The Illusion of Victory (26 page)

While military disasters disturbed General Pershing’s sleep, the political news that arrived in the White House from Europe gave Woodrow Wilson nightmares. The British blunder of urging General Lavr Kornilov to march on Petrograd had produced a political swing to the far left in the Russian capital. Kornilov’s army had vanished when the revolutionary government’s commissar of the northern front ordered his soldiers not to obey the reactionary general. On November 7–8, 1917 (October 26 in the Russian calendar), the most radical party on the left, the Bolsheviks, seized power. In March 1917, when the czar abdicated, they had barely numbered 25,000 supporters in all of Russia. By November they only had 115,000 in their ranks. But they were led by a revolutionary genius named Vladimir Ilych Lenin, who was backed by a man of equal genius, Leon Trotsky—and they had access to large amounts of German money. The Germans had smuggled Lenin into Russia from his exile in Switzerland for the express purpose of overthrowing the czarist government. With Berlin’s help, by August 1917 the Bolsheviks were publishing seventeen daily newspapers with a total circulation of 320,000 copies.
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American reaction to the Bolshevik takeover was a mixture of bewilderment and concern about Russia’s ability to stay in the war. Although Wilson had hailed the March revolution and sent a mission to Russia in the summer of 1917 with a promise of aid, his spokesmen made it clear that if the Russians stopped fighting the Germans, the dollars would instantly cease coming. Wilson had taken an equally hard line against the Socialists’ Stockholm Peace Conference, joining the Allies in refusing to issue passports to let homegrown Socialists attend it.

With that strategy for background, it is not hard to see why the first foreign policy statement of Russia’s new rulers stunned and dismayed the Americans. Lenin, with the approval of a rump parliament called the Congress of Soviets, broadcast to the world a “Decree of Peace,” calling on “all belligerent peoples and their governments” to join in “the immediate opening of negotiations for a just and democratic peace.” Lenin said this just peace would be built on three principles: no annexations (of foreign territory), self-determination for all foreign nationalities within current empires, and no indemnities.
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Blown to smithereens was Russia’s solemn 1914 promise to its Entente partners not to make a separate peace. Worse was the way the Bolshevik decree encouraged people everywhere to take the search for peace into their own hands, if their governments proved recalcitrant. It was also evident that no annexations and self-determination meant the abolition of colonies everywhere—an idea that caused instant outrage in London and Paris. The world was getting its first glimpse of what the Bolsheviks would soon call demonstrative diplomacy—aimed at embarrassing other nations. Lenin and his circle were certain that this gambit would produce either an instantaneous peace or an explosion of revolutionary warfare everywhere. At this point in their journey to absolute power, they were true believers in the puissance of their own rhetoric.
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On November 12, 1917, Woodrow Wilson made a speech to the American Federation of Labor convention in Buffalo, New York. When he mentioned the Russian Decree of Peace, he made it clear that he had no intention of sharing the ideological leadership of the war with the Bolsheviks. He called them fatuous dreamers and lumped them with American “pacifists,” whom the U.S. government was busily silencing, putting in jail, or both.“What I am opposed to is not the feeling of the pacifists, but their stupidity,” he said.“My heart is with them but my mind has a contempt for them.” Proof of the Russians’ low IQs, Wilson thought, was their readiness to negotiate peace with the present German government. That idea violated the first article of faith in Wilson’s latest creed.
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Back in the White House, early reports from Russia encouraged the president to think that the leader of the provisional government, Alexander Kerensky, would soon regain power. In a letter to a congressman, Wilson expressed confidence that the Russian Revolution, like the French Revolution of 1789, would have to go through some “deep waters,” but he was sure the Russians would reach “firm land” on the other side. The president seemed to have forgotten that by the time the French reached firm land, they had killed huge numbers of people in France and neighboring countries and wound up with a dictator named Napoleon Bonaparte.
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Leon Trotsky, now in charge of the Russian Foreign Office, had recently spent ten weeks working as a journalist in New York and considered himself an authority on the United States. In a widely reported speech, he said the Americans had decided to intervene in the war “under the influence . . . of the American stock exchange.” He went on to describe how much money the Americans were making from the war and suggested they were primarily interested in seeing the other belligerents weaken each other until there was a “hegemony of American capital.” Much of this statement would have won emphatic approval from Senators George Norris and Robert La Follette. We can be certain, however, that it did not enthuse Woodrow Wilson.
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A few days later, Trotsky began exhuming from the Russian diplomatic archives copies of the secret treaties the Allies had made to divide up the spoils of victory. All the sordid deals cut by the supposed defenders of small nations and universal democracy were suddenly revealed to shocked Americans. No one was more dismayed than Woodrow Wilson to have this dirty linen exposed and his sacred struggle for the “right” held up to ridicule.
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By coincidence, representatives from the Allies, including Wilson’s confidential envoy, Colonel House, were meeting in Paris to try to coordinate their disconnected and in some cases sagging war efforts. House decided the only way to retain a patina of idealism for the war was a frontal assault on the secret treaties. He called for their repudiation. The French and the Italians reacted with outrage and huffily insisted a deal was a deal, whether it was secret or public. The British gave the colonel support so tepid it amounted to another repudiation. All the conferees could agree on was a lame statement that each nation would communicate with Petrograd in its own way and express a willingness to “reconsider” their war aims as soon as Russia had a “stable government.” that gave the backs of their hands to the Bolsheviks, who obviously did not measure up to the Allied definition of stability.
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The Allied disarray gave the Germans a chance to play a trump card. On December 2, 1917, they sent their foreign minister before the Reichstag to orate on the moderation of Germany’s war aims and its readiness for a compromise peace. The Allies, exposed by the secret treaties as “demanding victory and nothing but victory,” were driven by narrow, greedy motives. The foreign minister added that he was ready to discuss with the Bolsheviks a “reorganization of affairs in the east”—code words for a peace conference. The Russians accepted the offer and delegates began talking at German army headquarters in Brest-Litovsk on the Russian-Polish border.
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This démarche left the international ideological stage swept bare of players—except for Woodrow Wilson. Colonel House clearly recognized this and urged his alter ego not to make “any statement concerning foreign affairs until I can see you.” The colonel obviously thought Philip Dru needed all the help he could get.
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In the midst of this diplomatic turmoil, on November 2, 1917, the British cabinet, over the signature of Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, issued a statement that looms large in retrospect but seemed a minor matter to most of the world at the time. The Balfour Declaration, embodied in a letter that the foreign secretary wrote to Lord Rothschild, the unofficial leader of the Jewish community in England, said that His Majesty’s government “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object; it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
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This epochal document was created by a complex interplay between the dynamics of the war and personal diplomacy by Jews who had become converts to Zionism, a vision of a regained Jewish homeland articulated by the late-nineteenth-century poet and playwright Theodore Herzl. In England one of Zionism’s leading exponents was the gifted chemist Chaim Weizmann, who had intermittently conferred with Balfour and Lloyd George during the preceding decade. Both these powerful politicians developed an attachment to the idea, thanks to their noncomformist religious past. But few if any statesmen allow religious sentiment to guide their policies. The driving force behind the decision to issue the statement at the close of the disastrous year 1917 was visible in a coded telegram that Balfour sent to Sir William Wiseman, the director of British intelligence in the United States and a confidant of Colonel House.

Wiseman swiftly passed this telegram to House, who soon handed it toWilson. Seven days later, the colonel got the following note from the president.

My dear House:

I find in my pocket the memorandum you gave me about the Zionist movement. I am afraid I did not say to you that I concurred in the formula suggested from the other side. I do, and would be obliged if you would let them know it.
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Clearly, the matter was not a major concern, if the president put the memorandum in his pocket and forgot about it. Palestine and the entire Middle East was British turf, in which Wilson and House had little interest.

What interest they had was overlaid by caution. On October 16, Wiseman cabled London, reporting that “Brussa [House] put formula before Adramyti [Wilson], who approves it, but asks that no mention of his approval shall be made when H.M. G. [His Majesty’s Government] makes formula public, as he has arranged that American Jews shall then ask him for his approval which he will give publicly here.”
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Onrushing events left little or no time to devote much thought to the Middle East. The United States never even bothered to declare war on Turkey. The European drama absorbed the attention of U.S. politicians. On the heels of the Bolshevik call for an early peace and the diplomatic contretemps over the secret treaties came a startling appeal for an end to the war from one of England’s leading conservatives. The Marquis of Lansdowne, former foreign secretary and viceroy of India, published a letter in the
London Telegraph,
saying the murderous conflict had already lasted too long. The marquis had lost two sons in the struggle. Calmly, magisterially, he repudiated the economic jealousy and newspaper-manufactured hatred of Germany, which he blamed for drawing England into the war. Lansdowne urged a peace that would neither threaten Germany with annihilation nor deny its rightful place as the dominant industrial nation of Europe. He added to these ideas a proposal for an international organization that would preserve such a peace.

The British leader clearly differed with Wilson and with his own government about their refusal to negotiate with the supposedly autocratic German government. He did not belabor the point. But he was obviously calling for a peace without victory. German-hating Ambassador Walter Hines Page reported that Lansdowne was supported only by “pacifists and semi-pacifists and a war-weary minority.” But the nobleman’s appeal put new pressure on Woodrow Wilson to find an answer to these calls for peace and somehow restore the idealistic glow in which his rhetoric had coated the war on April 2, 1917.
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The president was scheduled to go before the second session of the Sixty-Fifth Congress on December 4 to give his state-of-the-union address. He realized that House’s advice to remain silent on foreign policy was patently impossible. Wilson had to say something, as he pointed out to his alter ego in a terse cable: “SORRY IMPOSSIBLE TO OMIT FOREIGN AFFAIRS FROM ADDRESS TO CONGRESS. RETICENCE ON MY PART AT THIS JUNCTUREWOULD BE MISUNDERSTOOD AND RESENTED AND DO MUCH HARM.”
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The
New York Times
reported the president looked fresh and determined, and remarked on his colorful, new tie. He struck his main theme hard and early.“Let there be no misunderstanding. Our present and immediate task is to win the war and nothing shall turn us aside from it until it is accomplished. ” There could be no negotiations, no compromise with “German autocracy.” As for principles and goals, Wilson endorsed the idea of “no annexations, no indemnities.” They were good principles, but they had been used “by the masters of German intrigue to lead the Russian people astray.” when the war was won,“a right use” will be made of these principles. Peace would be based on “generosity and justice, to the exclusion of all selfish claims to advantage, even on the part of the victors. . . . There must be no covenants of selfishness and compromise.”