Dawn broke that day on a new epoch, one that would carry the name of a man whose ideas and ideals would extend well into the next century.

Shortly after seven o’clock on Wednesday, December 4, 1918, the sun rose over Hoboken, just as the nine-car special train of the twenty-​eighth President of the United States chugged its way through the New Jersey city that fronted the western piers of New York harbor. One thousand soldiers and a Marine Corps guard of honor joined the local police in restraining the hundreds who stood in the chilly first light in hopes of catching a glimpse of the illustrious passenger. They wanted nothing more, wrote one observer, than “to cheer the president and to wish him God-​speed on his momentous voyage.” At last, the flag-​draped locomotive sputtered to a halt so that its central car—​named “Ideal”—stopped before a red carpet leading to Pier 4. A battalion of the 13th United States Infantry surrounded the train.

The passengers remained on board until eight o’clock, at which time President Woodrow Wilson and his second wife, Edith, stepped off the train, prompting a rousing rendition of “The Star​-Spangled Banner” from an Army band. Brigadier General G. H. McManus, commander of the Port of Embarkation, stepped forward to welcome his Commander in Chief. In the last eighteen months, McManus’s port had witnessed the deployment of two million “doughboys” (as American soldiers were called) who had gone off to fight “the Hun” and win the first truly global war in history. General John J. Pershing, who had led the American Expeditionary Force, had rallied his armies from the outset with the vow that they would be in “Heaven, Hell or Hoboken” by Christmas of 1917.

A year later than Pershing had promised, President Wilson tipped his hat and greeted the surrounding soldiers and sailors before proceeding through a huge shed, which was lined with three hundred Army Transport Service girls in khaki and infantrymen bearing fixed bayonets. Hundreds of flags, those of the United States and the Allied nations—​Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy most recognizable among them—​hung from the ceiling of this vast hall. Wilson walked beneath the glorious array and onto his home for the next ten days, the United States steamship George Washington. On December 4, 1917, that same ship had transported her first five thousand troops to fight in the war “over there.” Now the great vessel was about to convey President Wilson and his team of aides and experts on a voyage of peace to Europe—​not only to conclude what had been the greatest conflagration in the history of man but also to create a document that might guarantee that they had just fought “the war to end all wars.”

As the President and Mrs. Wilson ascended the gangplank, the naval band on board struck up “Hail to the Chief,” after which it reprised the National Anthem. Then the Wilsons settled into their flower​-filled accommodations. The President’s suite consisted of a green​-curtained bedroom and bath and a large office, with a mahogany desk on which sat a white telephone for shipboard calls; attached to a wall was a wireless telephone by which the President could communicate with Washington or the Pennsylvania, the lead escort ship. Mrs. Wilson’s bedroom—​decorated in ivory with a pink bedspread, curtains, and plump cushions—​connected to a large bath, a dining room large enough to seat six comfortably, and a sitting room with a writing desk, chairs, and a table. It was all to her liking, except for the soldiers outside their staterooms and patrolling the decks.

Never in history had so much security surrounded an American president. In addition to the military presence, eight members of the Secret Service were aboard the George Washington, with two more doing advance work in France. The ship, recalled agent Edmund W. Starling, “had been checked from bow to stern and from keel to masthead, and members of the Secret Service all over the United States had been busy investigating members of the crew. . . . ​There was not a fireman or cabin boy whose family and background had not been thoroughly looked into.” The hopes of the world were on board, and everything was being done to ensure the safety of the transport.

At 10:15 the twin-​stacked ship—​722 feet long and weighing twenty-five thousand tons—​backed into the Hudson River. Once its stern was sighted heading northward, all the vessels in the waters around the New York islands responded with bells and sirens and horns and whistles. Passengers on every craft jockeyed for rail position in order to wish Woodrow Wilson bon voyage.

Wearing a bearskin coat, the President, with his wife, joined Captain Edward McCauley, Jr., on the bridge. Wilson waved his hands and raised his hat to the crowds again and again in appreciation of the most spectacular send-​off in New York history. It was difficult to imagine in that moment of purely joyful noise, with thousands of flags and handkerchiefs waving in his honor, that he was one of the most polarizing Presidents in the nation’s history. As one of his earliest supporters, Oklahoma Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, once said: “Wilson had no friends, only slaves and enemies.”

British Parliamentarian Cecil Harmsworth would later observe that he did not know of “any historic personage . . . ​who so strangely attracts and repels” as Woodrow Wilson. This was possibly because—​as another Wilson acquaintance observed—“probably in the history of the whole world there has been no great man, of whom so much has been written, but of whom personally so little has been correctly known.” Yet another, who, as a college student, had first encountered him, never lost sight of the personal paradox that was the man: “Stern and impassive, yet emotional; calm and patient, yet quick-tempered and impulsive; forgetful of those who had served him, yet devoted to many who had rendered but minor service . . . ​precise and business-​like, and yet, upon occasion, illogical without more reason than intuition itself.”

Theodore Roosevelt, the greatest political personality of the day, took potshots at Wilson at every possible opportunity; and during the 1912 Presidential campaign—​which he lost to Wilson—​advisers urged Roosevelt to smear his opponent with the rumors of an extramarital affair with a mysterious woman known as “Mrs. Peck.” TR refused, fearing that would only give Wilson some allure—​as he looked like nothing more than “an apothecary’s clerk.” In this matter, however, TR’s political assessment was mistaken. For all the dour photographs of the very proper President, society doyenne Evalyn Walsh McLean insisted that the women of America found him extremely attractive, which made him the subject of much giddy Washington gossip. For his part, Wilson admitted his susceptibility “to all feminine attractions,” as “girls of all degrees of beauty and grace have a charm for me which almost amounts to a spell.” He was, by his own admission, extremely sexual, always aware of “the riotous element in my blood.” Beneath his stern ministerial appearance churned a turbulent emotional life.

In wooing his first wife, the ethereal Ellen Axson of Rome, Georgia, Wilson indulged in one of the most expansive love correspondences in history—​thousands of letters so passionate she said they kept her “in an almost constant state of intoxication.” Cultured, well-read, and a talented artist, she abandoned any professional aspirations in order to serve her husband and raise their three daughters. She enabled his ambitions—​all the way to the White House, in which she got to live only fourteen months before dying there. Bereft beyond words, he contemplated resignation.

But the war had just broken out in Europe, and what duty could not arouse in him, a friend did, by introducing him to a buxom, well‑to-do, young Washington widow named Edith Bolling Galt. The President fell in love at first sight. Despite the political and practical difficulties of courting from the White House, the President romanced her, again through sheaves of letters and private meetings. Less than eighteen months after burying the first Mrs. Wilson, he married the second. She worshipped him. And from that day forward—​in health and unexpectedly grave sickness—​she almost never left his side. Unwittingly, she would later enter into a conspiracy that ran the government and which would result in an amendment to the Constitution to prevent such an occurrence from happening again. Throughout their marriage, she monitored a twitch in his lower left eyelid and a throbbing in his cheek.

Despite numerous chronic ailments—​and a bad cold as he boarded the ship—​sixty-​one-​year-​old Woodrow Wilson appeared remarkably fit. He stood five feet ten and one-half inches and weighed a lean 170 pounds. Except for some youthful experimentation with mustaches and sideburns, he had always been clean-​shaven, with strong cheekbones and a prominent chin; he had a fine straight nose, and ears large enough to make some look twice. His hair had thinned, but he always retained enough to cut close and part neatly on the left. Although his vision was weak—​one eye virtually useless—​his deep gray eyes were as understanding as they could be piercing. A pince-​nez, which emphasized his erudition, became his trademark. That and a J‑shaped jaw were all a caricaturist needed to conjure the man. He had a well-​defined mouth, with full lips; and though the public mostly saw a solemn face, he had a toothy smile and a deep laugh, one generally reserved for intimate occasions. He told corny jokes, could not resist a pun, and always had a limerick at the ready—​the raciest of which was about “an old monk from Siberia” who “eloped with the Mother Superior.” He loved to sing, showing off his silvery second tenor voice. One adviser wrote, “I never knew a man whose general appearance changed so much from hour to hour.” His demeanor could change as well. “He seems to do his best to offend rather than to please, and yet when one gets access to him, there is no more charming man in all the world than Woodrow Wilson.”

More than the elegant profile and courtly mien contributed to Wilson’s authoritative stature. Diplomat and historian George F. Kennan—​who closely observed public figures throughout most of his 101 years—​noted, “No man in modern times, to my mind, ever better looked or acted the part of an American president.”

Twenty-​six men had preceded Woodrow Wilson to the White House. Each generally pursued one of three well-​worn paths, and sometimes a combination thereof: the earliest presidents especially rose through the ranks of state legislatures until they leapt to the national level, either in Congress, the Cabinet, or the diplomatic corps; a handful earned their stripes on the battlefield, where their leadership and heroism transformed them into national figures; several graduated from statehouses to the White House. Woodrow Wilson, it is true, did serve as Governor of New Jersey—​but so briefly that it barely distracts from his having blazed a trail to the Presidency that is utterly unique. Quite simply, he enjoyed the most meteoric rise in American history, one with a most unlikely origin—​a college campus.

Woodrow Wilson loved his alma mater, Princeton, with religious zeal; and as a professor and then its president, he not only reformed a country club college into a top-​tier university but also developed a pedagogical model that many of America’s institutions of higher education would subsequently adopt. His efforts to alter Princeton’s social structure, however, forced him to leave under a cloud and to consider a lesson he taught without fully grasping himself: “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.”

A career intellectual, he was the only President of the United States to have spent the majority of his life cloistered in academia. Like most of his predecessors, he studied the law; and he became the first President to earn a doctorate degree as well. As one of the nation’s leading historians and first political scientists, he had written a dozen books and numerous articles and delivered countless lectures and speeches—​often on matters that reached into the realm of public affairs. While advocating educational reforms at Princeton, he had fought against the injustices of privilege wherever he could, championing meritocracy. Wilson distinguished himself as a public thinker.

But he had spent most of his life in private frustration, half-​fulfilled, as he long harbored hidden aspirations he seldom voiced. His intellectual vigor masked a lifelong ambition to hold high political office—​to make history more than teach it. With Princeton’s trustees thwarting his educational revolution, the impeccable Wilson accepted an offer to run for Governor of New Jersey. In so doing, he disabled the “machine” of the most corrupt state in the Union, defying the very bosses who had selected him to be their puppet. Wilson would later say he left Princeton for government service in order to get out of politics.

No American statesman ever had a shorter second act. As late as October 1910, at age fifty-three and never having run for public office, Woodrow Wilson headed a small, all-​male college in a quiet town in New Jersey; in November 1912, he was elected President of the United States. He swiftly went from near obscurity to global prominence, becoming the most powerful man on earth. He would contend that it had all been choreographed—​not by himself, but by Himself.

“No man in supreme power in any nation’s life,” wrote the University of Virginia’s president Edwin A. Alderman, “. . . ​was so profoundly penetrated by the Christian faith. He was sturdily and mystically Christian.” Born in a church manse, the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, Wilson did not often preach Christianity from his bully pulpit, but he ardently practiced it, infusing all his decisions with a piety and morality that were never lost on his constituents. His devotion was genuine. Twice a day he genuflected in prayer, he said grace before each meal, and he read a chapter of the Bible every night. He referred to Sunday as the Sabbath. And he appointed the first Jew to the Supreme Court.

Beholden to nobody, he had risen to his position through brainpower. Wedding the complexity of his intellect with the simplicity of his faith, placing principles before politics, he followed his conscience, never first checking public opinion. He spoke only for himself, and he found much of the nation agreeing with what he had to say. Arguably the least experienced person to hold the highest political office in the land, he was the Presidency’s most accomplished student of American history and politics. As such, he proved to be an unexpectedly evolved political animal, with a tough hide and sharp claws. In 1912 he entered one of the most thrilling races in the nation’s history and beat two worthy adversaries—​a Republican incumbent, William Howard Taft, and the even more popular third​-party candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive from the Bull Moose Party.

Ambrose Bierce had recently defined politics in his Devil’s Dictionary as “the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” But Wilson defied such thinking. In the middle of a period of great economic inequality—​when the nation’s richest 1 percent owned half its wealth—​he unveiled his Presidential program. His “New Freedom” worked honestly to protect the less favored 99 percent of his countrymen. In order to actualize his slate of progressive reforms, he brought a bold new approach to his office, one in which the executive and legislative branches co‑operated the government. He literally walked the walk, violating a century-​old tradition by appearing regularly before Congress—​not just to deliver his State of the Union messages but whenever he had an important measure he wanted passed.

“What I am interested in is having the government of the United States more concerned about human rights than about property rights,” he insisted. Toward that end, he lost no time in creating the Federal Reserve Board, reducing excessive tariffs, reforming taxation, strengthening anti-​trust laws, inaugurating the eight-​hour workday, establishing the Federal Trade Commission, developing agricultural programs, improving rural life, and making corporate officers liable for the actions of their companies. He even offered the first government bailout of a private industry in distress—​cotton. Without so much as a breath of scandal, his New Freedom served as the foundation for the New Deal and Fair Deal and New Frontier and Great Society to come. Future President Harry Truman said, “In many ways, Woodrow Wilson was the greatest of the greats.”

Wilson’s reelection in 1916 was an even more electrifying contest than his first, a legendary squeaker. He ran on his strong legislative record and the powerful message that “He kept us out of war.” He became the first Democratic President elected to two consecutive terms since Andrew Jackson in 1832.

And within weeks of his second inauguration, Woodrow Wilson returned to Congress to announce the most consequential shift in the history of American foreign policy, before or since. On April 2, 1917, he addressed a joint session of the legislature, with the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, and the diplomatic corps present as witnesses, in what one prominent journalist called “the most dramatic event that the National Capitol had ever known.” In speaking to an isolationist nation, one that had long adhered to a policy of avoiding foreign entanglements, Wilson summoned the American people less to a war than a crusade, declaring that the United States must help make the world “safe for democracy.”

In urging his countrymen to join in a war being fought an ocean away, to fight pre​-emptively for principles instead of retaliating for attacks against them, to wed idealism with interventionism, Woodrow Wilson initiated one of the most far-reaching precepts of American foreign policy. “Democracy” had long been America’s watchword. Wilson now added such terms as “self-​determination” and “collective security” to the battle cry.

A dynamic Commander in Chief, Wilson transformed an introverted country with minor defensive capabilities into a competitive military nation. “Perhaps the greatest foreign army that ever crossed a sea in the history of the world prior to the present war was the Persian army of a million men, which bridged and crossed the Hellespont,” wrote the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker. Wilson instituted a program of selective service that would provide the potential to raise an army many times the size of that of Xerxes and would send millions of men across an ocean.

Throughout the war, Wilson’s mightiest weapon was his oratory. With a resonant voice and precise diction, honeyed with a drop of Southern gentility, he became one of the most celebrated speakers of his time. He could extemporize for an hour or longer without a pause or misplaced word. He thought in metaphors, spoke in perfect sentences, and composed entire paragraphs in his head, relying on a superior vocabulary. When speaking formally, he resorted to prepared texts and proved even more eloquent. Muckraker Ida Tarbell said, “I doubt if there is any man in America that can talk . . . ​with such precision and at the same time so like a human being.” He was the last President to compose all his own speeches.

Wilson codified his war aims—​his terms for peace—​into “Fourteen Points.” Walter Lippmann, who drafted some of them, said they “merely voiced the common aspiration of liberal men for a better world order. It was assumed that they would create an environment in which a decent and orderly settlement could be made.” The empires of four great dynasties had just toppled—​the Hohenzollerns in Germany, the Habsburgs in Austria, the Romanovs in Russia, and the Ottomans in Turkey: no longer did divine right rule in Europe or across most of the world. It now fell upon the American President to reconfigure the pieces of those fallen empires.

More than a crowning touch, Woodrow Wilson’s fourteenth point became his raison d’être, what he believed would be his sacred legacy. It was a concept under which all countries of the world might congregate, to avert war by settling disputes through pre​-emptive peace talks. Others before him had championed similar organizations, but Woodrow Wilson was the first to stake his life on the idea, forever affixing his name to that vision of a League of Nations.

Wilson was especially sensitive to all sides in the impending negotiations because he was the only President in the history of the United States to have been raised in a country that had suffered a defeat in war. Born in Virginia and raised during the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Confederacy, Wilson grasped the tragedy that overcame the South after the Civil War, in which the aftermath, at times, proved worse than the defeat. He comprehended the feelings of guilt, even shame, the lingering anger, and the contrition; he saw why Southern eloquence turned toward euphemism, especially when it came to talking about “the recent unpleasantness.” He had seen how racism stained the region; and he spent a lifetime sorting out his own feelings on that subject. His administration instituted segregation—“Jim Crow” laws—​in Washington, D.​C.

In asking his countrymen to engage in this first World War, he had insisted that Americans were fighting for what he called a “peace without victory.” Feeling as right as he was righteous, he hoped to show the world that foreign policy might have a moral component as well as political or economic objectives. “Never before in the history of mankind,” Edwin Alderman noted, “has a statesman of the first order made the humble doctrine of service to humanity a cardinal and guiding principle of world politics.” Nor had any President ever suppressed free speech to so great an extent in order to realize his principles.

The first sitting President to leave the territorial United States, “he enjoyed a prestige and moral influence throughout the world unequaled in history,” said John Maynard Keynes, a young economist who was part of the British delegation to the peace talks. Indeed, concurred his colleague Harold Nicolson, Wilson came “armed with power such as no man in history had possessed: he had come fired with high ideals such as have inspired no autocrat of the past.”

Nobody could predict the quality of his mercy. He had, after all, spoken of fairness and severity in the same sentence, as well as of penalties without being punitive. The world could but wonder whether those who sought revanche and retribution could sign the same document required of those who believed Wilson was the “one man who would see that Germany was not looted and destroyed; that she would get justice at his hands.” To his longtime secretary, Wilson had confessed before embarking, “This trip will either be the greatest success or the supremest tragedy in all history; but I believe in a Divine Providence. . . . ​It is my faith that no body of men however they concert their power or their influence can defeat this great world enterprise, which after all is the enterprise of Divine mercy, peace and good will.” In the end, Henry Kissinger has noted, “Wilson’s principles”—properly applied or -misappropriated—“have remained the bedrock of American foreign​-policy thinking.”

For all his towering intellect and abiding faith, Woodrow Wilson was superstitious—​especially about the number thirteen, which he considered talismanic. His first and last names comprised thirteen letters. In his thirteenth year of service at Princeton, he became the college’s thirteenth president. In 1913 he became President of the United States, whose thirteen original colonies received tribute everywhere in the symbols of the nation, from the number of stripes on its flag to the number of arrows in the eagle’s sinister talon on its national seal. Those close to the President knew that he had selected the date of the George Washington’s departure so that it would dock in France on December 13.