Maynard Keynes and the ‘Bamboozlement’ of Woodrow Wilson: What Really Happened at Paris? (Wilson, Lloyd George, pensions and pre-armistice agreement)

Abstract

Woodrow Wilson’s acceptance of Lloyd George’s demand for the inclusion of military pensions among the reparations payable to the Allies under the Treaty of Versailles was stigmatized by J.M. Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace as the most notorious of the President’s alleged breaches of faith with Germany. Keynes’s damning verdict remains virtually unquestioned. This paper reconsiders the case for pensions, suggests that the question was less clear-cut than Keynes insisted, and queries his influential account of Wilson’s supposed gullibility and culpability. The paper then considers Lloyd George’s intentions in the Pre-armistice agreement, from which the Allied right to reparations and pensions were derived.