The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2004

James Leander Cathcart and Richard O’Brien. The latter two were (American) captives who insinuated themselves into the negotiations for their release (Cathcart became the dey’s chief clerk!) and later into the fledgling American diplomatic service. Like Guinness, Uncle Sam in Barbary is good for you. It is also good fun. Retired FSO Charles Dunbar teach- es international relations at Boston University. He spent 21 years in the Middle East, seven of them as chargé d’affaires in Afghanistan, ambassas- dor to Qatar and, later, to Yemen, and most recently as U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan’s special repre- sentative for the referendum in Western Sahara. A Voyage through History Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World Margaret MacMillan (foreword by Richard Holbrooke), Random House, 2003, $16.95, paperback, 624 pages. R EVIEWED BY D AVID C ASAVIS When the candidates for president were asked back in February to name the last book they had read, John Kerry cited this volume as a favorite, noting that he enjoys reading histories and found this one particularly pow- erful. Whatever one thinks of the sen- ator’s politics, it is hard to disagree with his assessment. The first full- scale treatment of the Paris Peace Conference in more than 25 years, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World takes us back to those dra- matic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, and countries were created (e.g., Iraq, Yugoslavia) whose troubles haunt us still. In his foreword to the American edition, Ambassador Richard Hol- brooke picks up on this theme, calling Paris 1919 “a voyage through history.” He also recalls joking with his negoti- ating team in the Balkans in 1995 that their goal was to undo Woodrow Wilson’s legacy. Author Margaret MacMillan criti- cally examines the three central fig- ures in the drama: Wilson, British Prime Minister Lloyd George (her great-grandfather) and French Premier Georges Clemenceau. Each had his blinders: Wilson didn’t know there were so many nationalities in the world, George’s sense of geogra- phy was poor, and Clemenceau at one point dismissively commented, “If I want oil, I will go to the grocery and buy a bottle.” It is therefore not sur- prising that the negotiators gave so lit- tle thought to the world east and south of Germany’s borders. She also moves a large supporting cast on and off the historical stage with aplomb. Wilson left his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, and the rest of the delegation so completely in the dark about his plans that a young Russia expert, William Bullitt, personally confront- ed the president during the voyage to France to obtain information. Wilson later sent the brilliant, cocky and mercurial Bullitt on a risky mis- sion to Moscow, only to ignore his report. Bullitt promptly resigned, persuaded a dozen other diplomats to do so, and sent out a press release about himself. (He would later testi- fy against the Treaty of Versailles in a Senate hearing.) Among the many other notable figures on the scene were Winston Churchill, John Maynard Keynes, Lawrence of Arabia (part of the Arab delegation) and Ho Chi Minh, who was a young kitchen assistant at the Paris Ritz but submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam. Foreign Service readers will find particularly instructive MacMillan’s account of Wilson’s ill-fated campaign to get the resulting treaty ratified. By snubbing the Republican-controlled Senate before he even left for Paris, Wilson lost a great opportunity to make American diplomacy a biparti- san tradition. Some 75 years later, another Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, would still cite Wilson’s treatment of his predecessor, Henry Cabot Lodge, with resentment. So MacMillan’s conclusion may come as a surprise: she defends the hasty diplomatic work done in Paris, look- ing to subsequent events for the causes of World War II. Despite its catastrophic aftermath, Paris 1919 is primarily a creation story that plunges the reader into the cru- cible of the modern world as it was being constructed. Seldom have so many diplomatic decisions, made by so few, so quickly affected so many people. Seemingly unrelated events, casual decisions and miscalculations all brought on historic consequences, and MacMillan’s skillful telling repeat- edly compels the reader to stop, think, and weigh what could have been. David Casavis, a regular FSJ book 72 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 4 B O O K S MacMillan’s conclusion may come as a surprise: she defends the hasty diplomatic work done in Paris.