Book of the week: Wilson by A. Scott Berg

(Putnam, $40)

Woodrow Wilson “had no real knack for learning from other people,” said Jill Lepore in The New Yorker. A Princeton lecturer who rose overnight from academia to the White House, he led America and its allies to triumph in World War I but paid a dear price for trusting too much in the transformative powers of his office and personal acumen: He’s remembered most today for an arguably noble failure— fumbling away the chance for an enduring peace by marshaling insufficient support for his proposed League of Nations. In this monumental new portrait of Wilson, the award-winning biographer A. Scott Berg casts his subject as a tragic figure, and the author’s “fluent prose and honest sense of majesty” make us feel the sting. The trouble is, Berg, like his subject, has vastly overestimated the degree to which any one man can bend world events to his will.

Yet Wilson did achieve much, said Ariel Gonzalez in The Miami Herald. A Virginia native, this son of a Presbyterian minister was running Princeton in 1910 when Democrats put him up as a reform candidate for New Jersey governor. He rode victory there to Washington, where his first-term achievements “amounted to a progressive wish list come true”—tougher antitrust laws, better worker protections, and creation of the Federal Reserve. Berg sheds less new light on Wilson’s politics, though, than on his character, said Martin Rubin in The Washington Times. “Quietly, methodically, the author examines almost every aspect of his subject’s life,” from his Christian faith to an extramarital dalliance to the strokes that rendered him an invalid during his last 18 months in office. As a portrait of a man, Wilson “succeeds magnificently.”

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Berg even acknowledges his hero’s flaws, said Kevin Baker in The New York Times. He chides Wilson for racism, noting that he packed his Cabinet with bigoted Southerners and segregated federal workplaces for the first time. Yet when the story turns to the push for the Treaty of Versailles, Berg perpetuates “the enduring national legend of Wilson as Christ”—a martyr whose dreams were crushed by small-minded peers. But is it really likely that the U.S., as a member of the League of Nations, would have halted Hitler before he plunged Europe into a new war? “In short, did Woodrow Wilson’s martyrdom really matter so much in the end...or is it more a story we like to tell ourselves?”