Reading Scott Berg’s recent biography of Woodrow Wilson to write a review of it for another publication has brought to mind a couple of striking developments in the evolution of the U.S. presidency. Woodrow Wilson has been much maligned as an unrealistic idealist who was supposedly afflicted by naïveté in seeking a League of Nations and proposing open international negotiations, reductions of armaments, and the supremacy of impartially administered international law. Certainly, the shambles of hypocrisy and corruption of the United Nations incites some thoughts of this kind.

But Wilson was undoubtedly correct that the American public would not sustain controversial foreign-policy initiatives, especially recourses to force, if they did not think they were morally compatible with the espoused ideals and ambitions of the country. And it is not reprehensible to require that going to war be morally justified. The dubious circumstances of the provocation of the Mexican War, which added a million square miles to the country — more than it started with or gained with the Louisiana Purchase — and led to the restoration of slavery in Texas, where it had been abolished by the Mexicans, would not be so easily sold to the country in the more searching and exigent media age we have known at least since World War II.