The Madman in the White House

The Madman

in the White House

Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt,

and the Lost Psychobiography of

Woodrow Wilson

Patrick Weil

,   · , 

2023

An earlier version of this book was published in French asLe Président est-il devenu fou?:

Printed in the United States of

America

First printing

Photograph courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Design by Tim Jones

9780674293250 (EPUB)

9780674293267 (PDF)

Publication of this book has been supported through the generous provisions of

the Maurice and Lula Bradley Smith Memorial Fund.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Weil, Patrick, 1956– author.

Title: The madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt,

and the lost psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson / Patrick Weil. |

Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identiers: LCCN 2022037088 | ISBN 9780674291614 (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: Freud, Sigmund, 1856–1939. Thomas Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth President

of the United States. | Wilson, Woodrow, 1856–1924—Mental health. | Bullitt, WilliamC.

(William Christian), 1891–1967. | Censorship—United States—History—20thcentury.

Classication: LCC E767.F73 W4513 2023 | DDC 973.91/3092 [B]—dc23/eng/20220830

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037088

To the memory of Aya

— Alice Roth (1912–2011) —

who lived a century through love

Contents

Introduction 1

1 The American Collapse of the Treaty of Versailles 11

2 The Making of WilliamC. Bullitt 32

3 An American in Paris and Vienna 51

4 Sigmund Freud, Coauthor 68

5 The Failure of the First Atlantic Alliance 75

6 Princeton Nightmares 83

7 Neurosis on the World Stage 99

8 Analyzing Wilson 115

9 Signing On with FDR 133

10 Ambassador Bullitt Goes to Moscow 143

11 Diplomacy to the Rescue? 160

12 After Munich 172

13 A Phony War 191

14 Liberating France, Confronting the “Red Amoeba” 208

15 America’s Freelance Secretary of State 226

16 The Wilson Book, at Last 247

17 The Return of the Father 256

18 The Secret 261

19 Wilson in Retrospect 278

Conclusion: Personality in History 292

Notes 299

Acknowledgments 377

Index 379

The Madman in the White House

· 1 ·

Introduction

as spring dawned on the morning of March21, 1920, many close ob-

servers of President Woodrow Wilson wondered if he had gone mad.

The day before, despite their pleas, the president had instructed his

fellow Democrats in the Senate to vote against ratifying the Treaty of

Versailles. This was a shocking reversal of Wilson’s earlier efforts. For

the rst six months of 1919, he lived in a “temporary White House” on

the right bank of the Seine in Paris. There he worked tirelessly to ne-

gotiate the treaty, which he and millions of others saw as a framework

for lasting worldwide peace.

Those negotiations followed, of course, the conclusion of the First

World War. Eighteen million had died, almost 10 million of them civil-

ians. Another 21 million were wounded, many horribly mutilated for

the rest of their lives. In response, Wilson convinced the Allies to

approve the creation of a League of Nations, a global organization de-

signed to prevent future wars. In addition, Wilson and the leaders of the

United Kingdom had agreed to a defense pact with France, pledging that

they would act together in self-defense at any sign of German aggres-

sion against her French neighbor. This in effect created a new collective

security apparatus with the United States at its center. Wilson and the

Allies had anticipated the United Nations and NATO decades before

their time.

Returning to Washington from Paris in July1919, buoyed by the

prestige and popularity of the peace he had negotiated, Wilson envi-

sioned ratication of the Versailles Treaty as a formality. But this

proved gravely wrong. Many in the Senate worried that the treaty would

commit the United States to defend others subject to aggression, with

the result that Congress would be stripped of its constitutional prerog-

ative to declare war. For months Wilson obstinately refused to hear

this concern or do anything that might assuage it. His position never

wavered, right up until the nal defeat of the Versailles Treaty in the

Senate; the treaty with France and the United Kingdom became a ca-

sualty of the impasse. Immediately upon the completion of the Senate

2 the madman in the white house

vote, the whole world understood that although the Treaty of Versailles

would formally enter into force, without US participation it provided

little guarantee of an enduring peace.

In Paris, the press emphasized Prime Minister Georges Clem-

enceau’s failed bet on a transatlantic alliance with the United States.

French General Ferdinand Foch, the supreme allied commander who

led the Allies to victory, predicted a new war would eventually break

out and told a friend, “If we are not careful, our army will be signi-

cantly inferior in  than it was in .”

In Washington, Wilson’s

followers unanimously held him responsible for the treaty’s collapse,

whether or not they supported its terms. Foreign policy “idealists”

believed the treaty the president had signed betrayed his promise of

“peace without victory”—it looked like a classic victor’s peace, forced

on the vanquished to the benet of her enemy. Rather than provide for

the universal self-determination Wilson called for, the treaty was full

of annexations that saw the Allies swallowing up former territories of

the defeated; rather than welcome Germany into a new world order

centered on law, the treaty imposed humiliating and onerous nancial

burdens in the form of harsh reparations. “Realists,” in contrast,

thought that Wilson’s main promises had been fullled. The treaty set

out a collective-security framework that could prevent future wars. In

line with the goal of self-determination, some new nation-states were

born, including Poland. Germany would have to pay for the damages

it caused, but contrary to popular belief the country—still the largest

in Europe, and unencumbered by foreign debt aside from the repara-

tions bill—had emerged from the war in relatively good economic

shape.

Regardless of their differences, idealists and realists blamed the

president for the failure of the peace—whether because the treaty it-

self was fatally awed or because Wilson had assured its ruin in the

Senate. Some attributed Wilson’s fatal stubbornness to a stroke he

suffered in fall , which left him at death’s door for weeks and per-

manently paralyzed the left side of his body. But others thought his

behavior had deeper roots.

Many of the participants in the conference—including Clemenceau,

British prime minister David Lloyd George, and Lloyd George’s war

secretary, Winston Churchill—attributed Wilson’s failure to his psy-

Introduction 3

chology. This belief was shared by his American collaborators, in-

cluding Robert Lansing, the secretary of state, and Wilson’s closest

adviser, Colonel Edward House. But only the young British economist

and peace conference delegate John Maynard Keynes, in the enduringly

inuential  book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, pub-

licly evoked Wilson’s “Freudian complex.” Keynes was in the idealist

camp—the group that saw the treaty as abandoning the principle of a

law-based peace among states acting as equals. “The President’s psy-

chology was essential to explain how it came about, in spite of the Pres-

ident’s sincerity, that a perdious peace was enacted,” Keynes wrote

in a letter.

WilliamC. Bullitt, a journalist, diplomat, and fellow idealist, had

joined Wilson in his ght to “create a world adequate to the needs of

mankind.”

After serving in the US delegation and coming away with

an opinion similar to Keynes’s, he resolved to torpedo the treaty in the

Senate. Early in September, the elegant twenty-eight-year-old ap-

peared at a Senate hearing where he revealed that Wilson had deceived

senators about the negotiations and further testied that top foreign

policy officials—including Secretary of State Lansing—feared the

treaty would draw the United States into a new war. Before the sena-

tors, Bullitt argued that if the United States ratied the treaty, it would

indeed nd itself at war again in short order, enjoined to ght on be-

half of Eastern European states sure to be overrun by the new Bolshevik

government in Russia.

Bullitt became a hero both for Wilson’s Republican opponents and

the liberals who had once supported Wilson. His revelations—arriving

just before the treaty debate began on the Senate oor, while Wilson

still enjoyed momentum—had seismic effects and earned him tremen-

dous publicity. Activists urged him to seek office in his own right.

Yet, though Bullitt had no doubt that he had been right to testify against

the treaty, he had no interest in staying in politics. Disgusted by Wash-

ington, he withdrew into writing and existential limbo. In  he

divorced his rst wife and married Louise Bryant, a fellow writer, so-

cial high-ier, and the widow of John Reed, the socialist journalist and

author of Ten Days that Shook the World. Three years later Bullitt pub-

lished an autobiographical novel, It’s Not Done. An unexpected hit,

the book sold , copies and was reprinted seventeen times.

4 the madman in the white house

Despite his successes, Bullitt remained traumatized by the tragedy

of Versailles. He took up the torch of psychology and decided to write

about Wilson’s personality in an effort to make sense of what had hap-

pened. To help him in his task, he called on none other than Sigmund

Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. At the end of 1926, Bullitt went

to Vienna and presented himself at Freud’s door. Bullitt became Freud’s

patient. On Freud’s couch, he shared facets of his life story but also dis-

cussed Wilson, about whom he was writing a play. The project received

considerable praise from dramatists, but Bullitt was forced to abandon

the work when he could not nd a theater willing to show it.

Three years later, Bullitt came to Freud with a new idea. At the

time, the Great Depression had hit the world and Europe’s precarious

peace was imperiled by the rise of fascism. The role of the United States

in the world had expanded, yet its diplomacy remained embarrassingly

underdeveloped. So Bullitt decided to write a book on diplomacy, a

subject he intended to approach scientically—through studies in

geography, economics, history, and, nally, psychology. For Bullitt, the

psychology of leaders was what mattered most. The book was to include

portraits of the key personalities of the Paris Conference: Clemenceau,

Lloyd George, Wilson, and other heads of state, as well as important g-

ures from the American delegation, such as House and Herbert Hoover,

the agricultural official and future president who ensured that Ameri-

cans and their allies stayed fed during the war while the Germans

succumbed to famine. Bullitt also intended to feature Vladimir Lenin,

the Bolshevik leader, who had not been at the conference but whom

Bullitt had met during secret talks in 1919. The book would conclude

with a radical call for parliamentary government in the United States.

The structure of

the US government was overly dependent on a single

individual, he thought—the president. A parliamentary system was

better suited for a democracy.

Freud was intrigued. He had conded to Bullitt that he, too, had

some ideas about Wilson that he would like to put to paper. Bullitt

asked Freud to contribute to his book. Freud agreed, but only if Bullitt

could gather the hard historical evidence they would need, including

archival resources and interviews with the people who knew Wilson

best. If Bullitt could gather this material for him, and if it proved ap-

propriate, Freud was eager to collaborate.

Introduction 5

Excited by the project, Bullitt dedicated himself to the task after

returning to the United States. He obtained access to important per-

sonal archives. He carried out interviews with Wilson’s condantes:

Cary Grayson, the president’s doctor; Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson’s

biographer; Joseph Tumulty, his secretary; Bernard Baruch, his eco-

nomic adviser; Colonel House; and others. Each confessed to Bullitt

secret information or interpretations about Wilson that have been un-

known until today.

Once assembled, the material seemed sufficiently impressive to

Freud. In October1930, he and Bullitt decided on a new course: instead

of appending an additional chapter to Bullitt’s diplomacy book, they

would coauthor a complete book dedicated exclusively to Wilson. For

months in Vienna, Freud and Bullitt studied and analyzed Wilson’s life

and personality. The president, they concluded, could not help but put

himself in situations where he would suffer, be humiliated, enraged,

and ultimately fail. To a psychoanalyst, this predilection for repeated

cycles of self-destruction was a clear sign of neurosis, with the potential

to provoke irrational thoughts and behaviors of the kind that appeared

to be in evidence during the peace treaty negotiations.

In April1932, after two years of work, the two men signed each

chapter of a 389-page manuscript. By the end of their collaboration,

Freud had developed an affection for the diplomat-turned-biographer. He

was smart, he knew international politics, and he even had innovative

ideas about psychoanalysis. They had become friends. When Bullitt wrote

Freud, he would address him as “Dear Freud”—a rare expression of fa-

miliarity, as Freud was known reverentially to his circle as “pro-

fessor.” The coauthors looked forward to publishing their interpreta-

tion of Wilson’s personality and its decisive role in the crisis that was

then threatening world peace—an interpretation bolstered by the au-

thority of the founder of psychoanalysis.

But if Bullitt had lost his admiration for Wilson, he never truly

abandoned Wilson’s vision. Amid the unfolding global catastrophe, he

yearned to return to the center of the action and see that, this time,

American values of democracy, liberty, and free enterprise won out. A

liberal internationalist to his core, Bullitt found a new vehicle for his

ideals in the 1932 Democratic presidential nominee, Franklin Roosevelt.

Bullitt hoped to secure a job in Roosevelt’s administration and recognized

6 the madman in the white house

that further public criticism of Wilson—whose reputation was sullied

after Versailles but on the mend posthumously in the 1930s—would

render him persona non grata in the Democratic Party. With Freud’s

blessing, Bullitt chose to postpone publication of their book.

Over the next ten years, Bullitt served Roosevelt as one of his most

prized diplomats. In the fall of 1933, Bullitt conducted alongside Roose-

velt the negotiations that led to US recognition of the Soviet Union. He

went on to become the rst US ambassador in Moscow. Surrounded

by a young guard that included George Kennan—future author of the

vaunted “long telegram” laying out the foreign policy doctrine of Soviet

“containment”—Bullitt cultivated a trademark style that blended dazzle

with professional rigor. He loved diplomacy and geopolitics, but he was

also a devotee of theater, parties, socialites. And socialists. Bullitt was a

strident anti-Communist but not because he opposed leftist ideas. He

had sympathy for socialist policies and tried to cultivate left-wing allies

capable of appealing to those who might otherwise succumb to Com-

munism, which Bullitt associated with dictatorship and cultism. In his

private life, emancipated women played a major role and contributed

to his successes: Inez Milholland, the feminist and suffragist; Ernesta

Drinker, a writer and journalist who became his rst wife; Bryant, the

revolutionary journalist and his second wife; Missy LeHand, Roosevelt’s

assistant and chief of staff; Cissy Patterson, editor of the Washington

Times-Herald and scion of the owners of the Chicago Tribune.

In August1936 Bullitt became ambassador to France. From Paris,

he coordinated the US embassies in Europe in an effort to save the

increasingly tenuous peace. In September1938, he went against the

grain of elite opinion and convinced Roosevelt that the Munich Agree-

ment would not satisfy Hitler and would instead lead to war. With the

help of others—in particular the French businessman and statesman

Jean Monnet—Bullitt organized the mass production of US ghter

planes to supply the French army. When the French government ed

Paris in June1940, Bullitt stayed behind to protect the City of Light

from destruction. He was among those who recognized the true nature

of the new Vichy regime—its ambition to become the nest province

of a Nazi Europe and to see Britain defeated. Bullitt had enormous in-

uence on the early course of the war: after returning to the United

States, he convinced Roosevelt to target North Africa as a possible site

Introduction 7

for a US offensive, providing the blueprint for Operation Torch, the rst

Allied landing of the conict.

Soon, however, diplomacy was reduced to an auxiliary of war, and

Roosevelt cast Bullitt aside. Bullitt nonetheless persisted in trying to

shape national policy. On January, , he warned the president in

a famous memorandum that the United States should not, in its zeal

to defeat Hitler, make undue concessions to Stalin. The consequences,

Bullitt predicted, would be terrible for hundreds of millions of Euro-

peans and Chinese, who were liable to become Soviet victims in due

course. In appraising the memorandum’s farsightedness, Kennan wrote

that “it had no counterpart as a warning of that date.” Indeed, Bullitt

had been enormously prescient in foreseeing the postwar situation. As

early as September he wrote, “To my mind, Mr.Hitler has already

lost this war completely. I rather imagine that he thinks he can nish

the French and British quickly enough to turn around and smash the

Bolshies; but that isn’t going to happen and in the end the Bolshies will

gradually eat like a cancer to Berlin. Then the next stage will be of n-

ishing off Stalin Khan.”

Bullitt worried that, like Wilson in , Roosevelt would win the

war and lose the peace. But Roosevelt was not listening. Frustrated,

Bullitt decamped to Europe and, in April, joined the Free French

Army under Charles de Gaulle. Bullitt proved an able officer, serving

and advising the esteemed General Jean de Lattre. By the close of the

war, Bullitt had become something of a French national hero.

When he returned to Washington, D.C., in fall , Bullitt con-

tinued his ght against Communism. He had no official position, but

he nonetheless played a crucial role in foreign affairs. Through jour-

nalism, campaigns to sway his powerful friends, and freelance diplo-

macy, he found his way to the frontlines of the Cold War. He was a

key negotiator in bringing about armistice in Korea. He contributed

decisively to the return of Emperor Bao Dai to the throne of Vietnam,

securing French and US support and thereby arraying American power

against Ho Chi Minh’s Communists. And he was indefatigable in his

efforts to stave off Chinese Communism. When Chiang Kai-shek and

his Nationalists lost China, Bullitt moved to Taiwan to advise Chiang.

In the early s, Bullitt became an informal adviser to Vice

President Richard Nixon; he was in some respect the original Henry

8 the madman in the white house

Kissinger, well before Kissinger arrived on the national scene. Although

Bullitt died before Nixon became president, his inuence lingered.

Nixon held Bullitt up as a model. “The foreign service reporting is an

utter disaster,” he complained in , because they described every

little thing that happened without assessing the bigger picture. “The

great ambassadors of the past such as Bullitt, put their view out.”

But it was not Bullitt’s diplomatic record that would be his legacy.

In December, feeling death approaching, Bullitt nally published

the Wilson biography nearly thirty years after Freud’s death. The work

was met with howls of protest. Many questioned whether Freud was

really a coauthor. Bullitt died in Paris in February before reading

any of the reviews, which were often severe. Wilson’s reputation seemed

untouchable at the time, while the inuence of Freud and psychoanal-

ysis had precipitously declined. Few reviewers agreed with the recent

assessment of historian Adam Tooze, who has called the Wilson book

a “compelling psychobiography” of a president “trapped in an imagi-

nary world of language woven by his domineering Presbyterian father.”

Of course, others had written biographies of Wilson and his fellow

presidents, but no one had written anything like that—no one except

Bullitt and Freud.

before he pubLished the Wilson biography in , Bullitt removed or

otherwise edited some  passages. Many of these focused on an inge-

nious link the authors had forged between Wilson’s ineptitude and his

Christ complex. Bullitt was a passionate Christian, and Freud, though

he did not share Bullitt’s faith, saw in the gure of Christ hope for a

peaceful future. Although it is impossible to say so with certainty, I

believe—and defend this belief in the later chapters of this book—that

Bullitt thought this discussion would be excessively controversial and

potentially dangerous, not least because it was steeped in shocking claims

about Wilson’s sexuality. Earlier than many other cold warriors, Bullitt

perceived a global war afoot between Communists and Christians, and

he was loath to give the former ammunition against the latter.

But while the published book omitted these key points of analysis,

Bullitt preserved them. He kept the original manuscript all along, per-

haps hoping that the public would one day discover what he and Freud

Introduction 9

truly thought of Woodrow Wilson. That day has come. My book re-

veals for the rst time the content of the original Freud and Bullitt

manuscript—a manuscript everyone thought had disappeared.

As a student, I read the Freud-Bullitt book published in 1967in

French translation. Even that version, though redacted, makes a con-

vincing case that the psychology of leaders matters in the conduct of

political affairs—that personality is very often at the heart of policy.

But I did not take particular interest in Bullitt until the summer of

2014, when I found the 1966 US edition of the book in a New York shop.

While reading, I took special note of the treatment of Colonel House,

Wilson’s adviser, on whom I was conducting research in the context of

his relationship with Clemenceau. Seeking out correspondence be-

tween House and Bullitt, I discovered that Bullitt’s archives were at

Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, the same location as House’s. Now

I was pursuing Bullitt, too. The search took me to archives in Wash-

ington, D.C., Edinburgh, London, and Paris; Louisville, Kentucky;

Staunton, Virginia; and West Branch, Iowa. By the winter of 2015, I had

before me the original manuscript, signed by Freud and Bullitt at the

bottom of each of its chapters. Some scholars were aware of it but pre-

sumed it lost or destroyed. At any rate, no one alive had seen it.

I decided to investigate how the original work was conceived, to

measure the contribution of the father of psychoanalysis and to under-

stand why the published version appeared as it did. I also needed to

check the rigor of the historical details on which the two authors based

their biography of Wilson—in particular, the negotiations surrounding

the Treaty of Versailles, the Senate debate, and Wilson’s role in both. I

quickly concluded that to understand the fate of the Freud-Bullitt

manuscript, I also had to follow Bullitt throughout his diplomatic life,

from 1917, when he joined the State Department, to his death in 1967.

This story begins with the Great War and the political wrangling

surrounding its conclusion, focusing on the psychology of the presi-

dent who saw the United States through the conict and the subse-

quent peace process. From there it illuminates Bullitt’s research into

Wilson’s life and work and his discussions with Freud before turning

to Bullitt’s diplomatic efforts in the Soviet Union and France and his

wartime exploits. Finally, we join Bullitt in his personal Cold War,

which overlapped with his return to the Wilson book.

10 the madman in the white house

This book, then, is a journey across the twentieth century. The

Freud-Bullitt manuscript was born, nourished, delayed, modied, and

cut for reasons having to do with Bullitt’s intimate relationship with

the great international events of the twentieth century and with the

giants of his time: Lenin, Stalin, Roosevelt, Hoover, de Gaulle,

Churchill, Chiang, and of course Wilson. Bullitt worked with them all,

not to mention others less well-known but no less important for having

been forgotten.

Bullitt’s service alongside Wilson decisively inuenced the project

with Freud. The relationships Bullitt developed with others in Wilson’s

sphere facilitated his inquiry into what exactly had happened at the

Paris Peace Conference—how it was that Wilson came to abandon many

of his ideals and then his treaty. Later, Bullitt’s return to a diplomatic

career and his dedication to the ght against Communism help explain

why the manuscript’s publication was further postponed. These factors

also shed light on most of the cuts that Bullitt made before the book

was nally published. Until his death, he feared the potentially devas-

tating effects of the original manuscript.

This manuscript emerged from the anger of its two authors. Freud

and Bullitt were amazed at the discrepancy between the Wilson who

bestrode the earth as a peaceful colossus in 1918 and early 1919 and

the man who gave in so readily once the peace conference began. And

why did Wilson—who understood that the treaty was far from perfect

but thought that it might later be revised—seemingly do everything

possible to kill it in the Senate? There was so much to explain to a

public that, by the 1930s, had come to see Wilson as a heroic victim of

isolationist US politicians and European imperialists.

Bullitt and Freud showed that Wilson was indeed a victim, but a

victim of his own psyche. In assessing their research, I realized that

there was much I had not understood about the Treaty of Versailles and

the Senate ratication process, to say nothing of many of the tragic

events that came after. Wilson bore considerable responsibility for

those tragedies, as becomes clear when one peers behind the obscuring

veil of a mythologized past. Even at a distance of ninety years, Freud

and Bullitt’s call to recognize the signs of pathological personality in

our leaders has lost none of its urgency.

· 11 ·

The American Collapse of

the Treaty of Versailles

when president woodrow wiLson returned to the United States on

July8, 1919, he was convinced that he would easily overcome all do-

mestic opposition to the treaty he had negotiated in Paris. The peace,

signed with Germany in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Ver-

sailles, bore the strong imprint of the United States. Wilson’s Four-

teen Points, the framework for a lasting peace that he had presented to

the US Congress in January1918, had been accepted by the Allies and

by Germany. The restoration of Belgian sovereignty, the return of

Alsace-Lorraine to France, the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire,

the adjustments of borders in the Balkans and Italy—all these territo-

rial dimensions of the Fourteen Points were integral to the Treaty of

Versailles. The Austro-Hungarian Empire also disintegrated and was

forced to recognize the independence of its peoples in accordance

with the principle of self-determination that had become Wilson’s

talisman.

Finally, and above all, the League of Nations, the cornerstone of the

Fourteen Points, was placed at the head of the treaty. Wilson was es-

pecially proud of this contribution, which he considered decisive for

the stability and security of all states. The league would be a forum

for adjudicating international disputes and would provide mecha-

nisms for preventing war. In cases of military aggression, economic

sanctions would be applied immediately, and league members would

be enjoined to collective defense, putting their own forces on the line

to protect any member states that had been attacked.

Getting to this point hadn’t been easy. Hostilities had ceased with

the armistice of November1918, but Wilson aimed for much more: not

just the formal end of the Great War, but an end to all wars, for all time.

The American president had spent the entire spring of 1919 negotiating

daily with the Italian, British, and French prime ministers—Vittorio

12 the madman in the white house

Emanuele Orlando, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau.

Along with Wilson, they comprised the so-called Council of Four or

Big Four. The challenge was to draft a peace treaty that would secure

a lasting peace while satisfying the Big Four’s security, territorial, and

nancial interests and obtaining Germany’s agreement.

Lloyd George and Clemenceau had been especially intractable.

Having come to power in the middle of the war, both promised out-

right victory, not negotiated peace.

During arduous talks, Wilson was

forced to make numerous concessions never contemplated in the Four-

teen Points—concessions that allayed fears in Britain and France

while deepening resentments in Germany. The British Empire would

gain control of the German naval eet and most of Germany’s colo-

nies. For fteen years, France would be granted occupation of the left

bank of the Rhine, the river comprising most of its border with Ger-

many, and ownership of the Saar, a coalmining region straddling the

French-German frontier. Thereafter, the Saar region would choose its

destiny in a referendum. The treaty nally obliged Germany to not only

pay reparations for damage done to civilian populations and property, but

also to assume the cost of military pensions and compensation granted

to soldiers’ families during the war; for that purpose, Germany would

be required to acknowledge its sole responsibility for “all loss and all

damage suffered by Allied governments and associates and their na-

tionals.” But, recognizing that the resources of

the vanquished were

not unlimited, the treaty included some exibility as to how much

Germany would owe. A league commission, presided over by the United

States, would determine the exact cost of the reparations. And Wilson

thought that the league, once established, would compensate for the

treaty’s decits.

By the summer of , when the Senate began debate over ratica-

tion, a majority of Americans favored severe treatment of Germany.

They were also in favor of maintaining alliances with England and

France. The Republicans, Wilson’s opposition in Congress, largely

agreed. Henry Cabot Lodge, the powerful Massachusetts senator who

served as majority leader and chair of the Foreign Relations Committee,

wanted “a League among the Nations with whom the United States had

been associated in the war.”

What gave Lodge and his allies pause,

however, was Article X of the League of Nations Covenant, the clause

The American Collapse of the Treaty of Versailles 13

committing members to defense of each other’s independence and ter-

ritorial integrity. A separate Treaty of Guarantee—also under consid-

eration in the Senate—would require the United States and Britain to

defend France in case of German aggression. Wasn’t that good enough?

When it came to defending all league members from any aggression,

Lodge and many others, including most Senate Republicans and some

Democrats, were circumspect.

After Wilson introduced the treaty in the Senate on July10, Re-

publicans insisted on reading its hundred pages line by line, a process

that took two weeks. Then the Foreign Affairs Committee organized six

weeks of public hearings, at which thirty-three witnesses testied and

presented documents, amendments, and resolutions.

On August 19,

Wilson, sensing that opposition to the treaty might be growing as

time dragged on, invited the Foreign Affairs Committee to a meeting

at the White House. Aside from the transfer to Japan of Shantung, a

German colony in China, the territorial clauses of the Versailles

Treaty provoked little concern among the senators. Most of the dis-

cussion turned on the possibility that the United States might be

pressed into a war by virtue of Article X, which would oblige the

country “to respect and preserve as against external aggression

the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all

Members of the League.” Wilson tried to assuage the senators by as-

suring them that any action would require the “unanimous consent”

of the league’s Executive Council, of which the United States was to

be a permanent member. Furthermore, “Congress” would be “abso-

lutely free to put its own interpretation upon [Article X] in all cases

that call for action.” Wilson described Article X as “the very backbone

of the whole Covenant,” yet he also said that it imposed only “a moral,

not a legal obligation.” It was “binding in conscience only, not in

law”—though, he added, a “moral obligation” was “of course superior

to a legal obligation.”

It was a confusing assertion, not a clarifying

one. The senators’ perplexity only increased when they questioned

Wilson about agreements the Allies—France, Italy, Russia, Britain,

and Japan—had signed in secret before the United States joined the

war. These treaties allocated territorial rewards in case of victory.

Wilson told the senators, implausibly, that he had no knowledge of the

secret treaties.

14 the madman in the white house

To shore up support for the treaty, Wilson went on tour, visiting

sixteen states to address the American people directly. Considered by

many contemporaries to have been the most powerful speaker the

United States had ever produced, Wilson knew that he could court

public opinion far more effectively than he could sway the opposing

senators. He had a talent for turning people around, a power of rea-

soning embellished by his impressive rhetorical skills, which often

united the inspirational tone of Theodore Roosevelt—with its echoes

of the founding era—and the kinds of policy specics that dened the

speeches of Wilson’s predecessor in office, William Howard Taft.

Senate Republicans planned a rejoinder. They would bring in an-

other witness—an insider, a diplomat who had taken part in the Paris

Peace Conference itself and who would speak damningly of what Wilson

had agreed to. Their rst choice was William Bullitt, who had provided

intelligence to Wilson and the others representing the United States at

the conference. A few months earlier, on May17, Bullitt had tendered

his resignation in a letter to President Wilson that became public a

few days later. “I am sorry that you did not ght our ght to the

nish,” Bullitt wrote, “and that you had so little faith in the millions

of men, like myself, in every nation who had faith in you.” Bullitt had

counted himself an idealist of Wilson’s stripe, a liberal who believed

that international law could secure permanent peace. The Treaty of

Versailles achieved nothing of the sort, he concluded. “Our govern-

ment has consented now to deliver the suffering people of the world to

new oppressions, subjections, and dismemberments—a new century

of war.” The renewal of conict was assured by the treaty itself, Bul-

litt wrote. The “unjust decisions of the conference” with regard to

territorial control and reparations were sure to provoke hard feelings

and hostilities. What is more, the resulting conicts would embroil

the United States, thanks to ArticleX. “It is my conviction that the

present League of Nations will be powerless to prevent these wars,”

Bullitt wrote, “and that the United States will be involved in them by

the obligations undertaken in the Covenant of the League.”

The Foreign Relations Committee issued a subpoena for Bullitt’s

testimony, and after a few days of searching, the summons reached him

in the woods near Fort Kent, Maine, where he was staying with his wife

Ernesta. Returning from an errand, she found her husband lying in bed.

The American Collapse of the Treaty of Versailles 15

“Are you ill?” she asked, observing later that “he looked white and

queer.” He handed her the telegram from Senator Lodge. “If I tell what

I should,” he said, “my career will be ruined.”

But when it came time to testify, on September, , Bullitt did

not shrink from the limelight. Indeed, he had long hoped for an oppor-

tunity to speak before the Senate and only suffered briey from cold

feet. Once in the chambers, he swore to tell the truth and said all that

he knew.

He spoke for three hours and provided extensive documen-

tation of his experiences and what he had witnessed. At the end of his

testimony, the journalists in the room rushed out to report on the day’s

events, knowing that the hearing would make the front page of every

newspaper in the United States and would shake the world. Lodge was

exultant. His last witness exceeded his expectations.

Bullitt had re-

vealed key details that would help Lodge revise or derail the Treaty of

Versailles in the Senate.

Bullitt’s Revelations

Bullitt knew the peace conference and the European security situation

better than anyone. After joining the State Department in fall , he

had coordinated what was commonly known as its Enemy Desk.

He would gather information from the Central Powers—Germany

and Austria-Hungary—for Colonel EdwardM. House, Wilson’s main

personal and political adviser, or for the president himself. At the peace

conference, Bullitt served as chief of the Division of Current Intelli-

gence Summaries. Every morning, he scoured sources and delivered his

syntheses personally to Wilson, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, and

the three other commissioners representing the United States at the

conference. Bullitt retained numerous documents and drafts related to

the treaty and the league; it was these that he provided to the senators,

along with his own observations. The Wilson administration had de-

liberately kept senators in the dark, hoping to present them a fait ac-

compli. Bullitt saw to it that they knew the facts.

Among the most important facts of which the senators knew

nothing was Bullitt’s secret mission to Russia and Wilson’s response

to it. A few weeks after Bullitt arrived in Paris for the peace confer-

ence, Colonel House directed him to travel to Moscow and meet with

16 the madman in the white house

Vladimir Lenin. The leader of the Bolsheviks, who had taken power in

October, saw an opportunity to obtain Allied recognition of his

government. This was crucial because, in early , the Bolsheviks

were engaged in a bloody civil war with remnants of the tsar’s regime

and with others jockeying for control in Russia. Bullitt’s task was to

negotiate Russia’s terms of entry into the new world order.

For the Allies, any such talks were enormously contentious, thanks

to the Bolsheviks’ perceived betrayal at Brest-Litovsk in March.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, negotiated directly between Russia and the

Central Powers, had ended the war in the east, freeing Germany to

focus its might on the Western Front. This caused understandable

consternation among the Allies. Upon entering the war, the United

Kingdom, France, and Russia—the so-called Triple Entente—had each

agreed not to conclude a separate peace. Yet the Bolsheviks did not feel

bound by the tsar’s promises.

Following the Allied victory, Clemenceau, alongside British secre-

tary of war Winston Churchill, argued for intervening in the Russian

Civil War in support of anti-Bolshevik forces. But Wilson and Lloyd

George opposed, deeming the idea too risky.

All over Europe and the

United States, the Bolshevik Revolution had politically powerful sup-

porters who approved of a rebellion against what they considered an ex-

ploitative, domineering, and imperialist order that had sent millions of

soldiers and civilians to die for their rulers’ prot. As Wilson saw it, there

was not a Western country that could safely deploy troops to Russia

without creating troubles at home. After Brest-Litovsk, the United States

had agreed to join its allies in deploying troops to the northern Russian

towns of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk to prevent munitions previously

sent to Russia from falling into German hands and to preserve the eco-

nomic blockade against Germany.

But directly supporting the White

Russians in their war against the Reds was a step too far.

Philip Kerr, personal and political secretary to Lloyd George, pro-

vided Bullitt with a list of conditions upon which he thought it would

be possible for the Allied governments to establish normal relations

with the new Russia. Hostilities would have to cease on all fronts of

the Russian Civil War. All Russian parties claiming the authority

of the state must be allowed to remain in control of whatever territo-

ries they occupied at the time, meaning that the Bolsheviks and the

The American Collapse of the Treaty of Versailles 17

White Russians would each keep their lands. The Allies would then

agree to trade relations with the various governments succeeding

Imperial Russia and would reopen supply routes.

Negotiating secretly with the Bolsheviks, on the sidelines of Ver-

sailles, was a bold move. But Bullitt was determined to succeed. On

March, the day he arrived in Moscow, he held face-to-face discussions

with Lenin. For three days after that, Bullitt conducted negotiations with

the Russian minister of foreign affairs, with Lenin nearby. Lenin eventu-

ally agreed to a proposal including all the points that Lloyd George and

Kerr had charged Bullitt with obtaining. And Bullitt won additional

concessions: political opponents of the Bolsheviks would be granted

amnesty, and the tsar’s successor governments would recognize full

responsibility for paying the former empire’s foreign debts. Lenin

gave the Allies until April to sign the agreement.

On March 

Bullitt returned to Paris. That night, excited by Bullitt’s debriefs, Col-

onel House called on Wilson, and the president invited Bullitt for an

appointment the following afternoon.

The morning of the twenty-sixth, before his appointment with

Wilson, Bullitt breakfasted with Lloyd George, Kerr, and General Jan

Smuts, who represented South Africa at the Paris conference. All found

Bullitt’s report of the utmost importance; every indication was that

they found the terms of Lenin’s proposal entirely acceptable. However,

that same morning, the influential editorialist Wickham Steed

denounced the Allies’ apparent readiness to accept the evil of Bolshe-

vism. All the English-speaking attendees at the conference read Steed’s

rebuke in Paris’s Daily Mail; he accused the Allies of accepting the

plague of Communist dictatorship in exchange merely for the prospect

of business opportunities in Russia.

Lloyd George, who was very sen-

sitive to the press, decided he could not openly promote Lenin’s pro-

posal, but he still hoped it would win the day. He authorized Kerr to

tell “Wilson that if he wanted to bring Lenin’s proposal before the

Council of Four, [Wilson] could count upon [Lloyd George’s] support

for consideration of it and probably acceptance of it.”

But before Bullitt could meet with Wilson, the president canceled

the appointment, claiming a headache. The meeting was resched-

uled for the following day, then canceled again. Wilson carried on

refusing to meet with Bullitt until Lenin’s April deadline passed.

18      

The new Russian state therefore never committed to laying down arms

in the civil war and a fortiori was not included in the Treaty of Ver-

sailles or the League of Nations, which required signatories to recog-

nize the borders of all member states. Wilson, it seems, had been con-

vinced that the Bolsheviks would soon lose control of Moscow to the

White Russians, who had wrested a hundred miles from the Bolsheviks

in the previous week. Yet the opposite happened. The Bolsheviks

quickly regained territory and by summer were moving toward victory

across the area previously controlled by White Russians and toward

possible expansion beyond the borders of Russia.

The Senate was therefore forced to confront a grave question: if, in the

near future, Bolshevist armies spread into the rest of Europe, wouldn’t

the United States be at war? Bullitt laid before the senators Wilson’s

own draft of the league covenant, written on the president’s typewriter.

“So far as I know, in the nal form of the League the only proposal of

the president that remains more or less intact is Article X,” Bullitt told

the senators. It was hard to see how Wilson was not committing the

United States to a war that seemed almost certain to arise, and not least

because of the president’s own miscalculations.

Losing the War for Public Opinion

Wilson’s refusal to act on Lenin’s proposal was not the only revelation

of Bullitt’s testimony. Bullitt also told the senators about a conversa-

tion he and Secretary of State Lansing had in Paris, after Bullitt had

submitted his resignation.

According to Bullitt’s notes, Lansing had called parts of the treaty

“thoroughly bad” and the League of Nations “entirely useless.” Lan-

sing thought France and Britain had gotten everything they wanted

into the treaty, at the expense of ensuring dangerously high levels

of resentment not only in Germany but also among colonized

peoples—Irish, Arabs, Indians, and so on—who hoped that the league

and treaty would assure them national self-determination. Instead,

thanks to the Treaty of Versailles and various other treaties negotiated

in Paris, many colonized peoples would remain under domination, if

perhaps that of a new power. Nothing could be done to alter the unjust

· 379 ·

Index

Abraham, Edgar, 289

Acheson, Dean, 235, 236

Addams,

Jane, 34

Algiers, Battle of (1956–1957), 235

Amiens, Battle of (1918), 38

Angier, RoswellP., 55

Antheil, Georges, 54

antisemitism, 59–60, 166, 201

Arnold, Hap, 174

Atlantic Alliance, 2, 80–81

Atlantic Doctrine, 162

atomic bombs, 234, 240, 242

Auchincloss, Gordon, 283, 284

Auriol, Vincent, 217, 227, 230

Axson, Ellen Louise. See Wilson, Ellen

Louise

Axson, Stockton, 29, 93, 281

Baden, Max von, 71, 106, 115

Bailey, ThomasA., 295

Baker, Ray Stannard, 71, 79, 86, 89,

117–120, 265, 280, 286

Bald, Wambly, 131, 132

Balfour, Arthur, 100

Bao Dai, 7, 230, 236, 240–241

Barnes, Albert, 208–209, 216

Baruch, Bernard, 111, 113, 167, 168, 184,

199, 289–290, 293

Beale,

Joseph Henry, 33

Berle, Adolf, 44, 45, 179, 213

Bidault, Georges, 227

Biddle, George, 55, 56, 196

Big Four (Paris Conference leaders),

12, 17,

73, 110, 294

bisexuality, 120–121, 272–273, 276

Bissing, Moritz von, 35–36

Bloch, Marc, 181

Blum, Léon, 160–163, 180, 189, 203–204,

209, 227, 255, 344n85

Bohlen, Charles “Chip,” 144, 150, 255

Boissevain, Eugene, 231

Bolsheviks: 3, 16–18, 41–43, 51, 110;

Bullitt’s disillusionment with, 135

Bonaparte, Marie, 167, 168, 248

Bones, Helen Woodrow, 280–281

Bonnet, Georges, 170, 178–179

Boris, Georges, 196

Brandegee, Frank, 24

Brandeis, Louis, 36, 77

Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918), 16

Brewster, RalphO., 214

Brill, Abraham, 263

Britain, Battle of (1940), 181

Brockdorff-Rantzau, Ulrich von, 45, 112

Brooke, FrancisJ., 89–90

Browder, Earl, 155, 213–214

Brower,

Jessie Bones, 280

Bryan, William Jennings, 100, 284

Bryant, Louise. See Bullitt, Louise Bryant

Bryn Mawr College, Wilson’s professorship

at, 92, 119–120

Budyonny, Semyon, 148–149

Bulgakov, Mikhail, 149, 154–155

Bullitt, Anne Moen: 53–54, 66, 143–146,

149, 156, 162, 222, 245, 259; Freud on

parental relationships of, 64; protection

of Bullitt’s reputation by, 258–259; on

publishing of

Wilson psychoanalysis,

264

Bullitt, Ernesta Drinker: 6, 47, 49, 50, 59;

relationship with Bullitt, 35–36, 52–53,

57–58, 67; on Bullitt’s secret mission

to Russia, 44

Bullitt, Jack, 59

Bullitt, Louise Bryant: 3, 51–54, 57–58,

145–146, 156–157; alcoholism of, 61–66;

therapy session with Freud, 64

Bullitt, Orville, 56, 245–246, 254,

258–259, 266, 335n7

Bullitt, William Christian,

Jr, 4, 37, 59, 73,

214–215; China policy of, 228–229;

Christianity and, 8, 274–275; onCom-

munism, 6–10, 133, 157, 175, 212, 227,

234–235, 239–240; death of, 8, 254–255;

on de Gaulle, 209–210, 217–218, 227,

235–236, 244

; diplomatic career of, 6–7,

142–158, 160–164, 186–190, 197–199,

206–207

; family of, 3, 32–33, 35, 53–54,

57–59; in First French Army, 219–222;

health challenges, 221, 226–227, 241,

247, 254; on Hitler, 7, 162, 178, 274–275;

in Korean War negotiations, 7, 240; on

Lend-Lease Act, 201, 205–206, 223–224;

at London Economic Conference, 137,

380 Index

Bullitt (continued)

140; at Paris Peace Conference, 3, 14–18,

39–46; psychoanalytic experiences of,

55, 57, 131

; secret mission to Russia,

15–17, 42–44; Senate testimony of, 3,

15–20, 24, 30–31, 46, 56; on socialism,

6, 41, 133, 227; on Stalin, 143–144,

211–212, 223–224; as US ambassador

to France, 6, 160–164, 186–190, 197–199;

as US ambassador to Soviet Union, 6,

142–158; Vietnam policy of, 7, 229–230,

240–241; during World War II, 6–7,

178–197, 201–212, 216–222. See also

psychoanalysis of

Woodrow Wilson

—relationships: with Franklin Roosevelt,

6–7, 135, 151–152, 164, 175, 191–199, 205;

with Freud, 4–6, 56–58, 60, 74; with

Nixon, 7–8, 237, 239–243, 254, 255

—writings: Gobi, 64–65; The Great Globe

Itself, 223–224, 228, 234; It’s Not Done,

3, 54–55, 335n7; journalistic career of,

33–34, 36; Keynes’s works reviewed

by, 48; speeches written for Franklin

Roosevelt, 232–233; The Tragedy of

Woodrow Wilson, 60–61; “They Died

Young,” 231–232; “The World from

Rome,” 218

Cachin, Marcel, 41, 42

Cambon, Paul, 109

Castle, William, 216, 265

castration anxiety (psychoanalytics

concept), 121, 267, 269

Cavell, Edith, 101

Chamberlain, Neville, 160, 169–171, 178

Chambers, Whittaker, 237–238

Chambrun, René de, 181–184, 190

Chamson, André, 222

Charnodskaya, Irena, 150

Chateau-Thierry, Battle of (1918), 268

Chautemps, Camille, 169, 180, 188

Chiang Kai-shek, 7, 152–153, 228–229, 231,

235, 239, 241

China: 7, 213, 224, 228–231, 237, 239;

Bullitt’s policy approach toward,

228–229; US relations with, 153, 201.