Some of America’s greatest war presidents — like Polk, Lincoln, FDR, and Truman — were constantly meddling in the military’s sandbox, Joseph Fouché notes:
America’s worst president, Thomas Woodrow Wilson (may he burn in hell), despite being a control freak and a sanctimonious prig, exercised little control over military strategy. Before Black Jack Pershing went off to France, he met with Wilson only once. When he tried to tell Woody something about the war, Wilson cut him off with the remark that Pershing came to him highly recommended and that he, Wilson, was sure he’d do a bang up job. That was the effective end of the interview and, true to his word, Wilson paid little attention to the military effort, leaving the running of the war to Secretary of War Newton Baker, avowed pacifist and former mayor of Cleveland, OH, Peyton C. March, Army Chief of Staff, and Pershing.If the otherworldly Wilson had employed something like strategy such as engaging in a build up of the U.S. Army before entry into World War I as a way of persuading the Germans and the Entente to be more reasonable (reasonable being do what we say) instead of counting on his shining personal righteousness acting as a beacon of peace from across the Atlantic, maybe some of the destruction of a disastrous war and a disastrous peace might have been avoided.