w aging w ar to t ransform the w orld 125he traveled in Europe before the conference began, he received the adu-
lation of enormous crowds, very much the hero of the moment, the
most famous and celebrated man in the world. Doubtless he expected
the Allied publics to continue to support him and his quest for a new
kind of international order. Some have suggested that he committed a
major blunder when he agreed to exclude the press from much of the
conference, thereby denying himself the means to communicate over
the heads of recalcitrant Allied leaders when necessary.
But there is more to it than that. Wilson in December 1918 was very
much like a president-elect before his inauguration, when every aspi-
ration is projected onto him and he has done nothing to disappoint
expectations or alienate his believers. That situation was bound to
change as the leaders at the conference made hard choices certain to
anger many. No amount of press access could have prevented disen-
chantment. In one country after another, as word arrived about
decisions in Paris that betrayed what people had taken Wilson to mean,
the local press turned on the American president.
Notably absent from this list of factors that led to Wilson’s disap-
pointing results in Paris is one that has been popular since the ink dried
on the Treaty of Versailles: the claim that he allowed himself to be out-
negotiated by his more savvy European counterparts. Wilson cer-
tainly did not grasp the complexity of the ethno-national mixtures in
the European empires. Moreover, though he expected Allied leaders to
pursue their parochial concerns, he still underestimated the domestic
political pressures they faced. Unlike Wilson, they arrived at the con-
ference having promised their own citizens specifi c gains as their just
reward for wartime sacrifi ces. Th ese leaders were eff ectively trapped, for
their governments would fall if they returned home empty-handed.
Wilson fundamentally overrated the means at his disposal for over-
coming opposition.
It is hard to square the picture of Wilson as gullible with the image
of him as too stubborn to ever change his mind once he had reached a
decision. Neither seems to refl ect the president who participated in
months of hard bargaining in Paris. On some matters he dug in his
heels, even hinting he might leave the conference to force the French to
back off their territorial demands on Germany, while on others that
he regarded as less central (Japan’s claims in China, all matters of British