Woodrow Wilson

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30342, 18 January 1964, Page 3

Woodrow Wilson

Mr Wilson’s War. By John Dos Passos. Hamish Hamilton. 517 pp. “It. would be an irony of fate,” Thomas Woodrow Wilson told a friend in 1913, “if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.” “I can predict with absolute certainty,” be said six years later, “that within another generation there will be another world war of the nations if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.” In both cases the fears of the 28th American President were substantiated. The irony in the first case. was that a high-minded liberal, steeped in Calvinist principles, desired only peace in which to pursue his programme of the New Freedom at home. The irony in the second case was that his plan for the salvation of the world foundered not only on its betrayal abroad but on its repudiation by his own people The events between have been exhaustively gathered from all the bestknown sources into this substantial volume which however does not bring a great deal that is new.

To tell President Wilson’s story, Mr Dos Passos has used the technique of the “camera eye,” a method he developed successfully for his novels and contemporary chronicles. Of “Mr Wilson’s War” he says: “My method was to try to relate the experiences of the assorted personalities and their assorted justifications to my own recollections of childhood and youth during those years; and to seek out, wherever possible, the private letter, the unguarded entry in the diary, the news report made on the spur of the moment.” The result is an enormous collection of situations and figures racing across the screen as the camera travels throughout the United States, to Britain, France. Russia and back to America, flitting here, flitting there. The whole makes compelling reading, but the method gives little depth to the policies which shaped this momentous period.

The traditions of peace into which Wilson fitted; the determination to remain neutral when the belligerents were in full cry; submarine warfare and the “birth of a Leviathan” when neutrality became intolerable; and the

importance of the full power of the American effort when it came to grips with the enemy are all illustrated m a series of short bursts with dynamic side headings. Even some of the words like “red eyed warfare,” “warprofiteering,” and “draftdodgers” might be calculated to keep the mind well jolted. Ways in which the War Secretary, Newton D. Baker, organised the manpower; the financier, Bernard Baruch, organised industry; and the journalist, George Creel, organised the mind have been often discussed. On the other hand, the descriptions of the engagements of American troops in France may give some new knowledge to British readers. But the peace negotiations, probably most interesting of all, have not been dealt with in nearly as much detail as the rest. Mr Dos Passos’ “camera eye’” takes some vivid portraits, the two main ones of the President himself, and his alter ego, Colonel House. It is hard to realise how a man such as the “confidential colonel” could without holding Government office.play so important a part in the affairs of a nation and of the world by being the friend, adviser and envoy of a leader. But the leader was such that this was his need. The “schoolteacher in politics”— as a brilliant professor of history and president of Princeton he was perhaps a little more—often seemed lonely, arrogant and aloof to all but his family and a few others close to him. He spent long hours alone at his typewriter, or “thinking out the processes behind closed doors.” His relaxation, like that of some other United States leaders, seems to have been golf in preference to game shooting.

Woodrow Wilson’s appeal came from his honesty, sincerity and ability to sway people with his persuasive generalisations; when he left the rostrum he lost much of his power. These pages show adequately the betrayal of Wilson’s idealism when he had to wage war to obtain peace—-he sobbed after he made the decision—and when those for whom he helped to gain peace could not live up to his ideals. If Mr Dos Passos’ methods make racy, enthralling reading, they perhaps do not evince enough sympathy for a man whose mistake was that he did not take a cynical enough view of human nature.