http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/books/review/wilson-by-a-scott-berg.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Excerpts from the review
Wilson took the presidency two years later,
only the second Democrat to capture the White House since the Civil War.
He possessed a rare instinct for power and how to use it. Once in
Washington he put his theories to the test, audaciously choosing to rule
more as a prime minister than a traditional chief executive. Within 10
months he had passed a progressive agenda that had been stalled for a
generation, slashing tariff rates that protected monopolies, passing the
first permanent federal income tax and creating the Federal Reserve
system to end the bank panics that continually ravaged the American
economy. More reforms — to bolster antitrust laws, discourage child
labor and inaugurate the eight-hour day and workers’ compensation —
followed.
Handsome and charismatic, Wilson was our first modern president, holding
regular news conferences, complaining about having to live in
Washington and delighting in popular distractions like baseball games,
detective stories, golf and especially the new moving pictures. He
adored women and had remarkably modern partnerships with them, sharing
every aspect of his work and his ideas with his wife, Ellen, and, after
she died, with his second wife, Edith. He also had a longtime — and
apparently platonic — female friend.
Both his temper and his injudicious selection of advisers were
indicative of flaws that would come to devour his presidency. Wilson
attracted some of the most talented figures in American political
history to his administration and his causes — Franklin Roosevelt, Louis
Brandeis, Herbert Hoover, Walter Lippmann and Bernard Baruch, among
others — but too often he failed to delegate well, routinely writing his
own speeches and even typing his own policy papers. Absolute loyalty
was valued over candor. Again and again, Wilson broke with his closest
associates when he felt they had betrayed him.
Despite these tendencies, he managed much of the war effort brilliantly,
delivering a surprisingly effective army of more than two million men
to France by the end of 1918. The United States stumbled onto the world
stage a full-blown colossus, turning overnight from the world’s largest
debtor nation to practically its sole creditor. Arriving in Europe to
negotiate the peace, Wilson was greeted with an ecstasy no American
president had ever matched, hailed as the savior of mankind.
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