This book will try to tell the story, as simply as it may be told, of a man, his time, and his task. The story will disclose no new events nor details nor circumstances in the life of Woodrow Wilson, but perhaps the arrangement of our biographical material may help his contemporaries to a better understanding of him and his work. His partisans have idealized his virtues and so have sought to create a superman -- some sort of Heaven-sent Messiah to redeem a wicked world from its iniquity. His enemies -- alas, they have seen his weakness through the green and red glasses of envy and hate, and a fine old striped devil they have made of him. He was neither God nor fiend, but in his political career rather a shy, middle-aged gentleman with the hoar frost of the cloister upon his public manner, with an academic respect for facts and with a Calvinistic addiction for digesting the facts into his own God- given truth. On the surface he was half or two thirds Irish, and so turned to his friends a gay and lovely face. But the dour Scot, big and dominant inside him, turned to his adversaries a cold and implacable heart that transformed even the most . . .