Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Woodrow Wilson
A FAMOUS HISTORIAN RECALLS THE COUNTRY WHERE HE GREW UP
We lived in Indian summer and mistook it for spring. Winter lay ahead just when we thought June was on the way. The school, the town, and the people connected with both were coming to an end that seemed to be a beginning.
The job ran in the family; both his uncle and grandfather were Secretaries of State. Home life in a parsonage taught him piety, and the law precision. The rigid views of a world divided between good and evil he worked out, apparently, himself. Private letters and new taped recollections help explain the shaping of the man who set our Cold War foreign policy
About a dozen years ago Carol Burnett’s nightclub repertoire included a number, “I Made a Fool of Myself over John Foster Dulles.” In 1971, in an era of massive discontent with American foreign policy, Miss Burnett would be unwise to restore it to her program
The cantankerous Californian’s utterly candid opinions, over thirty years, of the Presidents he knew, the senators with whom he served, and the (to him) alarming changes in the America he loved
During the presidential election of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt and Hiram Johnson, the new Progressive party’s candidates for President and Vice President, stood—as Roosevelt delighted in putting it—at Armageddon and battled for the Lord.
The American system of choosing a President has not worked out badly, far as it may be from the Founding Fathers’ vision of a natural aristocracy
exhibit one in a gallery of men who fought the good fight in vain
In a little-known novel President Wilson’s private adviser depicted a benevolent American dictator
The great tragedy of the twenty-eighth President as witnessed by his loyal lieutenant, the thirty-first.
American Heritage Book Selection -- Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915-1933
American Heritage Book Selection -- Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915-1933
Discreet helpers have worked on the speeches and papers of many Presidents, but a nation in a time of trial will respond best “to the Great Man himself, standing alone”
In the summer of 1918, with Russia removed from World War I as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution, the United States sent troops into Russia at two points. It did so only after the greatest soul-searching on the part of President Wilson, who had said that “the treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations … will be the acid test of their good will …” Two factors influenced the decision. In the Far East, Japan had made a move to occupy Siberia, apparently threatening America’s “open door” policy for China. In North Russia, English and French leaders had hopes of reviving the eastern front against Germany. In addition, large stores of Allied war supplies had been left at the port of Archangel. The expedition to North Russia resulted in fierce combat between American and Soviet soldiers and throws significant light on the forty years of difficult relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that were to follow.
While Paris cheered “Voovro” the isolationist crowds back home cried "Impeach him!” and in a clash of imperious wills his dream evaporated
His career at Princeton prepared him for a larger role, but also showed his strange blend of strength and weakness
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