The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

As Colonel House put it: “when the President stepped down from his lofty pedestal and wrangled with the representatives of other states upon equal terms, he became as common clay.” Lloyd George, who felt closer to Wilson than any of the leading Allied statesmen did, and Winston Churchill, who could not stand him, have recorded similarly ambivalent judgments of his personality. “Wilson,” Lloyd George wrote in his memoirs of the conference, “was the most clear-cut specimen of duality that I have ever met. The two human beings of which he was constituted never merged or mixed ... The gold was sterling and the clay was honest marl, and they were both visible to the naked eye. He was the most extraordinary compound I have ever encountered of the noble visionary, the implacable and unscrupulous partisan, the exalted idealist and the man of rather petty personal rancours.”