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

Cleveland. In 1976 the one-two punch of Watergate and the Ford-Reagan fight proved slightly too much for the GOP to overcome. And in 1912 Wilson's victory was made possible by the titanic Roosevelt-Taft split. Cleveland, Carter, and Wilson...three Democratic presidents whose presidencies punctured eras of Republican dominance. And there the similarity ends. After all, Wilson was both a forthrightly liberal president and a wartime president, while Cleveland and Carter were almost defiantly neither. Moreover, Wilson and Carter were southerners to one latitudinal degree or another; Cleveland, though sympathetic to the old Confederacy and the New South, was not. Thirdly, to hear him tell it, the Reverend Carter lusted only "in the heart"; not so Cleveland, who fathered a child out of wedlock, and Wilson, who carried on an adulterous affair with the shadowy Mrs. Peck. And, of course, it was Carter who managed to confine all of his presidential failures to a single term; whereas Cleveland and Wilson took eight years to establish their own marks for futility. Finally, Cleveland and Carter were actually rejected by the voters; Wilson was never accorded that particular comeuppance. But there is one other common thread. And therein lies a tale which goes beyond matters electoral, personal, and political and to the heart of what is wrong with the first single volume biography of Woodrow Wilson in better than three decades. Presidents Cleveland, Carter, and Wilson all interpreted their meteoric ascents to power to mean that they thought they had a direct pipeline to the American people. Each believed that he could safely ignore the advice of professional politicians, because each had convinced himself that he had achieved his lofty status without the assistance of professional politicians. To one emotional degree or another, all three operated as thought they personally embodied the national will. Therefore, all three possessed a significant measure of disdain for those political mortals within their own party whose misfortune it was to dwell beneath them. In sum, all three inhabited the worst of all psychological worlds in that each was a professional politician who disliked other professional politicians as a matter of course and who refused to see himself as a member of the species. 152