Of late I’ve been reading various shorter biographies. Normally I like to go for the whole, in-depth deal, long ago having found that I can read, enjoy, and absorb your doorstop history or biography. However, my time is so fractured these days that short, pithy, digest-style learning is what I can best accommodate as I flit from subject to subject (and job to job) like some intoxicated flitting thing.

Two days ago, I picked up Louis Auchincloss’s book-length essay on Woodrow Wilson. Here’s Wilson, just before the stroke that made Mrs. Wilson president, thundering on about the World War and the Senate’s hostility to the League of Nations treaty:

You are betrayed. You fought for something that you did not get. And the glory of the armies and the navies of the United States is gone like a dream in the night, and there ensues upon it, in the suitable darkness of the night, the nightmare of dread which lay upon the nations before this war came; and there will come some time, in the vengeful Providence of God, another war in which not a few hundred thousand men from America will have to die, but as many millions as are necessary to accomplish the final freedom of the peoples of the world.

I’m struck by two things: first, Wilson was right, even if he helped fulfill the prophecy by being pigheaded at Versailles and inflexible on compromising with the Senate over the treaty (both perhaps due to alterations to his oxygen-deprived brain). Second, “You fought for something that you did not get,” sounds a hell of a lot like Iraq.

If you want to add a third thing, man–that was a speech. When was the last time a president sounded so direct, and so eloquent?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 at 12:18 pm and is filed under The Political Mindscape, Things We Read Today. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.