Too Proud to Listen

__"An Inner Circle of One: Woodrow Wilson and His Advisers" by Robert W. Tucker, in The National Interest (Spring 1998), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 540, Washington, D.C. 20036.__

The presidency’s lonely burden of decision has been portrayed so often that it’s almost a cliché. "The buck stops here," as Harry Truman said. But never was a president more isolated than Woodrow Wilson was during the fateful years of U.S. neutrality in World War I, writes Tucker, a professor of political science emeritus at Johns Hopkins University.

"Wilson’s neutrality policy enjoyed widespread support," Tucker writes, "because his own waverings and uncertainties reflected those of the American people." But had he made greater use of his advisers to clarify his own thinking, he might have led the country sooner to decisive action, whether to stay out of the war or to intervene. "Wilson’s unwillingness to seek advice, his disinclination to hear what was unwelcome to him, and, even more, his penchant for taking an immediate dislike of those who told him what he did not wish to hear, were traits recognized by all who served him," Tucker observes. He did not allow much "give and take" over policy.

Wilson’s inner circle of foreign policy advisers was small, seldom more than three or four people. They included Colonel Edward House, who held no official position, William Jennings Bryan, the secretary of state, and Robert Lansing, the counselor to the State Department.

Wilson considered Bryan, the great populist orator and former presidential candidate, whom he had appointed for political reasons, an unsatisfactory secretary of state. Tucker agrees that Bryan was inept, but points out that he advocated positions—U.S. mediation of the conflict, and the idea of a peace without victory—that Wilson himself would later take. Moreover, Bryan, alone among Wilson’s advisers, "saw almost from the start" that the administration’s continued insistence on neutral rights would likely lead to war with Germany.

Like the pacifist Bryan, Wilson "wanted above all else to remain out of the war," Tucker says. Had he listened to his secretary of state, he probably "would have been far more hesitant to take positions from which retreat would later prove so difficult." But in February 1915, when Germany declared a war zone in the waters around Britain and Ireland, Wilson demanded that Germany respect the rights of neutrals. In May, after a German submarine sank the British ocean liner Lusitania, killing 128 Americans, the United States demanded that Germany abandon its U-boat attacks. Bryan resigned on principle, believing that Wilson’s course would lead to war. (Wilson privately denounced Bryan’s position on neutrality as "moral blindness.")

By late spring of 1915, Lansing, now the secretary of state, had privately concluded that the United States would have to enter the war if Germany gained the upper hand. By the summer, House had concluded that U.S. involvement was all but inevitable, and fumed at Wilson’s wavering policy and failure to improve military readiness. "If we were fully prepared, I am sure Germany would not continue to provoke us," House confided to his diary.

But "never once did Lansing reveal his true position to the President. . . . House was only slightly more direct," Tucker writes. Dissimulation remained necessary even after Germany’s January 1917 declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare. "Only Wilson’s decision for war in March," the author notes, "would bring that necessity to an end."