Peacemaking, Nineteen-Nineteen

British diplomat and diarist, Harold Nicholson's account of his work with the Peace Conference. The book includes his diary for the period as well as memoirs written after the fact. While initially enthusiastic about Wilson and his promises to negotiate a just peace, Nicholson's book recount a conference which soon slipped into traditional infighting and intrigue. Wilson's willingness, as seen by Nicholson, to sacrifice any principle in favor of obtaining agreement on the League of Nations soon soured Nicolson on the American President. Written and published years after the conference, Nicolson reflected the then general view by the British that the conference had failed to achieve as satisfactory peace. The book is an invaluable primary source and provides insights into the day to day operations of the committees where much of the work of the conference was done.

So many books of English diplomatist Harold Nicolson are still in print. Books about him and his family continue to pour out. It is a pity, therefore, that PEACEMAKING 1919 is not still readily available to readers. --In November 1918 at the time of the armistice, Nicolson was a passionate Wilsonian. Within four months, at the Paris peace conference, he was thoroughly disillusioned. Wilson had too quickly made territorial concessions to Italy, contrary to the principles of the very Fourteen Points which had made a Wilsonian of Harold Nicolson. And the American idol would fall farther and faster thereafter. --Woodrow Wilson rendered more and ever more to Caesar while asserting that he was doing the work of God and the American people. Nor was Wilson the only sanctimonious hypocrite among the leaders of the Allied and Associated Powers at Paris. --Nicolson's diaries and reflections convey, as he intends to convey, the sense that the peace made at Paris to end World War I was the product of poor planning, disorganized diplomacy, growing fatigue and a very large disconnect between experts and decision-makers. --PEACEMAKING 1919 was written as a manual for young British diplomatists who would face future peace conferences. If they heeded Nicolson, they would then be in a position to avoid the disaster known as the Treaty of Versailles. For peace should not be made, as it was in Paris in 1919, in an atmosphere of a "riot in a parrot house." -OOO-