Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

BOOK REVIEWS - John C. Chalberg: August Heckscher: Woodrow Wilson. Macmillan, 1991. 734 pp

claims," claims which Heckscher subsequently characterized as "not unreasonable." In any event, the French occupation of the left bank of the Rhine and of the Saar Basin were not the result of any machination on the part of Colonel House, but of the process of the negotiations themselves. If anything, House could be accused of being unwilling to placate the new Mrs. Wilson who both distrusted and despised him. But Edith Boiling Gait Wilson was not the only member of the Wilson household who held others in disdain in the spring of 1919. For his part, the president despised and disdained both Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and the entire Republican majority of the United States Senate. According to Heckscher, such feelings left Wilson "in no mood" to address the Congress upon his return to Washington following the pause in the Paris talks. All bitterness aside, Heckscher argues that Wilson erred significantly in refusing to take this "dramatic step to assert national leadership." And yet by not asserting presidential power Wilson was really doing no more and no less than Heckscher assures us had long been typical of this politically successful presidency. It was Theodore Roosevelt who climbed into the bully pulpit with little urging; Woodrow Wilson, on the other hand, generally preferred a more restrained approach, no matter his frame of mind. Besides, hadn't Professor Wilson himself asserted in Constitutional Government of the United States that the president ought to defer to the collective judgment of the senate when the issue at hand was treaty ratification? Presumably, President Wilson had forgotten what Professor Wilson had written. Political errors or memory lapses aside, Woodrow Wilson in the summer of 1919 was not yet a man devoured by paranoia or driven by a martyr complex. At least August Heckscher's Woodrow Wilson was not such a man: "With a stubborn faith in the ultimate good sense of the people, Woodrow Wilson managed to avoid depression or despair...(Instead) he remained detached and integrated, hopeful but not quite fooled, either by himself or by others." But as of mid-1919 President Wilson was a once adept politician who had lost a step or two. An earlier Wilson might have realized that the American infatuation with the idea of the League of Nations had cooled. An earlier Wilson would surely have come to terms with the force and depth of 163