Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand : The Life of Colonel Edward M. House

by Godfrey Hodgson

• ISBN13: 9780300137552
• ISBN10: 0300137559
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2008-07-29
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

The importance of Colonel Edward M. House in twentieth-century American foreign policy is enormous: from 1913 to 1919 he served not only as intimate friend and chief political adviser to President Woodrow Wilson but also as national security adviser and senior diplomat. Yet the relationship between House and the president ended in a quarrel at the Paris peace conference of 1919largely because of Mrs. Wilson's hostility to Houseand House has received little sympathetic historical attention since. This extensively researched book reintroduces House and clearly establishes his contributions as one of the greatest American diplomats. A "kingmaker" in Texas politics, House joined Wilson's campaign in 1912 and soon was traveling through Europe as the president's secret agent. He visited Europe repeatedly during World War I and played a major part in drafting Wilson's Fourteen Points and the Covenant of the League of Nations. He tried to stop the war before it began, and to end it by negotiation after it had started. His greatest achievement was to lock both sides into an armistice based on American ideals.

Author Biography

Godfrey Hodgson is associate fellow, Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University. He has written biographies of Henry L. Stimson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan as well as the pioneering article about the American foreign policy establishment.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
A Coming Together and a Falling Apart	p. 1
Origins of a Texas Gentleman	p. 16
The Texas Kingmaker	p. 31
Going National	p. 43
Making Woodrow Wilson President	p. 54
The Hungry Horde	p. 69
Wall Street and Mexico	p. 81
The Schrippenfest Affair	p. 91
Trying to End the War in Europe	p. 103
America Drifts into the War	p. 125
1917	p. 141
The Inquiry and the Fourteen Points	p. 157
Russia	p. 169
Armistice	p. 179
The Covenant	p. 198
The End of a Friendship	p. 215
The End of the Treaty	p. 235
Watching the World Go By	p. 257
Notes	p. 277
Bibliography	p. 315
Index	p. 323
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.