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instructions,” Wilson told him, “because I feel that you will know what to do.” House agreed with all his heart that Wilson’s new diplomacy was the best hope for the world. He thought the League of Nations a wonderful idea. He also thought he could do better than Wilson in achieving their common goals. Where the president was too idealistic, too dogmatic, he, House, was a fixer, with a nod here, a shrug there, a slight change of emphasis, a promise first to this one and then that, smoothing over differences and making things work. He had not really wanted Wilson to come to the Peace Conference. In his diary, during the next months, the loyal lieutenant was to list Wilson’s mistakes methodically: his outbursts of temper, his inconsistencies, his clumsiness in negotiations and his “one-track” mind.5

Clemenceau liked House enormously, partly because he was amused by him, but also because he seemed to understand France’s concerns so well. “I can get on with you,” Clemenceau told him, “you are practical. I understand you but talking to Wilson is something like talking to Jesus Christ!” Lloyd George was cooler: House “saw more clearly than most men—or even women—to the bottom of the shallow waters which are to be found here and there in the greatest of oceans and of men.” A charming man, in Lloyd George’s opinion, but rather limited—“essentially a salesman and not a producer.” House would have been a good ambassador, but never a foreign minister. “It is perhaps to his credit,” Lloyd George concluded kindly, “that he was not nearly as cunning as he thought he was.” House could not bear Lloyd George, “a mischief maker who changes his mind like a weather-cock. He has no profound knowledge of any of the questions with which he is dealing.” But Lloyd George knew how to keep his eye on the ends. House, who thought every disagreement could be worked out, did not. “He is a marvellous conciliator,” was Baker’s opinion, “but with the faults of his virtue for he conciliates over . . . minor disagreements into the solid flesh of principle.” House had already done this during the armistice discussions.6

The Great War had begun with a series of mistakes and it ended in confusion. The Allies (and let us include their Associate the United States in the term) were not expecting victory when it came. Austria-Hungary was visibly collapsing in the summer of 1918, but Germany still looked strong. Allied leaders planned for at least another year of war. By the end of October, however, Germany’s allies were falling away and suing for armistices, the German army was streaming back toward its own borders and Germany itself was shaking with revolutionary outbursts. The armistice with Germany, the most important and ultimately the most controversial of all, was made in a three-cornered negotiation between the new German government in Berlin, the Allied Supreme War Council in Paris and Wilson in Washington. House, as Wilson’s personal representative, was the key link among them. The Germans, calculating that their best chance for moderate peace terms was to throw themselves on Wilson’s mercy, asked for an armistice based on the Fourteen Points. Wilson, who was eager to push his somewhat reluctant European allies to accept his principles, agreed in a series of public notes.

The Europeans found this irritating. Furthermore, they had never been prepared to accept the Fourteen Points without modification. The French wanted to make sure that they received compensation for the enormous damage done to their country by the German invasion. The British could not agree to the point about freedom of the seas, for that would prevent them from using the naval blockade as a weapon against their enemies. In a final series of discussions in Paris, House agreed to the Allied reservations, and so the Fourteen Points were modified to allow for what later came to be called reparations from Germany and for discussions on freedom of the seas at the Peace Conference itself. In addition, the military terms of the armistice, which called for not just the evacuation of French