Free When the Cheering Stopped by Gene; Smith Page A

their chief. He became obsessed by the idea that the French servants—the waiters, the porters, the cleaning women—everyone—were all spies who spoke perfect English and reported to their government every word he said. It was useless to point out that three quarters of them knew no more than a few words of English, for he insisted it was not so. He locked all his documents in a safe he kept near him.
    At the same time he began to worry about the furnishings of the Paris house in which he was staying. He wanted everything itemized; he said things were being stolen. “Coming from the President,” Ike Hoover wrote, “these were very funny things, and we could but surmise that something queer was happening in his mind.” He began to check very carefully on the use of the delegation’s automobiles, ordering they be used only for strictly official trips even though, before, he had urged the cooped-up staff to go for relaxing drives and trips. Suddenly, also, he decided the furniture in a room was wrongly arranged and spent half an hour with Grayson moving the couches and tables back and forth. And quite as suddenly he turned on Colonel House. House suggested the President spare himself some of his labors by making better use of aides instead of trying to carry the load alone; it meant House was trying to plant spies by his side and subvert him.
    His tone and his attitude toward the Europeans and his own Americans alike bespoke a disturbing secretiveness and dourness. He spoke to the former in what they considered an infuriating fashion: they thought him the schoolmaster criticizing errant boys all over again, and they suspected his motives. “I never knew anyone totalk more like Jesus Christ and act more like Lloyd George,” said Clemenceau. The Americans he largely ignored. He dismissed the views of Secretary of State Robert Lansing and lectured his experts on their own fields of expertise. He was extremely impatient in his dealings with people, kicking his legs in irritation and walking fretfully about the room. The criticisms of the French press angered him and he threatened to force the transfer of the entire business to another country. There was a petulance in the way he labored over his typewriter on his reports, as if to indicate no secretary could do it right. His work in a way was brilliant, for he was able to compress scores and hundreds of difficult problems in his mind and come up with answers to them—perhaps no one else in the world could have done it—but that he was doing it more and more by himself exposed him to the great dangers of forgetful mistakes.
    Through it all, though—the irritability and ill-health which made him if not cool to his wife (for he could never be cool to her), then unresponsive to her cheeriness; through the high-handedness to his colleagues—he clung to one great central idea: the establishment of a League of Nations which would be a forum for the dispensation of justice for all men and wipe out the threat of war forever. If the peace treaty possessed flaws—and who could say it would not?—then the League would exist to remedy those flaws. As a boy in a barn near his minister-father’s church he had composed a set of rules by which his boys’ club would be governed, and as a man he had for decades studied the problems of how men can live with one another within the framework of laws. Now as a President and most powerful man in the world he worked for a League of laws and intelligence to deal with whole nations standing before a bar of international justice.
    In this he never wavered. He talked about it on Memorial Day of 1919, on May 30, when he went to the American Army graveyard at Suresnes to speak over the dead boys in their freshly dug graves. He attempted in that speech to say what it was they died for and to give meaning to those deaths, and the journalist Ray Stannard Baker, listening, thought to himself it