Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [82]
Two men acutely afflicted by this anger and resentment were Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt. Their collaboration seems at first sight wildly improbable: the old famed weary European, a genius, one of the rare authentic pathfinders of all time, and the young American, a person of courage, independence, and good will but volatile and “adrenal” (to use the word of a shrewd observer), a picaresque adventurer in politics, a Tom Jones of diplomacy. This seemingly bizarre combination has produced a fascinating but distorted book. As an analysis of the deep mainsprings of motivation in one of the most complex and puzzling public characters who ever lived, it is sharply illuminating and, with certain reservations, convincing; it makes the contradictions in Wilson’s behavior fall into place with an almost audible click. But as an over-all estimate of the whole man it is lamentable, and as an interpretation of events it falls to pieces. It is good psychology but bad history; bad because it is invalid, dangerous because it misleads us as to where the responsibility lies.
Past circumstances have a direct bearing on content. As a twenty-eight-year-old specialist for the State Department on Eastern European affairs, Bullitt, previously a participant in the Ford Peace Ship, went with the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 in the same mood expressed by his contemporary and colleague Harold Nicolson on the British delegation: “We were preparing not Peace only, but Eternal Peace. There was about us the halo of some divine mission.… We were bent on doing great, permanent noble things.” For Bullitt the opportunity came when he was sent to Russia to ascertain terms of settlement with the Bolshevik regime, which Wilson acknowledged to be “the acid test of good will.” Accompanied by Lincoln Steffens and sharing his conclusion, “I have seen the future and it works,” Bullitt returned with Lenin’s offer of incredibly favorable peace terms. His reception was a stunning blow.
Because the treaty with all its faults, after agonizing delay, was at that moment on the edge of conclusion and the Bolshevik problem seethed with cause for dissension, Wilson, who habitually evaded reality by refusing to look at it, refused to receive Bullitt, to read his report or hear what he had to say. Although it meant inviting attack as pro-German and a Bolshevik, Bullitt resigned in a public letter to the President stating that “effective labor for a new world order” was no longer possible as a servant of his government. He then left for the Riviera telling reporters he intended “to lie on the beach and watch the world go to hell.” Subsequently called to testify before the Senate, he supplied Senator Lodge with potent material to aid in defeating American ratification, thus earning denunciation as a traitor to his party and finishing off, as it seemed, his public career. True, Bullitt had a private income, but not everyone who can afford the courage of conviction exercises it.
Freud, too, had had high hopes of Wilson which had turned sour. It was “one of those numerous cases” in his life, according to his biographer Dr. Ernest Jones, where his “optimism and credulity” led to inevitable disappointment and resentment. The experience confirmed Freud’s existing displeasure with America, a country which he regarded as a “gigantic mistake.” “Your Woodrow Wilson,” he told Max Eastman in 1926, “was the silliest fool of the century, if not of all centuries. And he was probably one