Matthew Yglesias: The Strange Case of Woodrow Wilson. I'm reading Ann Hagedorn's Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America 1919, which hasn't had much to say about Wilson in the first 100 pages, but no doubt will. Meanwhile, much of what I know about Wilson was gleaned from Walter Karp's The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered the Political Life of the American Republic (1890-1920), which depicts Wilson as a pseudo-reformer and an inveterate two-faced schemer, especially in his efforts to plunge America into World War. (Actually, I'm sure I've read more on Wilson, especially William Appleman Williams, but that was long ago. James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong also features Wilson, practically on the first page.) Still, this post is a good precis, even though it leaves out a lot of details -- like two wars against Mexico. (Pershing's slog through Mexico in search of Pancho Villa is a pretty close precedent to the fruitless search for Bin Laden. Villa, like Bin Laden, had attacked US territory [a town in New Mexico]. Wilson, like Bush, responded with a massive retaliatory invasion, which never found Villa, and eventually returned empty handed. The only difference was that Pershing was so inept he didn't even manage to destroy Mexico. That was more the point of Wilson's Veracruz invasion, but that ultimately accomplished nothing either.)

You can make interesting cases comparing Wilson to two later US presidents. Like Clinton, he won a first term with the Republican Party split, then leveraged his incumbency for a second diastrous term. Even though Clinton got impeached, Wilson was actually far more unpopular: only Richard Nixon had a more disastrous second term. Like Nixon, Wilson implemented, or preëmpted, much of the other party's reform proposals, while administratively doing his best to undermine them. Like Nixon, Wilson had grandiose designs for foreign policy. Like Nixon, those designs involved all sorts of surrepetitious military adventures, massive propaganda, and major efforts to undermine civil liberties. Wilson's reputation today is based mostly on his usefulness to FDR and his cold war successors in turning American foreign policy from isolationism to interventionism: Wilson symbolized a path not taken, which supposedly would have changed the course of history, preventing a second world war and all that came with it. That's a fantasy which is hard to sustain once you look at what Wilson actually did, which is why so much of his record is forgotten, and should be recalled.