Présentation de l'éditeur
Longlisted for the 2014 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography“With the prescience that all truly great biographers possess, Berg discovered in Woodrow Wilson a figure who would understand Washington’s current state of affairs.”—Vanity Fair“A brilliant biography that still resonates in Washington today.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin
From Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times–bestselling author A. Scott Berg comes the definitive—and revelatory—biography of one of the great American figures of modern times.
One hundred years after his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson still stands as one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, and one of the most enigmatic. And now, after more than a decade of research and writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg has completed
Wilson--the most personal and penetrating biography ever written about the 28th President.
In addition to the hundreds of thousands of documents in the Wilson Archives, Berg was the first biographer to gain access to two recently-discovered caches of papers belonging to those close to Wilson. From this material, Berg was able to add countless details--even several unknown events--that fill in missing pieces of Wilson’s character and cast new light on his entire life.
From the scholar-President who ushered the country through its first great world war to the man of intense passion and turbulence , from the idealist determined to make the world “safe for democracy” to the stroke-crippled leader whose incapacity and the subterfuges around it were among the century’s greatest secrets, the result is an intimate portrait written with a particularly contemporary point of view – a book at once magisterial and deeply emotional about the whole of Wilson’s life, accomplishments, and failings. This is not just Wilson the icon – but Wilson the man.
Extrait
ASCENSION
So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received uvp into heaven, and sate on the right hand of God.
—Mark, XVI:19
Dawn broke that day on a new epoch, one that would carry the name of a man whose ideas and ideals would extend well into the next century.
Shortly after seven o’clock on Wednesday, December 4, 1918, the sun rose over Hoboken, just as the nine-car special train of the twenty-eighth President of the United States chugged its way through the New Jersey city that fronted the western piers of New York harbor. One thousand soldiers and a Marine Corps guard of honor joined the local police in restraining the hundreds who stood in the chilly first light in hopes of catching a glimpse of the illustrious passenger. They wanted nothing more, wrote one observer, than “to cheer the president and to wish him God-speed on his momentous voyage.” At last, the flag-draped locomotive sputtered to a halt so that its central car—named “Ideal”—stopped before a red carpet leading to Pier 4. A battalion of the 13th United States Infantry surrounded the train.
The passengers remained on board until eight o’clock, at which time President Woodrow Wilson and his second wife, Edith, stepped off the train, prompting a rousing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” from an Army band. Brigadier General G. H. McManus, commander of the Port of Embarkation, stepped forward to welcome his Commander in Chief. In the last eighteen months, McManus’s port had witnessed the deployment of two million “doughboys” (as American soldiers were called) who had gone off to fight “the Hun” and win the first truly global war in history. General John J. Pershing, who had led the American Expeditionary Force, had rallied his armies from the outset with the vow that they would be in “Heaven, Hell or Hoboken” by Christmas of 1917.
A year later than Pershing had promised, President Wilson tipped his hat and greeted the surrounding soldiers and sailors before proceeding through a huge shed, which was lined with three hundred Army Transport Service girls in khaki and infantryme
