Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [29]
Each of the Big Three at the Peace Conference brought something of his own country to the negotiations: Wilson the United States’ benevolence, a confident assurance that the American way was the best, and an uneasy suspicion that the Europeans might fail to see this; Clemenceau France’s profound patriotism, its relief at the victory and its perpetual apprehension of a revived Germany; and Lloyd George Britain’s vast web of colonies and its mighty navy. Each man represented great interests, but each was also an individual. Their failings and their strengths, their fatigue and their illnesses, their likes and dislikes were also to shape the peace settlements. From January to the end of June, except for the gap between mid-February and mid-March when Wilson was back in the United States and Lloyd George in Britain, the three met daily, often morning and afternoon. At first they were accompanied by their foreign ministers and advisers, but after March they met privately, with only a secretary or two or an occasional expert. The intensity of these face-to-face meetings forced them to get to know each other, to like each other and to be irritated by each other.
Lloyd George was the youngest of the three, a cheerful rosy-faced man with startling blue eyes and a shock of white hair. (“Hullo!” a little girl once asked him. “Are you Charlie Chaplin?”) He was only two when the American Civil War—something Wilson remembered clearly—ended. When a twenty-year-old Clemenceau was witnessing the birth of the new Germany in the aftermath of France’s defeat by Prussia, Lloyd George was still in primary school. He was not only younger; he was also fitter and more resilient. Wilson worried himself sick trying to live up to his own principles, and Clemenceau lay awake at nights going over and over France’s needs. Lloyd George thrived on challenges and crises. As Lord Robert Cecil, an austere Conservative who never entirely approved of him, said with reluctant admiration, “Whatever was going on at the Conference, however hard at work and harried by the gravest responsibilities of his position, Mr. Lloyd George was certain to be at the top of his form—full of chaff intermingled with shrewd though never ill-natured comments on those with whom he was working.”2
Lloyd George had known tragedy with the death of a much-loved daughter, as well as moments of considerable strain when personal scandals and political controversies had threatened to ruin his career. He had worked under enormous pressure during the previous four years, first as minister of munitions and then as war minister. At the end of 1916, he had taken on the burden of the prime ministership, at the head of a coalition government, when it looked as though the Allies were finished. Like Clemenceau in France, he had held the country together and led it to victory. Now, in 1919, he was fresh from a triumphant election but led an uneasy coalition. He was a Liberal; his supporters and key cabinet members were predominantly Conservative. Although he had a solid partnership with the Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, he had to watch his back. His displaced rival, the former Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith, sat brooding in his tent, ready to pounce on any slip. Many of the Conservatives remembered his radical past as the scourge of privilege and rank, and as they had with their own leader Disraeli, they wondered if he were not too clever, too quick, too foreign. He also faced formidable enemies in the press. The press baron Lord Northcliffe, who had chosen his title because it had the same initial letter as Napoleon, was moving rapidly from megalomania to paranoia, perhaps an early sign of the tertiary syphilis that