In the competitive race for worst President of the 20^th century, three names continually turn up:

Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace, having compromised the office and covered up a crime.  

Warren G. Harding, whose administration became a synonym for high-level corruption.

Jimmy Carter, the smiling hypocrite who could do nothing right, from facing up to the Iranians to making the economy function.

 These are all candidates worthy of consideration, but there's a fourth figure who should not be overlooked in this grand competition. Eighty-seven years ago this month, President Woodrow Wilson asked congress for permission to send American soldiers in the war to end all wars.

World War One was very possibly the worst idea of the 20^th century. In the aftermath, Josef Stalin rose to become the ruler of the U.S.S.R. and Adolf Hitler to become the Fuhrer of Nazi Germany. Both men are rightly regarded as the epoch's most vile mass murderers and, consequently, the personification of modern evil.

Did they have to happen? Even now the jury is out. Very possibly Germany would become a terror state; after all, the Nazi party built upon resentments far older than the nation's defeat in 1918. And Russia, which had never known liberty, might easily have fallen to the Bolsheviks despite the competition of the Trotskyites and the liberal ambitions of the Kerenskyites. It’s impossible to tell.

What is known is that Wilson made Hitler and Stalin's ascent easier by running on the platform, He Kept Us Out of War, and then getting into that conflict with both feet.

America was viewed ever after as an enemy of Germany. The treaty of Versailles, which followed victory, was held in cynical contempt by the defeated nations, by Russia, and by almost all U.S. Allies. Wilson, however, remained serenely oblivious, convinced that he could do no wrong.

Sigmund Freud never met the President, but felt well equipped to analyze him from afar. He had read all he needed to know about Wilson’s transparent vanity as well as the man's frosty attitudes and platitudes. Freud disliked his subject, whom he called, “An enlightened man who believed himself in direct communication with God, guided by an intelligent power outside himself….”

With some justification we hear the same thing said about another President these days, but not a word was spoken about Wilson’s egotistical self-importance then—or now.  Academics customarily list him as one America’s great presidents, though there is hardly a scintilla of evidence for that lofty status.

 Woodrow Wilson promised to “make the world safe for democracy.” He did nothing of the kind. He sent U.S. troops to Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic and Mexico and accomplished zero. Moreover his notion of the League of Nations as an arbiter of world conflict was, as everyone now acknowledges, pitiable and farcical.

He did create the Federal Reserve. He did impose the income tax. He did make speeches that seemed intelligent at the time, even though they later appeared to be fatally persuasive. As the former head of Princeton, he did look like a president.

Then again, so did Warren Harding.