ABSTRACT
The Inquiry's mandate was as broad as it was vague, consisting, as House told Walter Lippmann, "not only of a study of the facts, but of quiet negotiation, especially with the neutrals, so that America could enter the peace conference as the leader of a great coalition of forces". The Inquiry, working from maps and piles of statistics, attacked the question of frontiers by drawing up charts showing the concentration of national groups within Europe. Lippmann was exultant over Woodrow Wilson's speech. Many of the phrases had come almost intact from the memorandum he had produced from the Inquiry data. Regarding the Ottoman Empire, Wilson accepted the Inquiry's recommendation that Turkey be guaranteed security and its subject peoples granted autonomy. James T. Shotwell resented that Lippmann had taken over his job as editor, and complained that he "regarded his own place in the Inquiry as more important than that of any other".
