ABSTRACT
Walter Lippmann returned to the New Republic (NR), saw his old friends, took on an assignment as correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, and tried to pick up where he had left off. But his old optimism was gone. By mid-March 1919 an apprehensive Lippmann wrote Colonel House of the "resentment" caused by the President's failure to explain what he was doing. Woodrow Wilson's initial refusal to join the intervention encouraged the young diplomat William C. Bullitt to go to Moscow — with Colonel House's blessing — to see what terms he could work out with Lenin. For Lippmann and his colleagues at the NR, the treaty was a terrible betrayal. Not only did it "balkanize" Central Europe by breaking up Austria-Hungary, but it imposed a reparations burden that threatened to overwhelm the fledgling German republic and breed a spirit of revanche. However just Lippmann's accusation might have been, it was mixed with a good deal of self-justification.
