Coolidge (67 page)

Here we are the Nation that is always hollering for dissarmament, and Peace, and just because we are not smart enough to settle our differences by diplomacy (because we have none) why we are going to make it possible for somebody else to exterminate the faction that we don’t like. Suppose they don’t like Coolidge down there, and they would allow arms to be shipped into this Country to arm a revolution against our Government that is in Power. Boy, what a howl we would put up! But it’s us doing it down their way now, so that’s all right. Here is the humatarian nation of the world fixing so more people can get shot.

The State Department’s behind-the-scenes foreign policy was not popular. It was Borah’s simple outlawry of war that was popular.

That December, Grace’s mother entered the Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton with influenza; she improved, and then relapsed. Grace telephoned the doctors and would travel to Northampton early the next year with her own entourage, including Dr. Boone. John and her mother preoccupied Grace now. A weighty Vermont delegation called on Coolidge in Washington. Its members included Governor Weeks and both senators, not to mention Frank Partridge, the president of the Vermont Marble Company, to make the case for federal funds. But the Vermonters left the presidential meeting with no commitment for money from Coolidge. “The president’s attitude was not revealed,” the papers wrote. The president also received woolen wristlets as a Christmas gift from a grandmother, with a card: “These are to keep you warm when you come back to Vermont.”

But Coolidge insisted on remaining in the Washington area for Christmas. After pressure from the papers, he also wrote out a Christmas greeting in his own hand for the nation. The new process of facsimile made it possible for the newspapers to share his lines:

Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind. To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas. If we think on these things there will be born in us a Savior and over us all will shine a star sending its gleam of hope to the world.

The words touched, but they did not console. Though Coolidge could and did light the national Christmas tree, Christmas was rougher in Vermont. The Christmas tree harvest waiting for delivery near Mount Holly had been ruined, the trees strewn across wrecked train tracks, hopelessly bent and waterlogged. Coolidge could not do for his own what he did not do for others, just as someone had commented to the newspaper reporters. He had stood on principle this last time. Doing so had cost him so much, and no one, not even Vermonters, understood.

Fifteen
: The Shield and the Book

Washington, D.C.

ONE SUNNY JANUARY DAY
in 1928 the people of Cuba gathered at Havana harbor to mount the greatest welcome they had ever given a foreign leader. Thousands climbed onto the Morro Castle and the rooftops of buildings, craning their necks to get a glimpse of the battleship USS
Texas
as it moved into the harbor. Every balcony near the harbor was packed with cheering families. Overhead, six Cuban army planes circled to protect the
Texas
and her long convoy, which included three destroyers and the cruiser
Memphis
. Whistles shrieked; the
Texas
fired her sixteen-pounders in salute. Cannons at Fort La Cabaña saluted back.

The leader was Coolidge. This time, he was the traveler arriving in the port, not the host, as he had been when the troops with all their joys and troubles had returned to Boston in 1919. This time, the occasion was preventing future wars, rather than ending one that had just past, or those before. Coolidge’s disembarkation point at Capitania del Puerto sat only a few hundred yards from where the great battleship
Maine
had sunk three decades before.

President Machado greeted the Coolidges royally at the palace. At the Pan-American Conference the next morning, leaders from twenty-one Latin American nations were also in attendance. In his speech at the conference, Coolidge spoke of respect, democracy, and law. There had to be, he said, an “exact footing of equality” among nations. He also advanced the principle of self-government for Latin American nations. Finally, he spoke against force. It was time to heed “the admonition to beat our swords into plowshares.” The phrase resonated because just days before, Coolidge had ordered marines into Nicaragua.

Yet the Cubans ignored the Nicaraguan story. They were interested in every aspect of their guests: Grace’s splendidly large red hat and Coolidge’s coloring—they called him “Rubio,” red-haired. They praised Charles Evans Hughes, Coolidge’s former secretary of state. Hughes’s bearded presence added dignity to the sessions at the conference. The Cubans commented on the gravitas of Hughes, Ambassador Morrow, and Secretary of State Kellogg as the three stood in the background on the
Texas
or on the stages in Havana. The reporters noticed that presidents Coolidge and Machado both wore horn-rimmed glasses when they read; the cartoon similarity between the statesmen seemed to confirm Coolidge’s statements that there was a “footing of equality.” The Associated Press cheered that “it was a spectacle such as this American President has never before participated in and recalled to mind the clamorous entry of Woodrow Wilson into Paris.” Above all, Coolidge, Morrow, and Kellogg noticed one thing: the scale of the crowds. Noble Brandon Judah, the ambassador to Cuba, estimated sixty thousand in the streets alone. No one knew the exact total, but it was thought to be at least 200,000. The message was clear: Cubans, like the citizens of so many other nations, were not merely glad to undertake a common project with the United States. They were eager to do so. All they were waiting for was an invitation.

That invitation was something the Coolidge administration might provide, even now, in the difficult, beleaguered final year of the Coolidge presidency. Indeed, by the time Coolidge arrived in Havana, the plan had already been scripted by the secretary of state. Kellogg and then Coolidge had quietly made up their minds that the United States would indeed lead a great peace compact among nations after all. Soon—the State Department and White House would make public Coolidge’s endorsement of such a grand move. In the meantime, over the coming weeks, Kellogg would lay the groundwork by wooing moody foreign leaders, starting with the grandiose Aristide Briand and following with the German, Japanese, and British leaders. Even as the major states were won, Kellogg would invite additional nations, such as Cuba, Ethiopia, and even Russia, to be signatories. Finally the administration would come to the most difficult part: winning the ratification by the Senate. This victory would not come easily: the crowds in European cities had also hung from the balconies to see Woodrow Wilson, yet the Senate had denied Wilson his League of Nations. Still, Kellogg was determined. Nineteen twenty-eight was the year of the presidential election. A successful campaign for a treaty and its result might matter more than any election. The peace treaty would be Coolidge’s last legacy. It was Kellogg who had first seen how such a victory might be possible, even in a year when Congress was openly mounting a revolt.

The key to success or failure lay in Kellogg’s or, for that matter, Coolidge’s ability to surprise. And surprising others was an art both men had mastered. Originally country lawyers, Kellogg and Coolidge had made careers out of being underestimated, of stealing others’ thunder, of delivering more than anyone expected. Now Coolidge’s apparent weakness and indifference after the Geneva Treaty and the Vermont flood, like Kellogg’s age and trembling hands, would throw their opponents off. Men always loved best those projects they thought were their own, and in the case of the peace treaty the idea belonged to both Borah and Briand as well. The pair were likely to go along as long as they perceived themselves as the leaders and Coolidge and Kellogg as secondary figures playing catch-up. The lame-duck president and his old codger of a secretary would prevail over the foreign statesmen, the garrulous senators, even their own staffs, by outfoxing them.

The treaty itself had crystallized in Kellogg’s mind as the administration had tried to decide what to make of Briand’s irritating bilateral plan. Briand had proposed that plan in the newspapers in April 1927, and for months after, Kellogg had made a show of ignoring him. But perhaps, Kellogg had begun to think, one could use Briand’s document as a basis for a treaty among the great powers, a “universal undertaking not to resort to war.” That “might make a more signal contribution to world peace by joining in an effort to obtain the adherence of all the principal powers of the world to a declaration renouncing war as an instrument of policy.” Such a declaration, he wrote in one State Department paper, “could not but be an impressive example.” With the word “example,” Kellogg knew, he might lure not only Briand but also Coolidge.

At first Kellogg had not even been sure whether Coolidge would back him. Over the fall, Coolidge had more than once publicly shied away from a treaty, once by raising the question of whether it bound the United States in an unconstitutional fashion, and then again in the State of the Union address by asking if the country needed such a treaty. Still, a treaty about examples was an extension of Coolidge’s general philosophy of living by example. Kellogg reckoned that Coolidge, now nearing the end of his career, would naturally be ready to return to the law, coming full circle to where he had begun so many years before in the Forbes Library. And even as far back as the Massachusetts Senate, Coolidge had counseled that in moments of confusion, the people and the lawmakers should turn their eyes back to the law. Observing a law in common had represented, he had said in that first great speech as president of the Senate, the “sublime revelation of man’s relation to man,” democracy in its truest form. During World War I, as Massachusetts governor, Coolidge had done everything to find political middle ground, to pull parties together to get through the siege. Now Coolidge would sacrifice in the same way for a war against wars, pulling all together, to beat, as Coolidge put it in the Havana speech, “swords into plowshares.”

Over the course of the fall it had become evident that the Geneva naval conference truly was failing; Kellogg’s case for a new peace treaty had become stronger. The flop meant that the naval arms race was back on, and that the United States would have to spend wildly to keep up: “I think there is a pretty strong feeling we should extend our building program,” Kellogg had written to the president. Once again the sheer expense of war and its consequences daunted them both. In that period, half of the budget went to the Department of War, interest payments, and veterans’ benefits. Anything that could reduce the pressure to spend on arms would be welcome at this point. But Kellogg had felt it best to keep the project quiet at first: even his own staff, he thought, must be kept partially in the dark. Gossips and snobs sat all over the State Department. If his men, or Coolidge’s, did not know the extent or seriousness of the treaty campaign, so much the better.

It had been mid-December when the white-haired secretary had commenced his treaty campaign. On December 22, the same week the Vermont delegation had implored Coolidge for money, the secretary of state made his crucial first move, speaking in a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Outlawry,” the word for the concept, was practically a synonym for “Borah.” To advance a related idea as his own, Kellogg knew, was to ensure that the proud Idaho senator would kill it. In the meeting Kellogg had therefore come at the topic obliquely, speaking of condemning war, and Franco-U.S. agreements, in the hopes that Senator Borah would take up the topic for himself. The plan had worked like a charm. “But Mr. Secretary,” Borah had said, “the American counterproposal should be a pact to outlaw war between all nations of the world. We should point out that this is too important to confine only to this country and France.” All of them, Borah had gone on, were frustrated with bilateral agreements such as the one Great Britain was writing with France on arms. Kellogg had held his tongue until Borah had polled the room and found support for a compact among nations. Indeed, the senators had rushed to push the treaty idea. “That’s the best way to get rid of the damn thing,” Senator George Moses of New Hampshire had thrown in enthusiastically. “Put the baby on their doorstep. Extend it to all nations.”

At the White House, meanwhile, there had been subtle signs that the president was warming to the treaty project. The evidence was in the household budget. In December, Miss Riley, the housekeeper, noticed with concern that she would have to spend above her monthly allowance to meet the extra costs of unexpected diplomatic invitations. A surprise extra dinner for the governor-general of Canada, along with a few other cabinet and diplomatic dinners, had featured caviar, green turtle soup, and other extravagances not always on the table, including beef tenderloin and extra imported grapes. “We really did spend a lot,” Miss Riley wrote apologetically to the president, a total of nearly $350 extra. But spending a little extra on coddling diplomats now might be an economy that would benefit the national household later.

Just after Christmas, Kellogg had finished his treaty draft. A call came in from the French—the Quai d’Orsay, too, was ready to talk about treaties. Kellogg, keen to get his text out before the French sent theirs, hurried over to the White House to win explicit approval of the project from Coolidge. The language was sufficiently general, Kellogg had explained, that it would not compromise the federal government’s sovereignty. The president heard the secretary out on a few other basic questions. The scene felt familiar, two lawyers working through a document. The constitutionality question that Coolidge raised in his State of the Union address was covered now: the power to defend itself remained with the United States, and Coolidge might choose how he construed the concept of defense. When Kellogg was finished laying out what was promised and what was necessary for such a treaty, Coolidge looked up and asked simply, “We can do that, can we not?” Kellogg replied that he thought they could.