President Woodrow Wilson Insights

These are a few insights from Woodrow Wilson or about him by Ray Stannard Baker. Baker was Woodrow Wilson's biographer with complete, unhindered access to the former President's personal papers. ​These are from the the volume entitled: Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters - "Facing War 1915-1917."

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"Do you know what is the hardest job in being President? ... It is the difficulty of keeping your temper."

Woodrow Wilson, "The Break with Germany"

"Woodrow Wilson presents in the deepening summer of 1916 the tragedy that so often accompanies the power and responsibility of great place: not only the loneliness, but the essential helplessness, of supreme leadership."

Ray Stannard Baker on "The Emotions and Sympathies Aroused by the War"

"Wilson's great power--and he knew it well--was in speaking to the people. Strange gift for the kind of man he really was: the scholar and thinker, intellectually sensitive and discriminating, hesitant in individual human contacts, he had yet a potent gift of popular leadership. He could be more intimate and confidential with five thousand people than with one.

​"His genius had in it far more of the gift of the poet and the prophet than that of the politician."

Ray Stannard Baker on "Campaign and Election 1916"

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Ray Stannard Baker is right up with with Ida M. Tarbell as one of my favorite, all-time writers and journalists.

Peter E. Greulich