The President.
* * * * *
The White House,
Washington
(Manuscript: Of course I will help. I was under the impression that I
was helping. But I will do it at my own time and in my own way.
W. W.)
Further light on the Cox campaign.]
When I intimated to him that the Cox defeat might in the long run prove a blessing, he rebuked me at once by saying: "I am not thinking of the partisan side of this thing. It is the country and its future that I am thinking about. We had a chance to gain the leadership of the world. We have lost it, and soon we will be witnessing the tragedy of it all."
After this statement to me with reference to the result of the election, he read to me a letter from his old friend, John Sharp Williams, United States senator from Mississippi, a letter which did much to bolster and hearten him on this, one of the most trying days of his life in the White House. The letter follows:
DEAR MR. PRESIDENT:
God didn't create the world in one act. I never expected that we would win in the United States the first battle in the campaign for a league of nations to keep the peace of the world. Our people were too "set" by our past history and by the apparent voice of the Fathers in an opposite course, a course of isolation. This course was hitherto the best for accomplishing the very purpose we must now accomplish by a seemingly contrary course. We must now begin the war in earnest. We will win it. Never fear, the stars in their courses are fighting with us. The League is on its feet, learning to walk, Senate coteries willy-nilly.
As for the vials of envy and hatred which have been emptied on your head by all the un-American things, aided by demagogues who wanted their votes and got them, abetted by yellow journals, etc., these lines of Byron can console you: