The Smartest Man in the Room

The first thing to understand about Woodrow Wilson is that he never stopped believing he was the smartest man in the room, and he never doubted that this was a public service. Wilson did not enter politics the way most politicians do, by compromise, instinct, or appetite for power. He entered it as a man convinced that history itself had been waiting for a proper explanation, and that explanation had finally arrived wearing pince-nez and carrying a footnote. If this sounds unkind, it is not meant to be. It is meant to be accurate. Wilson was earnest, brilliant, disciplined, and convinced that moral clarity, once articulated clearly enough, would bend the world into better shape. That conviction carried him astonishingly far, and it carried him just as surely into moral blind alleys he never fully recognized.