Skip to Navigation Skip to Main Content

Book review: ‘Wilson,’ by A. Scott Berg

Profile image for Philip Seib
Philip Seib
This book cover image released by Putnam shows "Wilson," by A Scott Berg. The biography of President Woodrow Wilson will be released on Sept. 10.

Although Woodrow Wilson was president nearly a century ago, “Wilsonian” remains a complex political adjective, a mix of praise and rebuke. It implies an idealism that tends to drift away from the realpolitik that is presumed to govern relationships among nations. And yet, for a brief, shining Wilsonian moment, this president was thought to have led America through a conflict that would “make the world safe for democracy” and prove to be “the war to end all wars.”

He was a brilliant, conflicted man, rife with foibles and prey to illnesses that disrupted his life. In Wilson, A. Scott Berg presents a sympathetic but penetrating portrait that is essential reading for anyone interested in Wilson and his times. Winner of the National Book Award for his biography of editor Maxwell Perkins and the Pulitzer Prize for his study of Charles Lindbergh, Berg sifted through vast amounts of research material to tell the story of the man who, Berg writes, “enjoyed the most meteoric rise in American history.”

In October 1910, Wilson had never run for office and was the president of a small college, Princeton University. In November 1912, he was elected president of the United States. He had emerged from the ivory tower to serve briefly as a reform-minded governor of New Jersey, and his professorial demeanor appealed to voters dismayed by the fracas in the Republican Party in which the incumbent, William Howard Taft, was challenged by his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt. When Roosevelt could not unseat Taft, he ran as the Bull Moose Party candidate, handing the 1912 election to Wilson.

In the summer of 1914, Europe plunged into war. Wilson was initially resolute in keeping America neutral. He said: “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” He was re-elected in 1916, relying heavily on the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” but shortly after his second inauguration he asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany.

At the time, Berg writes, the German general staff ranked the United States militarily “somewhere between Belgium and Portugal.” But the infusion of American men and materiel was enough to bring victory to the Allies.

World War I marked a bloody coming of age for the United States. About 117,000 American soldiers died in the fighting, a relatively small number among approximately 10 million military deaths. In addition, tens of millions of civilians died as the result of combat or the accompanying famine and disease. “Western Civilization,” observes Berg, “lay prostrate from the most convulsive four years it had ever known.”

With its homeland physically untouched by combat and in its unaccustomed status as the world’s leading creditor nation, the United States was the new superpower. Wilson and America were looked to by an exhausted Europe as the saviors that would establish an orderly peace. Wilson certainly tried. He said that civilian leaders, such as he, must “use our proper weapons of counsel and agreement to see to it that there never is such a war again.”

He led the crafting of a peace treaty that he believed would accomplish this, but he encountered fierce political resistance at home, particularly toward the treaty provision that called for creation of a League of Nations that would resolve disputes before they became wars. Wilson asked the U.S. Senate, “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?”

In the end, it was Wilson’s heart that was broken. While campaigning for the treaty, he suffered an incapacitating stroke that was kept secret from the public. The White House barely functioned. Berg notes that the president’s wife, Edith Wilson, “took it upon herself to filter and analyze every issue that required presidential action, executing those duties to the best of her ability.”

Broken in spirit and health, Wilson faded even while admiration for his global vision grew. When he died in 1924, then-President Calvin Coolidge wrote: “His acts were prompted by high motives, and his sincerity of purpose cannot be questioned. He gave utterance to the aspiration of humanity with an eloquence which held the attention of all the Earth and made America a new and enlarged influence in the destiny of mankind.”

Woodrow Wilson’s passion and eloquence were genuine but sometimes became too detached from the political reality he understood but never wholly mastered. His story is inspiring and tragic, and A. Scott Berg tells it brilliantly.



A. Scott Berg

(Putnam, $40)

Plan your life

A. Scott Berg will speak at noon Friday at the Rosewood Crescent Hotel, 400 Crescent Court, Dallas. Tickets are $45 for members of the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth and their guests, $60 for nonmembers at or 214-965-8412.

He’ll also appear at 7 p.m. Friday at Barnes & Noble, 7700 W. Northwest Highway, Dallas.

6articles left

Get Unlimited Digital Access