Hollywood (37 page)

Wilson looked singularly miserable; and Blaise heard him say to Creel, “Don’t let them use their flashes. They hurt my eyes.”

But Creel could no longer control the situation. The principals stood in a row, the President slightly apart and averted from the cameras. The lights provided a terrible lightning glare. Wilson winced and blinked his eyes. “We will all look,” he said to Lloyd George, “as though we were laid out in a morgue.”

There were two boat trains to Brest that evening. The first contained Wilson’s staff and outriders, among them Blaise, and the second was for the presidential party. The troops that lined the railroad siding presented arms as the first train departed, twenty minutes before that of the President. Blaise shared a compartment with the Roosevelts and Eleanor’s youthful uncle by marriage, David Gray. Eleanor had come over to visit hospitals and be useful, while Franklin had just come from Brussels and Coblenz and the Rhineland, where he had collected a great many souvenirs, including a spiked German helmet that he kept beside him on the seat.

Dutifully, the Roosevelts waved at the crowd, who knew them not.
Noblesse
—or
politique—oblige
, thought Blaise: After all, Eleanor was the late President’s niece. Now she quizzed Blaise about Wilson’s speech. She was unusually pale, which, considering her normal lack of color, made her seem as white and insubstantial as a cloud, admittedly a large swollen cloud. She
had been ill with pleurisy. “So we shall have a league of nations,” Blaise concluded.

“I hope so,” she said.

Although Franklin had been talking to David Gray, he had also been listening at the same time. He interrupted himself with, “Public opinion’s with the President now. But let’s hope he can get this through the Senate fast. Before the Republicans whip up the opposition …”

“Mother says … Mrs. James, that is, Mrs. Roosevelt,” Eleanor giggled nervously, “that all of her set think Mr. Wilson is a Bolshevik, and she has stopped seeing the Whitelaw Reids because of that. Mother is very loyal.”

“I wish all the Democratic senators were.” Franklin frowned. “So many of them are paid for by the Germans or in so deep with the Irish that they forget that if it weren’t for Wilson they wouldn’t have been elected in the first place.”

This was exaggerated, thought Blaise. The President’s opposition within his party was the party’s true core: the big-city bosses with their obedient immigrant masses and the populist Bryanites like Burden Day. As the party of the bankers and great merchants, the Republicans had always been the internationalists, and they looked to the world outside America for trade and profit; it was no accident that to the extent that the League was any one person’s idea, credit must be given to the former Republican president Taft or to Elihu Root or even to the bellicose Theodore Rex, who had, when it suited him, come out for some such organization.

Eleanor was anxious about the American soldiers in Paris. “The stories one hears!” There was now a trace of color in her cheeks. “If their mothers only knew of the dangers.”

“Just as well they don’t.” Franklin exchanged a rapid conspiratorial look with Blaise—the masculine lodge must now close its shutters.

“I am told,” said David Gray sadly, “our officers are the worst. While the private soldiers ask for directions to Napoleon’s Tomb, the officers ask for Maxim’s.”

“Exactly what I’ve heard!” The vein in Eleanor’s temple throbbed. “Poor Franklin,” as Alice Longworth would say, “he has Eleanor, so noble.” Although Blaise quite liked Eleanor, he could not imagine being married to so much energy and high-mindedness. “Well, they’ll soon be home,” she said. “Anyway, I hope it’s not true, is it?” she was suddenly tentative, “that the French provide their troops with … with houses of assignation?” Eleanor
was pale pink now, the most headway that the blood could make through that thick alabaster-gray skin.

Franklin nodded gravely. “Horrifying,” he intoned, “but true. I was in Newton Baker’s office when General March told him what the French had done, and Baker said, ‘Don’t tell the President or he’ll stop the war.’ ”

“Good grounds,” said Eleanor, grimly, and ignored the laughter of the three men.

Blaise lay on a deck chair beside David R. Francis, American ambassador to Russia; each was heavily swathed in woolen army blankets like cocoons from which each would, presently, emerge as a stately moth. The February sea had been too much for most of the passengers of the
George Washington
—except Blaise, who enjoyed the ship’s shuddering encounters with gray-black waves, like boulders thrown up from the deep.

Ambassador Francis was also equal to the sea’s turmoil. But he was less equal, he confessed, to the Bolsheviks. “At the beginning, we really did think they were an improvement.” A spray of salt water caused him to wince; he dried his face with the corner of a blanket.

“I know.” Blaise did not remind the Ambassador of his embarrassing comparison of Lenin with Washington and the Czar with George III.

“But how did it all come apart?”

“The French. The English. Clemenceau.” Francis shook his head. “They want Russia destroyed, Russia in any form. I’m convinced it’s not just Bolshevism.”

“No more German Empire, no more Austro-Hungarian Empire, no more Russian Empire … one sees their point. England rules the waves, and France the continent.”

Francis nodded. “But except for Austria, the empires are still where they were. Only the emperors are gone.”

“There will be trouble?”

“There is trouble. Our boys are fighting right now in northern Russia, with the Allies, against the Bolsheviks.”

“How many American troops?”

“Over five thousand.” Francis stared unhappily at the pewter-dull western sky. Then a wave broke over the starboard bow, and the rubber of the sailors’ mackintoshes shone like seals. “Thanks to the War Department, instead of
reporting to me in Petrograd, they went straight onto Archangel and reported to the British commander. Now they’re icebound, and the railroad to Murmansk is out, and then when the thaw starts, how do we get them out of there?”

“We fight our way out, according to young Mr. Churchill. He claims there are a half-million anti-Red troops, eager to overthrow the Communist government, if only we’d just stay and help them.”

“It would be nice,” said Francis, sourly, “if
he
were to lead them. I met with him and the President just before we left. He was full of …” The ambassador, a former governor of Missouri, controlled himself.

“What did the President say?”

“He listened, mostly. Finally, he told Churchill how we are irreversibly—his word—committed to getting our troops out when the weather lets up. Privately, Lloyd George thinks Churchill’s one precious fool and that if we—the Allies—were to get into a full-scale war with the Bolsheviks so as to divide up Russia between us—Clemenceau’s dream—the English people would all go Communist during the war.”

Blaise was grimly amused. “At least Lloyd George understands the nature of tyranny in his own country.”

Francis did not hear—or did not choose to acknowledge—this heresy: the winners were all democracies; thus insuring safety for themselves and everyone else from despots and levellers. “Anyway, we’ll be out of Archangel by summer.”

“But what about Siberia? I’m told that we have eighty-five hundred troops there.”

Francis grinned. “Another War Department error. We told the Japanese that we’d send in seven thousand. So the War Department went and added another thousand, which gave the Japanese an opportunity to break the agreement, and send in tens of thousands of troops to keep
us
from annexing Siberia.”

“Are we?”

“Going to annex? I don’t see how. We’re too far away and the Japanese are too close, and Admiral Kolchak is still fighting the Bolsheviks, and if he wins, Russia splits in two. It’s a terrible mess for everybody.”

Blaise presented himself at the door to Wilson’s cabin just as the number of bells that meant three o’clock at sea were struck. Admiral Grayson ushered Blaise into a sizeable office with a large mahogany desk on which were placed two telephones connected, Blaise wondered, to what?

The President was dressed as if he were about to go golfing. The sea air had brought color to his face; the pince-nez shone in the light from the overhead lamp. “Mr. Sanford. How good of you to come.” It was part of Wilson’s charm to act as if each of his visitors had made an extraordinary personal sacrifice to call upon him, no doubt a necessary charm when dealing with wealthy Princeton alumni or difficult parents.

Blaise took the indicated chair at Wilson’s right. Through the porthole opposite, he could see Marine guards patrolling; could hear their boots strike, rhythmically, the deck. Wilson noticed Blaise’s glance.

“Mrs. Wilson can’t bear the sound or the thought of those boys marching back and forth all day. But I find it soothing.” The ship suddenly pitched; a telephone began to slide along the desk. The President steadied it.

“Is that your line to the Vice President?”

“The Vice President?” Wilson looked puzzled; then he laughed. “Yes, the Vice President. Well, we do have a wireless link to the War Department and they connect with the White House. So I suppose the Vice President is somewhere—out there—on the other end. Anyway, thanks to the wireless, I’m as much in touch with public affairs here as I was in Paris or even Washington.” Wilson sounded defensive. Many of his own supporters were appalled that a president should leave the country for even a day, much less two months.

“You’ll come back, then?”

“May I speak off the record?”

“By all means, Mr. President.” Over the years, Wilson had come to trust Blaise if only because the
Tribune
was generally favorable to his Administration while the
Post
was unreliable, and the
Times
, now manipulated by Hearst through Brisbane, hostile. Also, Blaise had never betrayed a confidence on those rare occasions when he had been in receipt of one.

“I don’t see how I can abandon the Peace Conference. Colonel House is superb, but he’s not well. The French …” Even off the record, Wilson could not trust himself. “Clemenceau …” he began; and let it go at that. “So much can be undone if I’m not there.”

“But you have your covenant …”

“Right here,” said Wilson and opened his coat so that Blaise could see the famous document folded in his pocket.

“Over my heart. Though Edith maintains it’s my spleen. But I shall not be splenetic, no matter how keen the fight in the Senate.”

“Why should there be any fight at all?”

“
They
will have it. So
I
must have it.” The underslung jaw set.

“But they … the Republicans … invented the idea, if anyone can be said to have thought of it first.”

“And they would rather kill it than see us get the credit for this astonishing charter. Oh, there’ll be a fight all right. But then I’ve never found that one could get anything worthwhile without a struggle.” Thus spoke the Scottish clansman on the eve of a border war.

“Surely all western civilization is built on compromise.” Blaise expected to get a rise from the President; and did.

Wilson looked at him sharply, even inquisitorially. “You’ve been talking to Colonel House.”

Blaise nodded. “I was quoting his exact words.”

“… when he quoted Burke to me. Yes. We disagreed. My wife calls me the most obstinate man in America.” The smile was faint and hardly proud. “But I know what I am up against. Lodge will do anything to destroy the League or, indeed, anything else that I propose.”

“If there were a vote now in this particular Senate, you’d win.”

“A two-thirds vote? Which is what I need for a treaty?”

Blaise nodded. Burden had explained it all; even with the new Republican majority, made not so secure by the independent Senator La Follette’s unreliable support, there were enough Republicans and loyal Democrats to give the President his treaty. Blaise then gave the President Burden’s detailed anatomy of the chamber and how the votes would go. To his surprise, Wilson had done no research at all into the Senate’s mood. Burden’s estimate of how this one and that one might vote appeared strange to him. “Well, everything you tell me is comforting, in theory,” he said at last. “But one can never underestimate Lodge’s ingenuity. You know, all during the conference, he was seeing to it that the press and the delegates were constantly reminded that I do not have the support of the American people, that I have lost the Congress, that I represent no one but myself. You can’t think what an effect this makes, and how difficult it is to dispel their doubts, particularly when dealing with those who want me—us—to fail.”

Wilson sat back in his chair, face suddenly white and strained. “I put all this on the head of one man alone, Theodore Roosevelt.” The name on Wilson’s lips was a curse. “Sick in the hospital, about to die, he was plotting with Lodge and Root to destroy this mission. All three wanted the League long before I’d ever appeared on the scene. But out of Roosevelt’s private rage and malice and, yes, malignant evil, he could not bear that anyone else might
ever get credit for benefitting the world. He was without the slightest human compassion. He cared only for himself and his ludicrous career. Frankly, I regard his death as a true blessing and I pray that no such monster ever again appears upon the scene, preaching mindless war.”

Blaise was shocked at the intensity of Wilson’s hatred; but hardly surprised. In life, Roosevelt had indeed done everything possible to destroy Wilson, and now, in death, thanks to Lodge, the mischief continued. But Blaise also was certain that the President, trailing glory, would prevail as he had in Paris against far more worldly opponents than mere gentlemen from Idaho and Missouri and even Massachusetts.

The telephone rang. “Little girl,” Wilson murmured, suddenly transformed from Old Testament prophet to uxorious mate. “Yes. Of course we’ll go to the show tonight. Yes.” Wilson hung up. “They were afraid that I was displeased with last night’s program.”

A sailor, dressed as a prostitute, had done a somewhat lascivious dance, and then chucked the President under the chin. The sailors had roared; the presidential courtiers had gasped; and the President himself had turned to stone. “They were a bit high-spirited …” Blaise began.