At a celebrity fundraiser for then-candidate Howard Dean, Rob Reiner distanced his ideology from conservatives by declaring that to be a liberal meant "entertaining the possibility that you could be wrong."
The obvious riposte to this suggestion that conservatives harbored no self-doubt is the example of Barack Obama, who never ceased regarding his opponents—even Republican moderates like John McCain and Mitt Romney—as completely "wrong."
But for all his moral vanity, Obama was never implicated in the deaths of 116,708 Americans as was Woodrow Wilson, who upon being reelected in 1916, shifted his position from no "entangling alliances" to a determined effort to involve the United States in an "Old World" battle.
In this largely excellent and (for fans of Wilson) sometimes devastating biography, Patricia O'Toole attempts to give a yin and yang to Wilson's idealism. And in this, she is merely reflecting how conservatives and liberals have long regarded him.
Although they largely occupy common ground in the assertion that Wilson disastrously involved the United States in World War I, conservatives and liberals have differed on what was good and bad about him. Conservatives saluted Wilson's basic free enterprise beliefs, his support of limited government, and his hatred of the Bolsheviks (he sent an expeditionary force into Russia to protect countries from Lenin)—yet he instituted the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax. Liberals admire his distrust of corporations, his demands that property rights take a back seat to social justice—yet he supported segregation.
His idealistic foreign policy managed to split both conservatives and liberals. Hawkish cold warriors like Ronald Reagan promoted the belief that American idealism would lead to a Soviet collapse. Those of a more realpolitik variety, however, namely Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, saw such idealistic goals as a disaster. (To his credit though, Nixon did acknowledge that Reagan's prediction that the Soviet Union was about to implode—a prediction Nixon initially scoffed at—was correct.)
O'Toole's thesis is that the goal of Wilson's involvement in World War I—to create a lasting peace via a world organization, the doomed League of Nations—was a near miss.
But she scores her biggest points regarding his racism, particularly with how it was expressed in foreign policy. Wilson was all too eager to send in the fleet when the "villains" were of "another color." He hated Theodore Roosevelt who saw foreign policy as more strategy than idealism and was also quick to invade backyard countries. But Roosevelt never left behind the mess Wilson did.
The prime example of this involved Wilson's attempt to impose American democracy on the Mexican Revolution before World War I. To capture Pancho Villa, who ventured into U.S territory to kill American citizens, Wilson sent in 4,000 troops. Not only did Wilson fail to capture Villa, but he also bequeathed to Villa's general of the Mexican Revolution, Venustiano Carranza, an invaluable propaganda gift.
Carranza drew considerable support by asserting that America was trying to take over Mexico. With his sight turned to Europe, Wilson was forced to give up his democratic attempts in order to keep Mexico out of the German camp. As a result, Carranza, free from "Yankee involvement," created a revolution far different from American democracy.
O'Toole locates Wilson's bush-league failures in Mexico and at Versailles to his lack of political experience: He served a single term as governor of New Jersey. But his ineptitude went further back. His uncompromising morality betrayed his background as a fundamentalist Christian of the revivalist type convinced that "God was on their side." One must also reckon with Wilson's background as an academic. Rather than empirically question every concept, he was a forerunner of political correctness. Hardly a leftist, Wilson nevertheless joined the politically correct in refusing to accept opposing points of view.
Coupled together, Wilson's failures had an air of inevitability to them. His political inexperience did play a part in his failure to secure a lasting peace at Versailles with his assumption that the Allied victors would have no imperialist appetites. Perhaps nothing could have been done to halt these vengeful leaders—after all, the much more politically canny FDR (who claimed Wilson as his role model) also failed to reckon with another type of imperialism at Yalta.
But Ronald Reagan was also a two-term governor and was able to combine idealism and toughness in a manner beyond Wilson. He stood up to Gorbachev by telling the Soviet leader that he would not "let the Soviets win." At the same time he idealistically helped end the arms race between the United States and the Soviets. As a result, he achieved much more than Wilson. As Margaret Thatcher said of Reagan's performance, "He ended the Cold War without firing a shot."
O'Toole does try to connect the dots to today by asserting that Wilson was a 20th century president of the "hope and change" variety. But his hopes were unrealistic, and the change he left behind led to Lenin and Hitler and another world war.
Update May 7, 2018, 9:11 a.m.: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Wilson served two terms as governor of New Hampshire. Wilson was governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913.