Unfinished Business

Stephen Bonsal's account draws directly on the diaries he kept while serving as a private interpreter and confidant to President Woodrow Wilson and Colonel Edward House at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, a position that put him inside rooms most journalists and even most diplomats never entered. Bonsal, a longtime foreign correspondent who had covered wars across three continents before the First World War, records the private conversations, personal frictions, and behind the scenes bargaining among the Allied statesmen redrawing the map of postwar Europe, material that never made it into the conference's public communiques. The book pays particular attention to the plain people of Europe caught underneath the negotiations, the refugees, the wounded, and the populations whose borders were being settled by men in closed rooms far away.

Bonsal writes from the vantage of someone who had spent decades as a war correspondent and diplomat before this final, most consequential posting, having covered conflicts on three continents and served at American legations in Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, and Madrid before the First World War brought him to France in a military uniform. That long apprenticeship in watching how nations actually deal with one another gives the book the authority of firsthand access rather than secondhand reconstruction. Its title states its argument directly: the peace settled at Paris in 1919 left the continent's deepest problems unresolved, a judgment Bonsal delivers from inside the process rather than after the fact. It suits a reader interested in the personal texture of high diplomacy, the fatigue, vanity, and genuine idealism of the men who tried and largely failed to build a lasting peace.