Wilson

Wilson by A. Scott Berg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I always really liked Wilson, with his 14 points and his dogged determination to forge peace as a quixotic ideal. (His top hat and pince nez didn't hurt). I didn't know if that was just my 17-year-old take of a page and a half written about him in my history book, or what a deeper look into the 28th president would reveal. Turns out my knee-jerk assessment was pretty spot on. Wilson was enormously idealistic and his integrity to his beliefs was truly remarkable. His black and white outlook on life may have been his downfall however. Not because he refused to compromise, necessarily, but because he trusted others around him implicitly and then they invariably let him down, and he was never able to forgive them. Thus he lost associations that could have helped him as well as the respect of others who saw him as petty and vindictive. He was not a perfect man, but I still admire him for truly trying the best he could do what he saw as right.

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"We live by poetry, not by prose, and we live only as we see visions."

"War isn't declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely."

"Do the thing that is audacious to the utmost point of risk and daring, because that is exactly the thing that the other side does not understand.  And you will by the audacity of method when you cannot win by circumspection and prudence."