Tragedy in Two Acts

WILSON: THE ROAD TO THE WHITE HOUSE (528 pp.) -- Arthur S. Link--Princeton University ($5).

One hot afternoon in July 1912, after a long week of bargaining, arguing and good Maryland rye, the Democratic Convention at Baltimore picked their man. The argument about their choice has been going on ever since, and this book will add to it.

Never before had the U.S. electorate chosen a President who had not served in Congress or the Army, or put in a long apprenticeship somewhere in public office. Woodrow Wilson's record had been suspiciously highbrow and severely private: he had written and taught for nearly three decades, spent eight years as Princeton's president, served part of one term as governor of New Jersey. Twelve months before he went to Trenton, probably not one U.S. voter in ten knew much more about him than that he had kicked up some kind of a row on the Princeton campus. William Randolph Hearst scorned him as "the Professor . . . perched on his little hillock of expediency ... a perfect jackrabbit of politics . . . ears erect and nostrils distended . . . ready to run and double in any direction."

From Princeton's University press, and from the pen of Arthur S. Link of Princeton's history department, Road to the White House is the first volume of a projected four-to eight-volume study. Coming from Princeton, where Woodrow Wilson is still a lively subject of conversation, it is painstaking and generally sympathetic, but now & then sharply criti--cal. It is also more academic and less anecdotal than Ray Stannard Baker's eight-volume Life & Letters. Wilson could be "cold, ruthless and stubborn," says Link, though firm and eloquent in defense of his beliefs. But "there was something about Woodrow Wilson that inevitably engendered controversy when he occupied positions of power."

Wilson's long-drawn-out battles against Princeton's "exclusive" undergraduate eating clubs and its "exclusive" graduate school, says Link, were due at least as much to Wilson's bullheadedness as to his democratic faith and educational ideals.

When crossed, Wilson was intransigent, bitter, even vindictive. "Wilson's intransigence in the matter of [the eating clubs], his refusal to compromise . . . his refusal to treat tolerantly those who opposed him were among the major mistakes of his career." In the graduate-school fight, Wilson "shifted from one issue to another and it was almost impossible to tell where he . . . stood. . . . The vagaries of his mind during this period are unfathomable."

Historian Link sees a strong likeness between Princeton's Wilson (whom the University trustees eventually forced out) and the Wilson of the White House. "During the first years of both administrations, Wilson drove . . . through a magnificent reform program. . . . His accomplishments both at Princeton and Washington were great and enduring. Yet in both cases he drove so hard, so flatly refused to delegate authority, and broke with so many friends that when the inevitable reaction set in, he was unable to cope with the new situation. His refusal to compromise in the graduate college controversy was almost Princeton's undoing; his refusal to compromise in the fight . . . over the League of Nations was the nation's undoing. Both controversies assume the character and proportions of a Greek tragedy." That Wilsonian tragedy has yet to be written.

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