Word: bonsall
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...winter afternoon in Berlin in 1915, Stephen Bonsal met a bewildered American vainly trying to get directions from passing Germans. They brushed him aside. Bonsal came to his rescue, and so became acquainted with wirepulling, involved, ambiguous Colonel Edward House, of Texas, the Harry Hopkins of the Wilson regime...
...Stephen Bonsal was soon acting under Colonel House's orders. He knew far more about Europe than House did. Born in Maryland, educated in New Hampshire (St. Paul's) and Germany (Heidelberg), Bonsal had in 1915 been a world traveler and newspaperman for 30 years, became a lieutenant colonel in World War I. For James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald (who, he says, was fond of "quoting winged words which, rightly or wrongly, he attributed to Abraham Lincoln"), Bonsal covered the meetings of Russian and German revolutionists in New York City and London, flew...
House drafted Bonsal to serve as his interpreter. Later, when the Peace Conference was being planned, Colonel Bonsal was called in again, first as adviser on Balkan affairs, then as interpreter for House and Wilson at secret meetings where no stenographic notes were kept and no official translations made. He kept his diary at Wilson's insistence. When he told the President that he was afraid the entries were indiscreet, Wilson said: "You can't be too indiscreet for me. I give you full absolution in advance...
Secrecy and Agony. Unfinished Business is a 313-page volume of intermingled diary entries and long passages of considered reminiscence that pictures the Peace Conference against the dark background of postwar Europe. It is a timely and important book. The Peace Conference that Colonel Bonsal saw is not the one that most U.S. historians and editorialists have presented. The dazed and suffering Europe that he saw on his long trips into its revolutionary interior is more familiar, but no one else has presented the plight of the plain people of Europe, in relation to the strained secrecy of the Conference...
Pistol Shot. The first entry in Unfinished Business carries a date as arresting as a pistol shot: November 7, 1918. The next-to-the-last-one is two days before Christmas, 1919, when Colonel Bonsal, out of the army at last, was holding a farewell dinner of reconciliation with a major who had previously threatened to shoot him on sight. But the central story of Unfinished Business is Europe in the spring of 1919. Its value rests upon the author's swings around postwar Europe...