From the Horse's Mouth

THE ORDEAL OF WOODROW WILSON (318 pp.)--Herbert Hoover--McGraw-Hill ($6).

Few U.S. Presidents spent much time writing about other U.S. Presidents. John Quincy Adams, a scholarly man, wrote about Madison and Monroe, and Woodrow Wilson, perhaps too scholarly for his own peace of mind, wrote about Washington before his own arrival at the White House. But taken altogether, presidential literary output about members of the club could be stowed between the covers of a single stout volume. One reason is that few Presidents have been up to it or have had the time for it. Another, possibly more important, is a guild sympathy--a reluctance to trespass on another man's ordeal. At 83, Herbert Hoover trespasses only to bear gifts, and he crosses party lines to do it. In The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, he gives a generous salute to an idealist whose tragedy was quite simply that he did not live in an ideal world.

Hard Facts. Ordeal is not a biography. Hoover deals only with the years 1915-1921, when Woodrow Wilson in his Presbyterian rectitude dreamed a new world of peace and good will but never awoke to the fact that he was dreaming. The hard facts of reality are supplied by Hoover, whose own files on World War I contain more than 1,500,000 items. His own role in that period was enormous, though widely obscured since then by his role in the era of Hoovervilles. He was not only the man who fed hungry Europe during and after the war; he was one of Wilson's first advisers, served on the President's "American War Council" and the "Committee of Economic Advisers" during the peace conference.

In keeping with his engineer's temperament, Hoover's book is essentially a documentation, a blueprint of the Wilsonian ordeal. He shows in detail how Wilson captured the imagination of a war-shocked world with the promise of a just peace and a League of Nations to tidy up the international madhouse. He then shows how Old World hatreds and greeds, together with home-grown suspicions, turned Wilson's dream into a patchwork of drab compromise.

Loyal Tribute. What of Wilson's own defects? Winston Churchill once wrote: "If Mr. Wilson had been either simply an idealist or a caucus politician, he might have succeeded. His attempt to run the two in double harness was the cause of his undoing." And Georges Clemenceau, the old French tiger whose claws helped to shred the Wilsonian dream, snarled: "He acted to the very best of his abilities in circumstances the origins of which had escaped him and whose ulterior developments lay beyond his ken."

But Herbert Hoover, four decades later, stoutly defends his chief against what he believes was European cynicism, a failure of generosity and political imagination. Even now he tends to find saintliness where others might have seen ingenuousness. His book is at once the profoundly loyal tribute of an admiring subordinate and a compassionate judgment of one U.S. President by the most harshly judged U.S. President of modern times.

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