The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative

The most dangerous thing about power is not losing it, it's watching someone you once respected wield it badly. Robert Lansing knew this intimately. As Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, Lansing sat at the heart of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, present for every tense negotiation, every compromise, every moment when the shape of the post-war world hung in the balance. What he saw troubled him deeply. This memoir is Lansing's reckoning. He watches as Wilson, exhausted and increasingly isolated, drives toward his grand vision of a League of Nations while ignoring the political realities of Congressional opposition and Allied territorial demands. Lansing, a seasoned diplomat, urges caution on the covenant, on territorial guarantees, on the sweeping commitments that would bind America to a future it wasn't ready to embrace. Wilson dismisses him. The friendship fractures. Lansing resigns. What remains is an invaluable historical document: the view from inside Wilson's inner circle, the personal cost of principled disagreement, and a diplomat's eyewitness account of the moment the modern world was forged. Anyone interested in the origins of international order, and the men who nearly broke each other building it, needs this book.