Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [17]
2
First Impressions
THE AFTERNOON of his arrival in Paris, Wilson had a reunion with his most trusted adviser. Colonel Edward House did not look like the rich Texan he was. Small, pale, self-effacing and frail, he often sat with a blanket over his knees because he could not bear the cold. Just as the Peace Conference was starting, he came down with flu and nearly died. House spoke in a soft, gentle voice, working his small delicate hands, said an observer, as though he were holding some object in them. He invariably sounded calm, reasonable and cheerful.1 People often thought of one of the great French cardinals of the past, of Mazarin perhaps.
He was not really a colonel; that was only an honorary title. He had never fought in a war but he knew much about conflict: the Texas of his childhood was a world where men brought out their guns at the first hint of an insult. House was riding and shooting by the time he was three. One brother had half his face shot off in a childish gunfight; another died falling off a trapeze. Then House too had an accident when he fell from a rope and hit his head. He never fully recovered. Since he could no longer dominate others physically, he learned to do so psychologically. “I used to like to set boys at each other,” he told a biographer, “to see what they would do, and then try to bring them around again.” 2
He became a master at understanding men. Almost everyone who met him found him immediately sympathetic and friendly. “An intimate man,” said the son of one of his enemies, “even when he was cutting your throat.” House loved power and politics, especially when he could operate behind the scenes. In Paris, Baker called him, only half in admiration, “the small knot hole through which must pass many great events.” He rarely gave interviews and almost never took official appointments. This, of course, made him the object of intense speculation. He merely wanted, he often said, to be useful. In his diary, though, House himself carefully noted the powerful and importunate who lined up to see him. He also faithfully recorded every compliment, no matter how fulsome.3
He was a Democrat, like most Southerners of his race, but on the liberal, progressive side of the party. When Wilson moved into politics, House, already a figure in Texas politics, recognized someone he could work with. The two men met for the first time in 1911, as Wilson was preparing to run for president. “Almost from the first our association was intimate,” House remembered years later, when the friendship had broken down irrevocably, “almost from the first, our minds vibrated in unison.” He gave Wilson the unstinting affection and loyalty he required, and Wilson gave him power. When his first wife died, Wilson became even more dependent on House. “You are the only person in the world with whom I can discuss everything,” he wrote in 1915. “There are some I can tell one thing and others another, but you are the only one to whom I can make an entire clearance of mind.” When the second Mrs. Wilson appeared on the scene, she watched House carefully, her eyes sharpened with jealousy.4
When the war broke out, Wilson sent House off to the capitals of Europe in fruitless attempts to stop the fighting; as the war came to an end, he hastily dispatched him to Paris to negotiate the armistice terms. “I have not given you any