To the Editor:

Daniel P. Moynihan, writing to the query, “Was Woodrow Wilson Right?” [May], quotes the peroration of Wilson’s last great speech, the one delivered at Pueblo, Colorado, only a few hours before he suffered the paralytic stroke from which he never entirely recovered. Immediately afterward, Mr. Moynihan quotes from an article that I wrote twenty years later, observing that if Wilson was right, the rest—or the majority—of us were wrong and citing half-a-dozen instances indicating that we were wrong.

Mr. Moynihan quotes correctly, but if I were writing that article today, thirty years later, I would not stop with half-a-dozen instances of supporting evidence. It would be nearer half a hundred. Yet perhaps I would abandon them all in favor of two criteria that history shows are the most reliable tests of the merit of any man who introduces a new style of political thinking. Disregarding extraneous matters (in which he was often wrong), the core of Wilson’s political philosophy was that with military might alone you cannot make peace, you can only “make a desert and call it peace.”

The criteria mentioned are (1) that in life the philosopher was derided, and (2) that, being fifty years dead, his ghost still walks.

In Wilson’s case (1) is attested by the fact that we replaced him, as President, with Harding—the very acme of derision.

Then (2) is attested by the fact that fifty years after his death people like Daniel P. Moynihan and—more significantly—people who are his direct opposite, are still writing about Wilson.

The fact that some write to bless and others to curse his memory is immaterial. He haunts them all, and that happens in the case of no thinker who wasn’t substantially right, whatever his errors in matters of detail.

Gerald W. Johnson
Baltimore, Maryland

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To the Editor:

Daniel P. Moynihan’s “Was Woodrow Wilson Right?” is one of the fairest, truest, and noblest evaluations of Wilson’s impact on our century’s developments that I have ever read. I was deeply moved by it.

Arthur S. Link
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey

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To the Editor:

Daniel P. Moynihan has rendered a notable service to the American political tradition. For over fifty years Woodrow Wilson has been largely separated from his own people. Mr. Moynihan’s essay makes an important contribution to the restoration of Wilson to us.

Mr. Moynihan brilliantly defines Wilson’s impact. He “helped, first, to set in motion an extraordinary world dynamic of political independence accompanied by a rhetoric of personal freedom; and sought, secondly, to establish a world order which, by legitimating and channeling these forces, would sufficiently contain them.” Since Mr. Moynihan gave his main attention to the first of these achievements, I hope I may be permitted to add a few comments on the second, based on a study of Wilson I am just bringing to completion.

As Mr. Moynihan stresses, Wilson saw a close connection between morality and politics. It is equally important to see the persistent emphasis Wilson gave to organization. Perhaps the best statement of this was in a speech in early 1912: “. . . Men who are behind any interest always unite in organization, and the danger in every country is that these special interests will be the only things organized, and that the common interest will be unorganized against them. The business of government is to organize the common interest against the special interests” (emphasis in original).

Concern with more effective organization was the controlling theme of Wilson’s first book, Congressional Government (1885). The common interest could be served only if organized through effective party structures and meaningful public debate. A similar emphasis underlay Wilson’s entire “New Freedom” program, and found expression in such major and durable organizational innovations as the Federal Reserve System. Wilson’s arguments for more effective international organization in the last speeches of his career were the extension to the disorganized area of world politics of beliefs that had been at the foundation of his political philosophy for over a third of a century.

The failure of the League is, as Mr. Moynihan points out, one of the reasons Wilson has long been separated from his people. The most influential tradition in American foreign-policy thinking in the quarter century after World War II has been political “realism.” Its chief proponents (Walter Lippmann, Hans Morgenthau, George F. Kennan) have laid heavy stress on the national interest and the balance of power, and have shared an antipathy to the “illusions” of Wilsonian “idealism.”

Wilson’s skepticism toward the balance-of-power system derived in part from philosophic preconceptions. To his mind it was an arrangement in which the special interests were organized at the expense of the common human interest in peace and justice. Beyond this, however, Wilson’s frustrations derived from the recalcitrance of events. The central theme of his great “Peace without Victory” speech in January 1917 was that only a peace which rested on a balance between the great warring interests could be durable. The course of events, not the “idealism” of Woodrow Wilson, made this quest for a balanced settlement impossible.

Until 1917 World War I was a 19th-century war; after 1917 it was a 20th-century one, as Elie Halevy has argued. By 1917 the old world order was gone beyond recall; the world of Metternich and Bismarck was in ruins. None of Wilson’s predecessors faced comparable dilemmas; none of his successors was to be free of them. If he is to be judged fairly, it must be by the standard of subsequent realities, not of prior expectations.

Faced with the catastrophic breakdown of 19th-century civilization, Wilson became the most. important spokesman for the possibilities of a new order on a liberal basis. He embodied all the great values of the liberal tradition—its integrity, its unyielding commitment to human freedom under law, its dynamism, its faith in the possibilities of more cooperative behavior among states. That tradition itself remains crippled so long as its most influential statesman is dismissed as a “blind and deaf Don Quixote,” to quote the merciless distortion of Keynes. With the crippling of liberal convictions, Americans are all the more subject to the pull of two alternatives: the “reactionary utopianism” (the phrase is Stanley Hoffmann’s) of the “realists,” and the violent romanticism of the revolutionaries.

In truth, however, the Wilsonian emphases were rooted in persistent and growing realities on both the domestic and the international scene, as Mr. Moynihan points out. It is perhaps in response to these realities that Secretary Kissinger so often speaks in Wilsonian tones (although he does not acknowledge the lineage). The recurrent emphases in all his major policy statements are those Wilson would well understand: the dangers of war for the future of civilization, and the imperative need for organized cooperative behavior among states.

Wilson was prophetic in his understanding of two great realities: the classic system of states could never be reconstructed after the revolutionary destruction of World War I; if any future world order were to have liberal dimensions, an active world role for America was essential. Wilson gave authentic expression to America’s selfhood. When Americans separate themselves from Wilson they close a major avenue to the deeper understanding of themselves. We are indebted to Mr. Moynihan for helping us narrow that distance.

Whittle Johnston
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia

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To the Editor:

Some time ago I wrote to thank Daniel P. Moynihan for redeeming the word “honorable” in his “Address to the Freshman Class” [December 1972]. Now he has the courage to use “liberty,” “duty,” and even “patriotism” in “Was Woodrow Wilson Right?” What a nice surprise to find such old friends rehabilitated.

Beth Rosenbaum
Brookline, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

In his otherwise insightful article that exhibits his moral toughness, Daniel P. Moynihan writes: “. . . [Wilson] was willing to bend a principle for Lloyd George, but not for Robert A. Taft. . . .” In 1924, when Wilson died, Robert Taft was only thirty-five years old. Perhaps Mr. Moynihan meant to refer instead to William Howard Taft.

Barry Weisman
Flushing, New York

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To the Editor:

The Celtic perversity of Daniel P. Moynihan grows increasingly intolerable. Even in far-off New Delhi he must be aware that the current intellectual fashion demands pessimism about the world, humankind, and the United States. He has surely heard of Robert Heilbroner and Richard N. Goodwin and all the other neo-Manichean prophets of doom. How, then, does he dare to write an article of such radiant hopefulness as his recent appreciation of Woodrow Wilson? Hope is outmoded; confidence is obsolescent; belief in freedom old-fashioned; and the notion that half of the Wilsonian program has already become a reality is simply intolerable.

The United States a beacon of freedom? Ambassador Moynihan begins to sound not only like Woodrow Wilson but even like Walt Whitman and Thomas Jefferson. As the country approaches its 200th anniversary, the last thing we need is patriots, especially hopeful patriots.

Maybe before the Ambassador returns to American academic life, the State Department will provide him with sustained briefing sessions to prepare him for culture shock. He must learn that the American intelligentsia already has passed through the portals of Dante’s hell and accepted Loren Eiseley’s judgment that the evolutionary process made a fatal mistake several million years ago when it produced humankind. At least, that’s what they’re saying on the Op Ed page of the New York Times, and if they’re saying it there, it must be true.

Out on the prairie soil of Illinois, of course, we still like men who hope, but then the Ambassador won’t be coming back to the prairie soil of Illinois.

Andrew M. Greeley
Center for the Study of American Pluralism
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

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Daniel P. Moynihan writes:

Whittle Johnston’s letter seems to me exceptionally important, and bears reading more than once by those of us who may have got into the habit of wondering whether international organizations are worth the pretense. Of course they are: if only because they may one day be what Woodrow Wilson felt they would one day have to be. I am grateful to him, and am fair to embarrassed by the generosity of Arthur S. Link. How shall I respond to Barry Weisman’s good-natured correction? It were perhaps best simply to deny ever having written that sentence. I thank Gerald W. Johnson, Beth Rosenbaum, and Andrew M. Greeley for their generosity and insight.