Woodrow Wilson

Rating:
Summary: Not quite the real Woodrow Wilson
Review: While a decent short introduction to the man and his career, Auchincloss passes over all too lightly the more significant aspects of Wilson as man and president. Wilson was a very partisan man who never doubted that his views were the only correct ones. His myopia concerning race and his order removing many blacks from federal employment in 1913 needed greater emphasis. His unbending defense of the Treaty of Versailles even when it failed to fulfil his own Fourteen Points seems to have been lost in the shuffle. Wilson had, as Auchincloss argues, at least two personalities. The scandal of his second wife keeping his incapacity from the American people and its leaders after a series of strokes was inexcusable. All in all this is a much too favorable portrayal of Wilson. It is well written as one would expect from Auchincloss, but carries all the biases of its author over and against the evidence that could be brought to a more balanced, but ultimately, negative evaluation of Woodrow Wilson as man and president.

Rating:
Summary: A fair assessment
Review: While I found the biography to be very informative concerning general historical information, I was disappointed in the lack of depth given some very important events in Wilson's era. Glossed over were the development of Wilson's post-WWI proposals, and his scandalous second marriage so soon after his first wife's death. But a lack of detail is what you can expect in a book that's only 120 pages long.

The author's writing left me confused at times, and seem to inject too much of his personal opinion without enough substantiating fact. If you take Auchinloss at his word, Wilson was a mother-loving person with dual personalities who was easily swayed by the opinion of a few advisors. This hardly sounds like a man who theorized the United Nations thirty years before its time.

While I will recommend this book, I would caution readers to remember that it is a short biography that would read well on a 2 hour plane trip.

Rating:
Summary: It whet the appetite of this would-be Wilson critic.
Review: Yes, Louis Achincloss ultimately fails to present Woodrow Wilson in the vast complexity he appears to deserve. However, reading his book intrigued this young conservative (who previously - and ignorantly - took Wilson for another of our presidential jokes). I rather sensed that instilling his audience with a desire to inquire further about our 28th president was precisely the author's intention. With deft subtlety, Auchincloss arranges the brief material at his disposal to give us Wilson the enigma... rather than Wilson the rhetorical foil.

The great question of our time (but how could Auchincloss have predicted this?) has suddenly become one of foreign policy. Not for decades have American readers been deluged with so many books on diplomacy and international relations. Writers as different as Halberstam, Hitchens, Kaplan and Kissinger have joined the fray; not to mention a host of lesser writers suddenly alarmed by the great, perhaps terrible civilization to our East.

Auchincloss returns us to the very beginnings of American foreign policy. It is a time of high ideals, but few are as idealistic as the reserved and scholarly Wilson. This especially high-minded president must suddenly face a world torn by war. Wilson's impulses are entirely in keeping with his Christian character. He holds out until the Zimmerman telegram turns public opinion decisively towards war. Upon entering, he thankfully (and unlike our contemporary "Wilsonians") insists on America's unilateral command of its own soldiers. In less than two years, they wrap up the war for the Allies.

Then he moves towards his ultimate goal. Messianic and perhaps noble to a fault, Wilson, with the earnestness of any would-be beauty Queen, wishes for World Peace. Less a product of politics than of Presbyterianism, he cannot comprehend the forces who would exploit his inexperience and idealism at Versailles. Of course, we know this already... but Auchincloss makes it harder for us to simply dismiss this sort of naivete. With fine little brush strokes, he complicates the peace-loving Wilson. He selects tidbits of speeches that flash with Biblical furor. Also, he makes a point of Wilson's admiration for Edmund Burke. Throughout the narrative he indicates why Wilson's career brought him further to the left. The snobs of 1900s Princeton (over which he presided as Dean) are not unlike the Republicans of two decades hence; the very senators who steal his moment of triumph by refusing to ratify the sacred Fourteen Points. There was an evident logic to this leftward drift. It was sped somewhat ironically by his multiple strokes. But even someone who opened this book with every desire to dislike Wilson could not help but be touched. Auchincloss' portrait refutes some measure of that meanness which Conservatives forever heap on Wilson.

Of course, the book is not perfect. In keeping with the "Brief Lives" series, it is remarkably short... easily a two-hour read. This reviewer cannot fathom how Mao or Mozart, Dante or Churchill could be so condensed. The authors of the "Brief Lives" of Elvis, Crazy Horse, and Andy Warhol have, by contrast, somewhat easier tasks. About their subjects, there is either little material or else little that needs said.

Very likely, readers attracted to a volume of this brevity will have little previous knowledge of Wilson's friends and foes. Achincloss's selection of material sometimes appeared to be aimed at insiders - that is to say, other Wilson scholars. Important in this regard are his discussions of William Jennings Bryan, Henry Cabot Lodge, and especially his Secretary of State Colonel House. After years of loyal service, Wilson ceased to recieve House following his own disappointments and ill-health at Versailles. The author renders this sudden break with the fullest drama so slim a volume might possibly contain.

If you want the entire story, you will probably need to look elsewhere. If instead you want an intriguing preface to the whole story, read this book. Auchincloss helps complicate the great question of our time by giving us a complicated Woodrow Wilson. The book is a feather for the cap of anyone wanting to inject our foreign policy with high-minded convictions like human rights, the spreading of Democracy, or - oh yeah - World Peace.