unately, it was precisely in the social sphere that he had,
before the war, experienced certain disappointments in Berlin,
which, as far as we were concerned, might have been avoided, and
it is possible that Mr. Gerard may have been influenced by these
regrettable incidents. In any case, the Ambassador did not like
Berlin, and he took too little pains to conceal the fact. Mr. Gerard
was not the sort of man to be able to swim against the tide of
anti-German feeling, once it had become the proper thing in America
to be pro-Ally. As to whether any other United States Ambassador
would have shown less hostility to us, however, may be reasonably
doubted. I have already singled out the Adlon dinner as a proof
of the fact that Mr. Gerard could behave differently.

Be all this as it may, the reasons which were alleged genuinely
to justify the hostile attitude of General Headquarters towards
myself, struck me as not being sufficiently weighty. I say "General
Headquarters" intentionally, for the Kaiser was manifestly only
prejudiced against me by the usual whisperings that characterized
the Wilhelminian epoch.

Nevertheless, I had conducted the most important negotiations of
the war, and the Monarch must, in any case, have had the wish to
hear the report of it all from the person chiefly concerned. Besides,
the Kaiser knew as well as I did, that in Washington I had pursued
the policy of which he and the Chancellor were actually in favor.
Otherwise, the Imperial Memorandum, which was sent to me about
the U-boat war, and to which I have already referred, would be
inexplicable. Meanwhile, however, this policy had not been able
to prevail against the preponderating influence of the military
party, who demanded the U-boat campaign. Now, of course, I have no
longer any doubt that the views which General Ludendorff expressed
against me before the Examination Committee of the National Assembly,
simply as his personal opinion and without proof, constituted more
or less what was suggested to the Kaiser at this time. Briefly, they
wished to make me the scapegoat for the United States' entry into
the war, and this, despite the fact that all that I had prophesied
in regard to American policy had proved correct, and all that my
opponents had prophesied had proved wrong. In their efforts to
accomplish this end, they found that a poisonous mixture could be
brewed out of my efforts for peace, and my well-known democratic
views, which the Kaiser