The Foreign Service Journal, March 2008

Once They’ve Been to Paris… A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today David A. Andelman, John Wiley & Sons, 2008, $25.95, hardcover, 326 pages. R EVIEWED BY J OHN B ROWN This year marks the 90th anniver- sary of the end of World War I, a con- flict which, perhaps like no other, shaped the 20th century. “Some of the most intractable problems of the modern world,” writes Richard Hol- brooke, “have roots in decisions made right after the end of the Great War.” That quote comes from Hol- brooke’s foreword to Margaret Mac- Millan’s magisterial Paris 1919 (pub- lished in 2001), her widely praised account of how the victors of World War I sought to reshape the world in the wake of a devastating conflict that brought the end of four empires (Ger- man, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Ot- taman); the aspiration for indepen- dence of numerous suppressed na- tionalities; and the international dom- inance of the United States. In his book, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today , David A. Andelman, executive editor of Forbes.com and a longtime foreign correspondent, acknowledges that MacMillan’s work “was a valuable road map” for his own work. He adds that his goal was to take “the study of this period several steps further — particularly in dealing with many of the secondary individuals and smaller nations that played such an integral behind-the-scenes role in Paris, while at the same time examining their lega- cy.” Indeed, that is the strength of Andelman’s book: It is a clearly writ- ten narrative that brings out intriguing historical details about the postwar world the Versailles conference creat- ed, many of them unknown to most non-specialists. He skillfully recreates the atmosphere of the period, dealing not only with the setting and the often humorous and absurd goings-on at Versailles itself, but also devoting seven of his 10 chapters to explaining how the Paris agreements affected Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Of particular interest to this reader was the brief but revealing treatment of how Herbert Hoover’s “network of private relief workers in the defeated nations was used as a cover for the first network of spies the United States ever fielded in a coordinated fashion across the continent.” Also fascinating was Andelman’s account of how the young, penniless Ho Chi Minh tried, without success, to influence the decisions of the conference. Throughout, the author draws astutely on the diaries of the ever-observant British diplomat Harold Nicolson, who was “the great- est single and most colorful chronicler of all those present at the conference.” Speaking of colorful, here is the book’s account of Woodrow and Edith Wilson’s meeting with the glamorous Queen Marie of Romania. As Edith later described the scene, the queen lifted from the mantelpiece a photo- graph of a dark-haired girl, 10 or 12 years old. She then “held it up to him, saying, ‘This, Mr. President, is a pic- ture of my youngest daughter, Ileana. My love child, I call her. Is she not lovely? My other girls are blonde, like me; but she—oh, she is dark and pas- sionate.’” While immensely readable, A Shattered Peace does have three sig- nificant drawbacks. In his effort to underscore the importance of Versail- les, Andelman links its causal relation to current events (particularly terror- ism) in a rather heavyhanded way. He also repeatedly cites his experiences as a foreign correspondent, regret- tably interrupting the flow of the nar- rative in the process. And his conclu- sion that Versailles was a failure, due in large part to Wilson’s naïve idealism and the Allies’ realpolitik cynicism, is far from original. All that said, this book serves as a useful reminder that it is far easier to start most wars — including, as we are becoming increasingly aware, the so- called “war on terror” — than to deal with their consequences. John Brown, who was in the Foreign Service for over 20 years, compiles the Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review for the USC Center on Public Diplomacy (http://uscpublicdiploma cy.com/index.php/newsroom/john brown_main/). B OOKS 70 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 8