton Woods financial system protected the desolated belligerents from postwar inflation; and the Marshall Plan financed the reconstruction of Europe with American money, creating a flourishing though divided Germany. The bitter experience of Versailles inspired these measures, which were decided by veterans of the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference. The generation of Roosevelt, Bullitt, Marshall, and Keynes was determined not to repeat Wilson’s mistakes.

In April 1922 Germany and Russia signed a new treaty. Gathering in the Italian town of Rapallo after Mussolini’s election, they renounced the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, voided their mutual claims, and pledged to cooperate economically and militarily. The Treaty of Rapallo allowed Germany to avoid some of the harm done by the Versailles treaty because Soviet resources—grain, coal, ore, and oil, among other raw materials—compensated for the loss of Alsace, an important mining and industrial region given to France. After Rapallo, American journalist Herman Bernstein conducted an interview with Walter Rathenau and Bullitt. The head of the German delegation to Rapallo, Rathenau denied that there was a military component to German-Russian cooperation and emphasized the peaceful reconstruction of both countries. Bullitt disagreed; he was confident that Rapallo was a prelude to a military alliance between the two states. “All that the Allies have done with regard to Russia and Germany necessarily forced these two nations to combine.” The day would come, Bullitt said, when the Atlantic powers would confront a new coalition of forces: an axis of Germany, Russia, Japan, perhaps China, and parts of the Islamic world. Their conflict with the Atlantic powers within twenty-five or thirty years would be a “situation too terrible to contemplate.”³⁰ The new war would occur, Bullitt prophesied, around 1950. In fact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, and the new war started much earlier—in 1939.

Many Europeans saw no value in the imperialist ambitions of the First World War, and even less in the Treaty of Versailles. But it was not Bullitt, Keynes, or Rathenau who voiced the most vehement opposition to the Treaty of Versailles. It was Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin who turned resentment into practical politics. In Tehran and Yalta, President Roosevelt paid close attention to Communist Russia, which President Wilson had refused to take into consideration. But when the next, post–Second World War generation of Russian, European, and American politicians set about dealing with the dismemberment of the socialist bloc, they forgot the lessons of Versailles. Like the First World War, the Cold War ended in the emergence of a revanchist Russian elite, which threatened the world with the prospect of a new war.