The Way the Future Blogs

RMS Queen Mary, decks full of troops, during World War II.

Although cruise lines do their best to make passengers perfectly safe, they don’t always succeed. Every once in a while, a rogue wave will hit a cruise ship — not often, but once is enough if you’re on the ship. A Holland America ship, the Prinsendam, did get clobbered by a rogue on its way to Antarctica a few years ago. It was tipped far onto its side, but it recovered with the loss only of every bit of breakable glass or pottery on the ship. (Betty Anne and I sailed in the Prinsendam, to the Baltic, a few cruises later, but by then they had restored it to its proper immaculate shape.)

There is one ocean liner, though, that most of us have seen and that had an even worse experience. That is the RMS — anyway the former RMS, now simply Hotel — Queen Mary. Although it is now immune to rogue waves, since it is now “afloat” on several thousand tons of concrete poured in the bay off Long Beach, California, it had its bad time.

Since it has become a hotel, it has been visited by several thousand times as many people as ever set foot on it as a trans-Atlantic liner. It has even occasionally been the site for a science fiction con.

It was not always thus. During World War II, the Queen was pressed into serving as the best troop transport the Allies owned — big enough to carry mass troops anywhere on the globe, fast enough to fear little from the German U-boats.

But not quite safe from rogue waves. In 1942, the Queen was ferrying American troops to Scotland as part of the build-up for D-Day. It hit a patch of bad weather some 760 miles from land, which quickly became even worse weather. A giant wave, estimated at 92 feet tall, turned the ship on one side. It took several minutes for it to recover, and at the worst it had been knocked over to a 52-degree tilt.

This does not sound like fun for anybody, but how do you suppose it was for the 14,000 American troops in the windowless, very nearly exitless, six or seven cots tall troop quarters below?

Sun Myung Moon

Back in the late 1970s, I got a call from a scientist friend I had last seen at a meeting on energy storage in what then was still Yugoslavia. (I don’t know if he would like me to mention his name in this connection.) We’d had a good time exploring the place between sessions — Yugoslavia was a beautiful and welcoming country, before they decided to begin killing each other off — and now he was offering me an all-expenses-paid trip to South Korea to attend what he promised would be an interesting conference. That was a country I’d never visited before, and I knew just what to say to that offer.

I said it: “What’s the catch?”

“I thought you would ask that,” he said. “Well, it’s the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s, what he calls a Conference on the Unity of the Sciences.”

That was a pretty big catch. I’m not fond of weird made-up religions in the first place (I’m personally an infrequent Unitarian) and of Moon’s in particular, because I think he is an evil man, with his relentlessly right-wing Washington Times and unpleasant doctrines, not to mention that I had been buttonholed in airports by too many of his zombie saved souls to be impartial.

But my friend assured me that I wouldn’t have to fight off zealots intent on converting me — “There will be sessions about the Unification Church but you won’t have to attend. I don’t.” And there were guaranteed to be some good papers and interesting entertainments.

Well, those things pretty much convinced me anyhow, and when you added in that it was a chance to visit a previously unexperienced foreign country, the pressure to say yes was irresistible. I did say yes, though not without some apprehension..

Which increased after I got a call from the Moonie organization in New York inviting me to visit them in New York City to pick up tickets and program and advance copies of some papers.

Like most New Yorkers (all right, I was living in Red Bank, New Jersey, at the time but New York was where my heart was), I was wary of the Moonie outposts. They had bought outright one of the city’s better hotels, the 43-story New Yorker, and made it their dormitory and nerve center. (Just across the street was the new Madison Square Garden, which Moon chartered to hold his mass marriages, several hundred Moonie couples at a time.)

What had been the lobby was now divided into lanes and divisions like a Motor Vehicle Bureau office. I found the right one; they gave me my documents with a minimum of conversation and no proselytizing at all, and I escaped to Penn Station, which sits right under the Garden.

Continue reading ‘Interesting Meetings I’ve Attended:
Weekends with the Moonies’ »

Doc and Jeanie Smith, 1958.

When I first began obsessively reading science fiction, at about the age of ten, all sf writers were as gods to me. Some, however, were bigger gods than others, my holiest trinity being Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells and Edward Elmer Smith, Ph. D. — with Doc Smith at the top of the heap because he was the one who wrote the Skylark novels.

In those days, I couldn’t afford the exorbitant cover price of an sf magazine, which could run as much as 25¢ apiece. I got my fixes in a second-hand magazine store. These were Depression days, remember, and there were second-hand everything stores all over the place. There the magazines might sell for a dime, and the storekeeper would buy them back from you for a nickel when you were through if you liked. (But what fan would sell off parts of his collection?) The trouble with getting your magazines that way was that you spotted issues you hadn’t read in no particular order in the bins, which was an annoyance when you were reading serials.

And serials were what Doc Smith was good at. First there was the Skylark trilogy, then the Lensman novels. Every couple of years, Doc would give us another masterpiece of interstellar adventure, with heroes in vast machines going even vaster distances to find bizarre aliens — to befriend or, if they were evil, to triumph over. Does that sound at all recognizable? You bet it does, because it was in the fertile mind of Doc Smith that the very first space opera was born, and every episode of Star Trek, Star Wars and a host of others owe him a debt they can never repay.
 

Doc first wrote The Skylark of Space as early as the teens of the young 20th century, just for the fun of it. He did try it on a publisher or two, who had no interest in this weird tale — perhaps, his bride, Jeanie, conjectured, because the story was all big machines and strong, single men with little human interest. Doc conceded the possibility but disqualified himself from trying to repair the gap.

However, there was that nice Mrs. Garby down the street. When approached, she agreed to write the necessary pages of romantic chat between the fictional inventor of atomic energy, space travel and much else, Richard Ballinger Seaton, and his beloved longtime fiancée, Dorothy Vaneman. Doc inserted her episodes of love stuff where appropriate, and that is why the appropriate byline for The Skylark of Space is “by Edward E. Smith, Ph. D., and Lee Hawkins Garby.” (In the later books Doc plucked up his courage and wrote the boy-girl material himself. I can’t tell the difference.) But, alas, even with human interest no one seemed to want it, so Doc retired it to a bottom desk drawer. There it stayed, almost forgotten, for years. . . .

Until, one day, Doc stopped by the general store to pick up some necessities. He noticed a new magazine called Amazing Stories. On inspection, it appeared to be publishing stories about the future. He hastily exhumed the rejected story and sent it off to them, they bought it at once … and a new kind of fiction was born.

Over the years, many another sf writer tried to copy Doc’s style of celebration of not-yet-existent science and super-technology. None really succeeded, perhaps because they were not naïve enough to believe in the stories they were writing. John Campbell, in the years before he turned to editing Astounding/Analog, perhaps came closest, though his attempts, like Doc’s, didn’t seem to concern real, live people. Perhaps what he needed was his own Mrs. Garby.

Of course, the simple concept of Mankind’s vast super-weapons duking it out with other, alien super-weapons all by itself was easier to borrow and there’s plenty of that still around. Fortunately for all of us, because if we didn’t have that what would we watch on television?
 

Doc’s doctorate was in chemistry. His particular specialty was in food chemistry, with particular attention to the chemistry of the doughnut, but wheaten edibles of all kinds were within his purview.

I know this because Doc’s wonderful daughter, Verna Smith Trestrail, with her nearly as wonderful husband, Albert, became good friends with Betty Anne and me. How good? Well, when the Trestrails complained that we always stayed at a Holiday Inn instead of at their house when we drove to central Indiana for our once-a-summer visit with them, and we said it was because the Holiday Inn had a pool, what did they do? Why, they put in a pool for the next summer.

Albert’s special claim to our affection came in several parts. One was that he had built in his basement the finest privately owned model railroad layout I have ever seen, complete with a lake, a steel mill and tracks for four or five trains at a time. Another was his history. He and Verna had met when he was her high-school teacher. Albert was very proper with his student, but as soon as Verna was 18, he swept her off her feet and married her before she could get away. Not that either of them ever regretted it. They had as perfect a marriage as any couple I have ever known until Verna died and Albert followed.

Verna looked like any pretty, middle-aged — and empty-headed — Hoosier housewife until you found out that she had a towering measured IQ, higher than either my own or Isaac Asimov’s. Quite a few of the highest-IQ people I’ve known (no, not Isaac. Or, for that matter, me) have been somewhat quirky or stand-offish, but Verna was as sweet as apple butter. She was also a great cook and, as mentioned, owned a stock of her father the baking and frying chemist’s personal recipes. Perhaps formulae would be a better term, because they not only specified what kind of wheat to use and how to grind the flour, but even at what time of year the crop should have been planted. And when Verna made his flapjacks for us, they were worth the trouble.

 
Doc retired not long after World War II. The kids were grown, and Doc and Jeanie moved to Florida, where they took up residence in a double-width trailer, in a park near Tampa. They actually lived in that trailer only nine months of the year. When Florida began to warm up for summer the two of them would transfer to their other trailer, slimmer and more roadable, and drive clear across the country to their summer stamping grounds on the Oregon coast.

Around that time, local science-fiction cons began to spring up all over the place. Doc discovered that he enjoyed them. So did I. We met pretty often at one or another of them, and we became friends.

Although the super-high-tech, atomic-powered spacecraft that Doc wrote about were the size of ocean liners and flitted from one star system to another at considerable multiples of the speed of light, their creator was modest in his modes of travel. A light pickup truck was good enough for the Smiths.

When, having been invited to the Cape to watch the launch of America’s mightiest space rocket, the Saturn 5, I decided to make a detour on the other side of the Florida peninsula for a visit with the Smiths, I was sure Doc would want to hear all about what the space agency was planning for this new titan. He did, and that gave me an idea. My invitation included a guest if I chose to bring one, so why shouldn’t that one be Doc Smith? I mentioned to him that it was only a short hop from Tampa to Orlando; he could share my hotel room that night and see the launch in the morning.

But Doc looked startled at that idea, then firmly negative. Jeanie didn’t like the idea of him going up in airplanes, and, no, he had never flown in one

Reluctantly I gave up the idea, but it would have been fun.

(End of Part One. Part Two will follow as soon as I write it.)

Today, Frederik Pohl completes his 90th trip around the Sun.

His wife and 18 of the best sf writers alive planned to celebrate by presenting him with a festschrift book containing stories and personal reminiscences on his birthday, but health problems interfered (not so much his as Betty Anne’s, the editor’s, who fell and cracked a caudal vertebra, requiring surgery, and then needed more surgery for an unrelated complaint, with longish recovery times for each), and pub date has been delayed till June 2010.

But Happy Birthday, anyway!

When people ask me why I became a judge for the “Writers of the Future” contest, I tell them that it was AJ Budrys’s fault. Until AJ worked his will on me, I was making it a point to stay as far as I could from Dianetics and Scientology and all the other weird things that my hero and mentor John Campbell had chosen to believe in. (Hieronymus Machine, Dean Drive, et many a c.)

It wasn’t simply that I didn’t believe in Scientology as a religion. I didn’t, but then I don’t believe in your religion, either, whatever it happens to be, because I don’t “believe” in anything that has to be taken on faith. People who take faith-based actions have caused many, probably most, of the world’s messiest disasters, from our present economic catastrophe to most, maybe all, wars.

Algis Budrys

So when AJ phoned me one morning to invite me to become a judge in the new “Writers of the Future” contest sponsored in L. Ron Hubbard’s name by the Scientologists, I didn’t let him tell me how nicely they would treat me and what a wonderful deal it would be for struggling writers. I just said no and declined to discuss it.

That’s where it stood for a few months, until AJ got back on the phone. He reminded me that when I turned him down, he had recruited Theodore Sturgeon to take my place as a judge, and then sorrowfully let me know that it wasn’t working out. Ted’s health had begun to fail. He was now hospitalized, at death’s door and with no hope of recovery — or of managing to read the dozen manuscripts that were sitting by his hospital bed, written by the first group of contestants, who had already been waiting far longer than was fair. So would I please, just this once —?

How could I refuse? I couldn’t. I didn’t. I told AJ to ship me the damn manuscripts. When they arrived I put everything else aside to read them — I was working as Bantam’s science-fiction editor in those years, plus writing my own books, and so without a lot of spare time on my hands. Then I read parts of the stories again. Then I emailed my votes to Author Services, which is the action wing of “Writers of the Future,” and then I went back to my life, feeling pleased with myself for having given a friend a helping hand in an hour of need. And then — Well, then things changed.

When people ask me how I wound up as an almost 30-year veteran as a Woffie judge I usually give them the short version: “I signed on to do them a favor, and then I just forgot to quit.” But it is a little more complicated than that.

My basic feelings hadn’t changed, pro and con. Let me give you the major arguments, as the debate had gone on in my head: To begin with, there are some pretty unpleasant things that have been said about pernicious practices of Scientology, and I believe that at least some of them are true. On the other hand, they’re not the only religion that has done lousy things, and at least I’ve never heard it said that Scientologists have murdered anyone. (That’s more than I can say for most of the major religions I know of.)

Looking at the other side of the argument, the pro-Scientology one, religions over the years in general seem to have given comfort to many people. That arguably is not necessarily a good thing, because the comfort of religion has frequently been employed to make people, usually poor people, accept manifestly unfair treatment without resistance, on the grounds that accepting evil in this life will buy them an eternity in heaven. (That’s what Karl Marx was talking about when he said that religion was the opium of the people.) On the other hand; most lives are marked with serious sorrows of one kind or another, and it does appear that religion can make these burdens perhaps a little easier to bear.

I have to say that I deem that to be a powerful argument, maybe the only meaningful one, for putting up with the problems religious beliefs cause. There is not so much comfort to be found in this world that I want to take any of it away from anyone who has found some.

And, anyway, the specific matter we were discussing — the “Writers of the Future” contest — is by and large a good thing for writers, who need all the help in getting started that they can get. And the Woffies have been kind to me, kind enough to spare me most of the Hubbard idolatry that does creep into some of their activities as well as kind in many creature-comfort ways. So I have stayed.

 
Oh, not without occasional qualms.

I said that the contest is a good thing for writers, which it is, but even good things may have some flaws. There’s more of the idolatry in the annual awards ceremony than there used to be. Ron’s name is everywhere, the giant photos of him stare down from the stage and, perhaps most of all, there is the way almost every winner prefaces his remarks with thanks to Ron for making the whole thing possible. All of that is the unarguable right of the organizers, of course, since they pay the piper, but it strikes me as annoyingly heavy-handed.

Nevertheless, when unpublished writers ask for advice about how to get their careers moving I always advise them to enter their stories in the WotF contest. It’s easy enough to do. You go to a bookstore and ask them for a copy of L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future. Each copy contains an entry blank, with the contest’s address, and a copy of the rules and rewards. (Or you can get them off the web, but it’s a good idea to read some of the winning stories.) Type out a nice clean copy of your best story and send it in to that address. Three months later, do the same with your second best story. Three months after that, your third best, and you keep on doing that every three months until you run out of stories. (Which actually you should never do. You’re still writing, aren’t you?)

The reason for doing it that way is that the contest is organized on a quarterly basis. Every three months, the staff gathers up all the stories that have accumulated in that period, makes copies for each quarterly judge and ships them out. When the judges have finished their deliberations, the winner gets $1,000, with lesser amounts for second and third place. Then, when the fourth quarter has been dealt with, the four quarterly winners go to a different set of judges, who pick the grand winner, who gets another $4,000, to make the total an even Five Large. (An amount which seemed a lot more impressive twenty-odd years ago than it does now, but, hey, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth having.)

The thing to remember is that each quarterly batch is separate. One batch may be twice as good as the next. Or, through the luck of the draw, may just have more or fewer good stories. Or — a bad deal for you, as I know because it has happened to me in other awards — there can chance to be two or more stories in the same batch, each of which is really good and would be an easy winner, if only the other or others had been in different batches. That would be tough luck. But it’s a problem you can’t prevent, so that’s why you try to be in as many quarterly batches as possible.

Okay, suppose you do win, what then?

Then Author Services flies you to wherever the awards are to be given out that year, usually around Hollywood. (But now and then at a more interesting venue. Some past ceremonies have been at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, at the Houston Space Center and at the United Nations in New York.) There they will put you up in a nice hotel and provide you with three decent squares while you’re there. And there will be at least two events going on. The big one is the actual awards ceremony where, unless you are lucky enough to be female, you will be asked to wear a tux. There you will get up on the stage to accept your award and say thank you, and then you socialize with a bunch of other winners, some other writers and a collection of more or less celebrities at a subsequent buffet. (Nice food, by the way.)

Continue reading ‘The Worlds of L. Ron Hubbard’ »

MS Ryndam

 

It occurs to me that some of you might be contemplating cruises of your own and thus might like some idea of what to expect and how likely you are to get it. With Holland America that would be a generally pleasant cruise, mostly reliably delivered.

However…

Just before Betty Anne and I boarded the Ryndam for our thirty days in the tropics, we got a letter from a friend who happened to be aboard a different Holland America ship in a quite different part of the world. He said: “I have to say that the quality of service on Holland America seems to have fallen off a notch or two — still good, but not quite as good as a year or so ago.”

We have the same feeling. Things are good but they used to be just a touch better. The Lido self-service dining area, an upper deck feature on HAL ships still has that everyday miracle of Holland America’s special bread pudding, but what it doesn’t have any more are those gigantic mountains of iced seafood, shrimp and crab legs and whatever, that used to ornament each Lido once a week.

And things go wrong that never went wrong before. Telling time, for instance. If you want to know what time it is on a Holland America cruise the recommended plan is to look at the TV screen in your room — but on this particular cruise this would have given you the wrong time for, on average, at least one day a week (and for some days two or three different wrong times in a single day).

Well, that’s all trivial stuff. But in my view it’s trivial stuff that just shouldn’t have happened — at least not over and over again.

And then there was the suite question.

See, when you use the word “suite” it’s shorthand for “suite of rooms.”
When Holland America advertises a “Veranda Suite” at only a mildly exorbitant markup over your basic stateroom, you’re promised by the laws of English grammar that there will be more than one room, and there wasn’t. There was the same long, skinny room nearly identical in layout to many others on the ship. To be sure, it did have the promised veranda and a nice thing it is to have one on a tropical cruise.

All the same, that is not too remote from fraud in my view. I’m disappointed in my generally honorable cruiseline for practicing it.

 
By the way, although the economy was tanking in most of its parts on a daily basis at the time, we had a pretty full ship. I take this to mean that there were vast amounts of last-minute discounting and upgrading going on and doubt that will change much in the near future. In such circumstances you gain nothing by early booking and may gain a lot by late. Talk to a good travel agent.

Swanson and the Brits

There is a story about H.N. Swanson making a phone call to a producer that goes like this:

H.N. Swanson

Swanie: “Sam?”

Producer: “Yes, Swanie?”

Swanie: “I’m taking over representation of your writer, Blodgett. You’ve been paying him $150 a week.”

Producer: “Yes, Swanie.”

Swanie: “You’ll have to raise him to $500. I don’t represent any $150 a week writers.”

Producer: “Yes, Swanie.”

True story? I don’t know. It could be. Swanie certainly had all the musculature to enforce his will on the biz. I don’t know how long Swanie had held the rights to some of the greatest properties of all time. I don’t know who his very earliest clients were — H.G. Wells, probably, Joseph Conrad, some Kipling, why not? — though I do refuse to believe in Beowulf. And what I especially don’t know and never did was what advantage Swanie saw for his own high-voltage agency coming to be known as the West Coast branch of mine. Of course the association wasn’t likely to make a lot of work for Swanie. At that point in the development of my agency the number of film sales had reached a grand total of zero.

But now everything was different. What I said to Swanie’s associate was, “I want Swanie to handle it.”

“All right,” she said, a little doubtfully, I thought. “I guess he’ll do that.”

And she told me that British Redifusion, the name of the people making the offer, was a London outfit that took TV channels from one place and transferred them to another. This, under the English licensing laws, gave them enough money in the bank to contemplate new careers as movie producers. So, contemplating the prospect of what an unplanned thousand dollars or two might mean to my own solvency, I went about my business.

That week my business included four or five stops on an abbreviated lecture tour to the Midwest and the Coast. I don’t remember what my first stop was — perhaps some management conference in Chicago — but when I got to my hotel, there was a message waiting:

Mr. Pohl —

Now that we have made contact we would prefer that future discussions take place between the two of us, rather than through a third party. As an evidence of good faith we are prepared to increase our offer to $10,000. Please let us have your acceptance by return.

When I called Swanie’s office the next morning, he wasn’t surprised that they would have preferred to dicker without him. “Wouldn’t you?” he asked. “Anyway, they’re up to $12,500.”

And when I checked into my Denver hotel, they were at $22,500, and at $27,500 in Seattle, and by the time I was home the price was up over $30,000, and British Redifusion was trying to beat some sense into me — “Swanie is going to ruin the whole thing for you, you know. We can just walk away.” — and failing to beat sense into me.

Even Arnold Perl was showing some concern: “You did say that the Kornbluth family had some money concerns. It could be quite a while before our negotiations began to reach this kind of number.”

And when I called Swanie the next day, he said, “They’re at $50,000. What do you want me to do?”

I said — or screamed — “I want you to deal with it! Take it, leave it, whatever. I want you to make the decision.”

“Well,” he said, “I am encountering some resistance. I could go for $100,000, but I think it’s better to take the $50,000.”

How much is the $50,000 of the 1950s?

It’s enough that my share paid for a convertible, our first color TV, a dining-room chandelier that my then-wife Carol had her heart set on, and a few other odds and ends. I should say that $50,000 then was worth at least a quarter of a million now, but for the Kornbluths, the story was somewhat different. That great loving Mom that is the state of New York makes sure that the needy among us is cared for by rigorous laws, especially if they are lawyers. Since Cyril had not planned on dying but had let himself go intestate, the New York government appointed a lawyer to protect his interests — by which I mean the lawyer’s interests. So the Kornbluth half was not quite as big as my half. . . .

And if I had it to do over again, I’m not sure how I would do it.

 
Related posts:
Me and the Biz
Me and the Biz, Part II

There were four other books that I rescued from the Ryndam’s library. My interest in two of them was generated by the Ryndam’s unexpectedly lavish store of American classic films. I had had no warning such a treat was in store.

But while I changed for dinner one evening, the stateroom TV stopped me cold. A young man was standing his ground against a powerful older one. I didn’t know either man by name, but I was pretty sure that the young one was a struggling composer desirous of being taken on by the Maestro di tutti di maestri di balletto. And in just a moment — wait for it — yes, there was Moira Shearer to apply to that same company as a dancer, looking as dewy and darling as any human female had ever been.

There was no doubt. We were right at the beginning of that greatest of ballet films ever made, The Red Shoes. Of course I was a little late for dinner that night, as I was on more than one other night that month because the classics didn’t stop coming. Patton. The Wizard of Oz. The African Queen. Fantasia. Cleopatra.

And then the one that turned me to the Ryndam’s bookshelves, On Golden Pond, starring Jane Fonda, playing the estranged daughter of Henry as well on the screen as she did in real life, with Katharine Hepburn playing the totally loved mom — but that was only casting. The first time I had seen the movie, I had been interested in some newspaper chat about Hepburn being critical of Jane for politics, Fonda disapproving of Kate for switching her own career to black so she could devote every minute of her time to loving and caring for Spencer Tracy, the man who meant her life to her, but couldn’t divorce his Catholic wife to give her a ring.

These are two of the greatest film actresses of any century. One would like to know what drives them. This one would anyway, so I checked out Kate by William J. Mann and My Life So Far by the Fonda woman herself and began to read. The first couple of chapters of My Life went well enough, not least because they covered the Barbarella period of Jane’s career, and it is quite rewarding to even an aging man to help Roger Vadim calculate how many centimeters of fabric can be removed from his wife’s costume to produce the maximum of pink-skinned gorgeousness.

Kate, on the other hand, offers no such rolls in the hay. Kate is dying. The roles, the lovers, the headlines, are all over now. All the roaring fireplaces in her house are shut down because there is oxygen in the house. The end is approaching.

Well, you say, why not? Could not a great book be written about the death of a loved person? Of course it could. Just not by Mann. Too bad. This could have been a good book, but perhaps better with a different author.

There remain two books, both pretty much picked up by chance, and both highly recommended by me. I had had no idea such a volume as Elizabeth’s London existed, therefore couldn’t go looking for it as I might otherwise have done before watching Shakespeare in Love. It tells you all there is to know about how Elizabethan London filled its shops, emptied its latrines, and dealt with its criminals.

I should on the other hand have expected the existence of a book like Paris 1919 if I had thought to look for it, because surely someone would have tried to express all those complex interactions of victors and vanquished that did so much to assure that there would be a second World War worse than the first.

It is easy to point out areas where the victorious Allies made mistakes, harder to know how they might have avoided them. Take Woodrow Wilson’s bargaining position. When the American navy first landed in France after the Armistice, he was The Man, and his word was law. A little later — when American Republicans were tired of being ignored; when secret deals that removed chunks of populations from one state to another could no longer be kept secret; when wartime promises had to be repudiated (catastrophic! Or kept, even worse), that worldwide writ was running thin. Unfortunately, Wilson didn’t seem to know.

Even worse was one other thing he didn’t seem to know. Georges Clemenceau and Lloyd George did: In November, the German high command had pled for a truce not because they were bored with fighting but because they were being crushed by huge, fresh Allied forces. Total defeat was about to happen at any day. With the Armistice, though, everything changed. The Germans had time to lick their wounds, while the victorious Allies began sending their troops home.

Before long, the numbers favored the Germans. If fighting had resumed and those German troops had returned to the assault on Paris, there would have been very little to keep them out.

Related post:
The Book Place