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The book reveals in House a political artist of rare talent and a diplomat of enviable tact and insight, as well as a courageous statesman. It should be a textbook for diplomats during the next 50 years. His foresight, not only political and diplomatic but even military, was extraordinary. In 1916 Wilson needed 266 electoral votes to be reelected. House made a list of 21 states with 230 electoral votes, not only in the solid South but scattered over the entire country, and said to Wilson: "These you will surely win, and you must pick up 36 more electoral votes from the rest of the country." In the list of "certainties" not one failed. Throughout 1915 and 1916 he warned the Allied statesmen that Russia might make a separate peace before the War was over. He declared that there would be no political trouble in Germany during the War, but if Germany lost there would be an upheaval within. In 1916 at dinner with Lloyd George, Grey, Balfour and Asquith, House declared his belief that the Germans would soon start a drive on the western front and suggested Verdun as the point of attack. Exactly a week later the famous attack on Verdun began.
But it was as a diplomat and constructive statesman that he excelled. He planned a Pan-American policy in 1914 that was to supersede the Monroe Doctrine—a plan that fell through when his whole attention was taken up by the War, but which had in it many points that were afterward incorporated in the League of Nations. He suggested to Wilson many things that became landmarks in foreign policy. He took part in framing many of the President's famous utterances, suggested topics for others and edited out not a few ill-timed phrases that had a way of creeping into Wilson's public remarks. Besides all this, he was the President's political assistant par excellence. And the cynically surprising fact remains that coupled with so much practical ability was a uniformly high idealistic purpose.
The Editor. Charles Seymour, Sterling Professor of History at Yale, to whom Colonel House entrusted his papers for arrangement and selection, is a man of distinction not only in his profession but out of it. He began his career by taking his A. B. at Cambridge University, returned to New Haven (his birthplace) and repeated the process at Yale. After that, M. A., Ph. D., Litt. D. and LL. D. followed in natural sequence. Reputation came to him in 1916 when he published his Diplomatic Background of the War. In 1919 he was one of the U. S. experts who served on the commissions which drew up the peace treaty. Now, only 41, he is no penurious pedagog, no mere historian, but a well-to-do, cultivated gentleman," noted in his profession.