Colonel House

A Biography of Woodrow Wilson's Silent Partner

De: Charles E. Neu

Narrado por: Michael Quinlan

Duración: 22 h y 1 m

Resumen del Editor

A man who lived his life mostly in the shadows, Edward M. House is little known or remembered today; yet he was one of the most influential figures of the Wilson presidency. Wilson's chief political advisor, House played a key role in international diplomacy and had a significant hand in crafting the Fourteen Points at the Paris Peace Conference. Though the intimate friendship between the president and his advisor ultimately unraveled in the wake of these negotiations, House's role in the Wilson administration had a lasting impact on twentieth-century international politics. In this seminal biography, Charles E. Neu details the life of "Colonel" House, a Texas landowner who rose to become one of the century's greatest political operators. Ambitious and persuasive, House worked largely behind the scenes, developing ties of loyalty and using patronage to rally party workers behind his candidates. In 1911 he met Woodrow Wilson, and almost immediately the two formed what would become one of the most famous friendships in American political history.

House became a high-level political intermediary in the Wilson administration, proving particularly adept at managing the intangible realm of human relations. After World War I erupted, House, realizing the complexity of the struggle and the dangers and opportunities it posed for the United States, began traveling to and from Europe as the president's personal representative. Eventually he helped Wilson recognize the need to devise a way to end the war that would place the United States at the center of a new world order. In this balanced account, Neu shows that while House was a resourceful and imaginative diplomat, his analysis of wartime politics was erratic. He relied too heavily on personal contacts, often exaggerating his accomplishments and missing the larger historical forces that shaped the policies of the warring powers.

©2014 Charles E. Neu (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Brings out new understanding perhaps America’s least known but most powerful figures of the early part of the past century.

Brings one of the quietest but most powerful behind the scenes American diplomats and advisors out into the open. Neu provides perhaps the most detailed look at a very misunderstood figure.

Life and Times of a Venal Political Fixer

This is a pretty interesting story that is probably not fully understood as House himself would need to tell us the full story. How a political con man got the USA into a European Dynastic suicide war, WWI. Nevermind the "foreign entanglement" thing that Washington said. Nevermind the Jeffersonian concerns of concentrated financial power. Nevermind that House's dad was a foreign contrabandist for the Confederacy, making a fortune from the slaughter of American youth. Was House just the useful American idiot in a global idiot cabal of war or was he just an "honest" vulture contrabandist like his old dad? Why did cruise-liners blow up like munitions boats? This book pretends at scholarship, but is incredibly poor. Edward Bernays and the House of Morgan later all bragged and admitted that WWI was a long con to protect bond interest in the UK, this was common knowledge and outrage in the 1920's, after the foolish war.

(1) understand how EM House used "our crowd" cronyism in Texas politics to parlay political fixing into an opaque real estate arbitrage scheme
(2) how he lived outside his means and spent incredible money traveling without any official state position, selling and pretending influence - never had an actual job but lived like a Rockefeller heir. Even Rockerfeller, Carnegie, and JP Morgan had to run the business, they could not spend all their time in hotels and "summering".
(3) how he did all this without education or a background in diplomacy, even flunked out of college - yet "worried" about standout student and Governor Calvin Coolidge's capacity.
(4) how he expediently influenced the creation of a Central Bank in the USA and emotionally owned the Sec of Treasury, A stone gangster like Andrew Jackson would have personally shot EM House in a NYC street in the 1830's - Gangland Style
(5) how he groomed emotionally weak people to give him influence without accountability, an American Rasputin
(6) how EM House undermined William Jennings Bryant, the Secretary of State during WWI, WJB, who wanted real neutrality and did not abide dynastic idiocy.
(7) how a guy that basically hated Mexicans was influencing US- Mexican relations during the Revolutionary Period of Mexico.
(8) How a complete failure of a human was placed as the Treasury Secretary during the Wilson Administration. McAddoo, who was not fit to manage a department at a grocery store, was in office when nation changing things like the National Income Tax and Federal Reserve were created.

House was lucky to find an emotional basket case in Woodrow Wilson. Both guys had delusions of running the world. Wilson was actually fired from Princeton for overstepping administrative bounds, went crazy as a result before he was discovered by the New Jersey political machine as a good Strawman. EM House himself wrote fantasy books about being an "administrator dictator" of the United States. Basically both men where proto-fascists before the world knew the word.