1 - What Really Happened at Paris? Keynes and Dulles

Summary

At the Paris peace conference in 1919, Keynes served as a member of the British delegation. He often represented the Treasury although himself only a temporary civil servant aged thirty-six. But there were equally youthful members of the US delegation with whom he worked closely, initially in support of the position adopted by President Woodrow Wilson in seeking a negotiated peace with Germany. Hence Keynes’s close contact with both Norman Davis and also John Foster Dulles, then a young lawyer. Their task was to define the ‘reparations’ due from Germany under the Armistice agreement – often called the ‘Lansing Note’ after the American Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, who was Dulles’s uncle.