woodrow wilson.

[gorkay]

He's one of the hardest Presidents to judge, because he did so much good on the one hand and so much bad on the other. The solid domestic-policy accomplishments of his first term have been obscured by the foreign-policy blunders of the second, unfortunately. But it was the conduct of the foreign policy that was a failure more than the concept of it... if his proposals had been enacted, there may never have been a World War II, but his inflexibility doomed them. It's true that the isolationists sabotaged his efforts, but he could have done a lot to lessen their influence had he been more conciliatory. Negotiating the Treaty of Versailles himself and refusing to allow even minor clarifying amendments were grievous mistakes, but typical of the man. He had great intellectual capacities but no talent for the give-and-take of politics... he may have had the best mind of any President since Jefferson, but he had none of Jefferson's craftiness, which proved a fatal flaw. His high-minded moralism was admirable in the abstract but a liablity in practice.

I doubt I would have liked him much as a person, because he had a moralistic streak a mile wide and a priggish sort of arrogance. But that's beside the point, as is the fact that he was a segregationist. Practically everybody in or out of politics in those days was one, and those that weren't were considered extremists.