Although he was far from the madman of this book’s extravagant title, few US presidents have been as riven by contradictions as Woodrow Wilson. The world largely saw him as a lofty idealist, and millions admired his proposed “Fourteen Points” for a peace treaty to end the First World War, especially its promise of self-determination for peoples long denied it. When Germany knew the war was lost in 1918, it was to Wilson, not the other Allied leaders, that the country appealed for a ceasefire, hoping for mercy. When he travelled to Europe soon after the armistice, enormous crowds greeted him in every Allied capital, and flowers rained down on his motorcade.
