Cary T. Grayson Diary

Cary T. Grayson Diary

Grayson, Cary T. (Cary Travers), 1878-1938

WWP17199

1919 June 17

Cary T. Grayson Papers, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, Staunton, Virginia

English

There was no meeting of the Council of Four in the morning, and the President spent part of the time in conference with some of the American Commissioners. Before lunch he went for a drive and returned in time to proceed to a meeting at the Quai d’Orsay, which was unique in its aspects, inasmuch as the Council of Ten was reconvened and the enemy delegates were permitted to come into Paris for the first time since the war. The Turkish Delegation, which had been invited to come to France to present the position of the Turkish Empire, was heard by the Council of Ten. They were very different in their attitude from that of either the Germans or the Austrians, inasmuch as they accepted full responsibility for Turkey’s part in the war and admitted the atrocities that had been charged against the Turkish troops and the Turkish government, but pointed out that Turkey itself was brought into the war by the machinations of the Young Turks’ Committee, headed by Enver Pasha. They appealed to the Council of Ten on behalf of the 300,000,000 Mohammedans scattered throughout the world not to take Constantinople away from Turkey. They pointed out that it had been the seat of the religious head of the Mohammedan race and that now to remove control by the Turks from that city would cause great unrest in all of the countries where the Mohammedan population predominated. They were given a courteous hearing but no action whatever was taken.

After the meeting I had a talk with the President and he said to me: “Lloyd George seems to have a genuine fondness for you. He asked me if I were not going to take you to Belgium with me he would like to have you go off on a little trip with him to Verdun and other places in the devastated regions. I told him that I could not spare you.”

The President told me that he had been watching the attitude of the Republican majority in the Untied States Senate, especially in the manner in which they were endeavoring to embarrass him and to try to put through a resolution declaring that the League of Nations Constitution must be separated from the treaty itself. The President said that the Senate as a matter of fact had no right to debate the treaty before it actually had been turned over to them in an official manner; that the unofficial copies which they were discussing were in no sense the completed documents which they would have to pass upon. The President said that he intended to examine the Constitution of the United States very carefully to determine exactly what his rights were in the premises, and he said that if he found that he enjoyed the power to do so, he would take the treaty away from the Senate if the Knox Resolution should be passed.

I had prepared a memorandum for the President about the King of Belgium, Cardinal Mercier, Burgomaster Max of Brussels, and about the working people of Belgium. The President took these notes and after dinner sat down and studied them with a view to incorporating references to them in the speeches which he planned to make on the trip to Belgium, which we begin tonight.

We departed for Belgium from the Gard du Nord at 10:30 tonight.

Diary