Wilson

“With the prescience that all truly great biographers possess, Berg discovered in Woodrow Wilson a figure who would understand Washington’s current state of affairs.”—Vanity Fair

From Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times–bestselling author A. Scott Berg comes the definitive—and revelatory—biography of one of the great American figures of modern times.

One hundred years after his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson still stands as one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, and one of the most enigmatic. And now, after more than a decade of research and writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg has completed Wilson—the most personal and penetrating biography ever written about the 28th President.

In addition to the hundreds of thousands of documents in the Wilson Archives, Berg was the first biographer to gain access to two recently-discovered caches of papers belonging to those close to Wilson. From this material, Berg was able to add countless details—even several unknown events—that fill in missing pieces of Wilson’s character and cast new light on his entire life.

From the scholar-President who ushered the country through its first great world war to the man of intense passion and turbulence , from the idealist determined to make the world “safe for democracy” to the stroke-crippled leader whose incapacity and the subterfuges around it were among the century’s greatest secrets, the result is an intimate portrait written with a particularly contemporary point of view – a book at once magisterial and deeply emotional about the whole of Wilson’s life, accomplishments, and failings. This is not just Wilson the icon – but Wilson the man.

Fiche Technique

• Author : A Scott Berg
• ISBN-13 : 9781101636411
• Publisher : Penguin Group (USA)
• Publication date : 09/10/2013
• Sold by : Penguin Group

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

His Lindbergh garnered a Pulitzer Prize for Biography and his life of legendary literary editor Maxwell Perkins won him a National Book Award' but with this narrative about scholar/politician/statesman Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), A. Scott Berg has found his most powerful subject. His mammoth, 832-page biography of the two-term president immerses us in the controversies and contradictions of a chief executive who was reelected on a banner of "He Kept Us Out of War" only to sink us into the bloody confrontations of World War I just months later. Drawing on hundreds of thousands of documents including two recently recovered caches, Berg presents a Wilson who not even his contemporaries fully knew. Certain to be one of the most discussed, reviewed, and popular books of the holiday season.

The New York Times Book Review - Kevin Baker

A. Scott Berg tells the story of Wilson, the man, very well indeed. The author of four previous prizewinning, best-selling biographies, he has a novelist's eye for the striking detail, and a vivid prose style.

Publishers Weekly

This won’t replace John Milton Cooper Jr.’s superb 2009 biography of the United States’ 28th president (Woodrow Wilson), and one could argue that Berg’s isn’t needed so soon after Cooper’s; other than two caches of papers belonging to Wilson’s daughter Jesse and his physician, nothing significantly new about him has been learned in the past four years. Notwithstanding, Berg (he won a Pulitzer for Lindbergh) has written a lively, solid book. It’s more digestible than Cooper’s scholarly tome, and Berg does a better job of capturing Wilson’s personality. Before he occupied the Oval Office, Wilson served as president of Princeton; Berg—like Cooper—is an alumnus of the university, and is generally sympathetic to the man (he puts much emphasis on Wilson’s love for his two wives and characterizes him as a passionate lover as well as a determined leader), while taking a more critical stand against his racial views and policies, his handling of the League of Nations, and of the secrecy that surrounded his late-presidency illness. Most importantly, Berg presents Wilson’s failure to win the world over to his post-WWI vision as a personal and national tragedy. He’s right, but Berg’s likening of Wilson’s life to biblical stages is overkill (chapter titles include “Ascension,” “Gethsemane,” etc.). Fortunately, the theme of tragedy—while nothing new—binds the book and lifts it above more conventional biographies. Photos. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Sept.)

New York Times Book Review

Berg tells the story of Wilson, the man, very well indeed…he has a novelist's eye for the striking detail, and a vivid prose style. (9/22)

Richmond Times-Dispatch

A splendid look at [Wilson's] life and legacy…In this majestic biography, [Berg] succeeds in capturing Wilson the man as well as Wilson the politician…With the sweep of his narrative, the wealth of his detail, the clarity of his prose and the breadth of his vision, Berg has produced an insightful and intimate work that is likely to stand as the definitive biography of one of the nation's most consequential leaders.

Miami Herald

Berg is a masterful biographer…[Wilson is] absorbing.

Library Journal

For this intimate portrait of our 28th president, in the works for over a decade, Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning biographer Berg had a jump on the competition. He was the first author to gain access to two recently discovered caches of papers belonging to Wilson's daughter and to his personal physician.

Kirkus Reviews

Accomplished biographer Berg (Lindbergh, 1998, etc.) emphasizes the extraordinary talents of this unlikely president in an impressive, nearly hagiographic account. Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), writes the author, was a much more complex figure than he appeared to be; he was a man of astounding depths, conflicting desires and erudition, driven to make history by his passionate ideals. Titling his chapters rather grandiloquently with biblical catchwords usually associated with Christ's journey (from "Advent" to "Pieta"), Berg brings out an enormously sympathetic side to the Princeton-educated lecturer who was first and foremost a brilliant writer. Wilson took his first postgraduate job teaching women at Bryn Mawr; he was an uxorious husband (twice) and devoted father to three daughters. Indeed, he was wildly in love with his soon-to-be second wife, Edith, just as the first great crisis of his presidency erupted over whether or not to go to war with Germany after the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915. A man of principles who ruled with rhetoric, Wilson took the controversial step of attending in person the Versailles Peace Conference, absenting himself from the United States (and the domestic political fray) for a now-unimaginable six months. A stable Europe could only be built on "a peace of justice," he insisted; the pride of his life was the establishment of the League of Nations and implementation of his Fourteen Points, while his heartbreak remained the refusal of Congress to enact either. Berg passes more lightly over the Virginia-born Wilson's less-than-admirable position on African-American civil rights. The author devotes a good portion of the book to the years following Wilson's 1919 stroke, the severity of which the public did not fathom; it was a well-kept secret that Edith largely ran the White House in the final 18 months of his presidency. Berg portrays Wilson as an utterly new kind of chief executive, in a mold that has yet to be refilled. Readable, authoritative and, most usefully, inspiring.

The Barnes & Noble Review

It is a truth universally acknowledged among presidential scholars that one criticizes Woodrow Wilson at one's peril when speaking to Princeton Men. They tend to exaggerate the good, gloss over the bad, and ignore the truly ugly. A. Scott Berg, a prizewinning biographer of Lindberg, Max Perkins, and Audrey Hepburn, is a Princeton man. And while he certainly falls within the booster camp (known to its alums as "Princeton in the nation's service"), his deep knowledge of the university's traditions and culture provides him — and subsequently his readers — with a similarly deep insight into the mind and character of Wilson. It also helps that Berg had access to new troves of Wilson's correspondence (with one of his daughters and with his personal physician), which enables this book to flesh out the details and offer considered judgments about Wilson's personal behavior and standards of conduct.

Wilson grew up in several southern towns (his father was a peripatetic minister, often shifting congregations) and witnessed some of the terrible destruction wrought by Union armies in Georgia. He came to value reading late in his youth (he didn't learn how to read until he was eleven) but did well enough at school to get into Davidson, and after a failed year there, he regrouped and went to Princeton. As Berg recounts it, much of his political style was formed at this small college: he joined clubs and with his energy and enthusiasm quickly rose to leadership, after which he wrote new charters or constitutions. He caught the postwar wave of enthusiasm for a more parliamentary system of government, and his senior essay turned into an article on fixing the flaws of American national government, which was accepted for publication at the International Review by an up-and- coming intellectual named Henry Cabot Lodge.

Wilson tried law but was bored. He turned to his first love, the world of ideas, and without serious academic credentials (no doctorate yet received from his graduate school at Johns Hopkins) he nevertheless secured a position as an instructor at Bryn Mawr College. It was quickly apparent that he had no gift for teaching young women, and when he left for another post at Wesleyan, it was with the self-realization that, as he wrote to a friend, "I have for a long time been hungry for a class of men." (When he was inaugurated years later as president of Princeton, Bryn Mawr did not send a delegation.) He was soon recruited to teach at Princeton, and Berg gives us an inside view of Princeton customs and traditions, all of which Wilson embraced as a popular and highly regarded member of the faculty.

What Berg omits, though, is the content of Wilson's publications, and of the ideas floating in his mind, as he moved from his early embrace of the parliamentary system to a more nuanced view of the possibilities of presidential power, especially after President McKinley's triumph in winning consent to the Treaty of Paris (ending the Spanish-American War) over the opposition of the Speaker of the House. He also slides past Wilson's decision (while teaching at Wesleyan) to incorporate chunks of German scholarship almost verbatim (after his wife Ellen had translated them for him) into one of his major books, The State. Berg then provides one of the best accounts of Wilson's approach to governance as president of Princeton: become the leader of an organization; promote a reform agenda; when faced with opposition convert the practical plan into a moral imperative that must be won through an appeal on principle rather than through political compromise; use oratory to attempt to win over the opposition and sway the undecided; accuse those who continue to oppose the plan of a personal betrayal, and sever relations with opponents forever; make the battle a supreme physical and mental test; and bear the consequences of a brittle physical constitution. This was the case with the effort to reform the eating clubs and create the graduate school at Princeton, and it was later to be the template for the formation of the League of Nations.

Berg is a master of the modern style of presidential biography, in which the president's household and domestic relationships are interwoven in the narrative of national affairs. In Wilson's case, it reaches an apogee as his courtship of Mrs. Edith Galt (née Bolling) is narrated as the confrontation with Germany over its naval policies comes to a head. The approach (and Berg's brilliant writing style) is reminiscent of Doris Kearns Goodwin's biographies of FDR and Lincoln and Jon Meacham's illuminating portrait of Andrew Jackson. Berg eschews deep psychological interpretations of Wilson, most especially the flawed psychoanalytic effort by William Bullitt and Sigmund Freud, demonstrating that Bullitt's motivations were vengeful (he had been ignored as a young aide in the negotiations on the League in Paris). Berg's seventeen chapter titles all come from the Christian Testaments (Ascension, Advent, Baptism, Gethsemane, etc.), which is the tipoff that he sees Wilson's Presbyterian piety as the key to his character.

This is a book of vivid description: Berg brings the reader into the trustees' room at Princeton, into the convention halls during campaigns; and there isn't a parade, commemoration, or funeral that he has missed. We accompany Wilson to plays, concerts, music halls, vaudeville acts, and other entertainments of his times. But it's also a work of wonderful prose, as in this brief summary of the smitten Wilson's courtship of Edith Bolling: " 'She's a looker' the doorkeeper told Colonel Edmund W. Starling . . . .Wilson's personal bodyguard. 'He's a goner' confirmed Arthur Brooks, the President's valet."

As a wise biographer should, he lets Wilson's words and actions speak for themselves. But although we learn a great deal about Wilson's intellectual development as an undergraduate at Princeton (including brief summaries of papers he wrote), we never learn the significance of Wilson's new rhetorical approaches in the White House — which are so important that entire books have been written on the subject — and little about the impact of his scholarly writings on the new academic discipline of political science. We are given only a brief discussion of Wilson's program as governor of New Jersey or of the motivations of the party bosses who gave him the nomination. In Wilson's first two years as president much of the New Freedom legislation was passed: Berg dutifully recounts the highlights, including Wilson's effort to regulate industry to prevent the establishment of financial trusts, but he spends considerably more time on the history of Princeton and its post? Civil War development, Wilson's domestic arrangements, and his various hiking vacations in Europe. Berg describes Wilson's summer and fall months at Shadow Lawn in 1916. What Berg doesn't tell us is that it was an estate built by Benedict Greenhut, who had been the owner of the largest distillery in the world, a man who, ironically enough, had started the Distillers and Cattle Feeders Co. (also called the cattle trust) that united all distillers and for a time controlled the U.S. production of whisky.

Berg has made a wise choice in concentrating on what he does well, and no biography provides as thorough and as convincing case for Wilson's personal humanity. In Berg's hands, Wilson is a passionate lover, and both wives adored him. He played games with his children and late in his term of office made a great friend of the child of his personal physician, motoring with him around the District on a daily basis. He hid his temper, it is true, and was more likely to freeze people out of his circle than raise his voice to them, but in Berg's telling Wilson was an emotional man who paid a great price in keeping his emotions in check.

The book's penultimate story (and of course its dramatic climax) involves the defeat in the U.S. Senate of the Treaty of Versailles. This is perhaps the only place where it would have been good if Berg had spent some time on constitutional matters. He tells the story with dramatic details and personal touches, and is particularly illuminating about the relationships between Wilson and his Allied counterparts. He provides one of the most illuminating discussions of how Wilson's illness progressed and affected him during his speaking tour and thereafter. But he omits one central aspect of the story: Wilson's objections to the Reservations presented by Senator Lodge were based not on animosity toward Lodge, or a generalized disposition against compromise, but rather on the content of the reservations: Lodge was undermining presidential prerogatives (especially involving the use of military force) in ways Wilson could not accept.

Although Wilson's legacy with regard to women, African Americans, ethnic minorities, and the antiwar Left was decidedly mixed or wanting, Berg makes the case for his man. He opposed national action for woman suffrage, but after the amendment passed he worked hard for its ratification by the states. He segregated the federal workforce in the District of Columbia but early in his career spoke publicly in the South against both its practice of slavery and its decision to secede, and as president occasionally demonstrated compassion for the suffering of African Americans (though not nearly often enough, and Berg does not let him off the hook on his efforts to keep blacks out of Princeton). He made significant appointments of Jews to office, most notably his intellectual collaborator Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court (to balance his earlier appointment of the anti-Semitic McReynolds), and he backed the Balfour Declaration with its call for a national homeland for Jews in Palestine. He was hard on the antiwar movement: because he viewed Eugene Debs as disloyal he would not consider a request from his own attorney general to pardon Debs, and in his administration, as Berg notes, there was an ill- advised curtailment of First Amendment freedom during the World War.

In this biography Berg has brought Wilson to life. "The beauty about a Scotch-Irishman," he joked, "is that not only does he think he is right, he knows he is right." Jest aside, this was Wilson's great flaw, but it does not take away from him another great insight that guided his entire career: "Sometimes people call me an idealist," he told a crowd in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, while campaigning for the League of Nations. "Well, that is the way I know I am an American."

Richard Pious is Adolph and Effie Ochs Professor at Barnard College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University. He is the author of The President, Congress and the Constitution (1984), The War on Terrorism and the Rule of Law (2006), and Why Presidents Fail (2008).

Meet the Author

A. Scott Berg is the author of four bestselling biographies: Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, winner of the National Book Award; Goldwyn; Lindbergh, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; and Kate Remembered. He lives in Los Angeles.