Just as the first World War tends to get swallowed up by the deep, dark shadow of its monumental second act, so too does Woodrow Wilson’s presidency tend to be overshadowed by the giant of 20th century presidents, Franklin Roosevelt.

And that is too bad. Wilson was a war president. He was a progressive thinker. He pushed through Congress a heavy forward-looking agenda that would be the envy of most presidents before or since.

He was witty. He was tough. President Wilson was a student of government, and he was among the first to recognize that the degrading armistice that ended World War I, and the heavy-handed and punitive Treaty of Versailles would ensure a war greater and more destructive than “the war to end all wars.”

For the record, author Cooper points out those words were not Wilson’s, and although he picked them up and ran with them, his speeches and writings clearly portend what would befall mankind one generation in the future.

How the world of American politics has changed in only a few lifetimes. When the former president of Princeton University won the White House as a minority president in 1912, he had served less than two years as governor of New Jersey. With unfinished business back home, President-elect Wilson would return to Trenton and work on the state agenda for three months before his March inauguration.

Once in Washington, taking advantage of Democratic majorities in both houses, Wilson pushed through the Federal Reserve, the income tax, the Federal Trade Commission, child labor laws and the eight-hour workday. That’s a heavy lift for any president.

This president was a charmer of both men and women, self-deprecating, entertaining, personable, all qualities not often attached to the 28th president today, when he is most often pictured as the dour, aloof academic.

His work habits were quirky by today’s standards. He typed his own letters, wrote his own speeches, even often took his own notes in shorthand at meetings, and still found time to play golf several mornings a week. After the death of his beloved wife Ellen, he managed to squeeze in a torrid courtship, and then a marriage.

Some things don’t change. To escape the prying eyes of the press corps, much of his courtship took place in a moving presidential limousine.

Wilson’s strength was domestic policies, but as fate would have it, the Great War in far-away Europe and its bitter aftermath would consume the last five years of his presidency and forever shape his legacy.

“Peace without victory” became his logo, and neutrality his theme. He was certain that was the only way to secure peace for the next generation. Of course, the U. S. did not remain neutral. Peace without victory did not happen. And the next generation paid the awful price.

Following that, the idea of a league of nations, a super body more powerful than its individual members, became his consuming passion. Think of it, the president of the United States was his own chief negotiator at the Paris talks and for nearly half a year, he was out of the country, a 10-day sea crossing from Washington.

The world was not ready for such a league, although a shadow of what Wilson conceived did meet long enough to prove itself ineffective.

It’s that second term that bedevils American presidents. Think of Nixon, of Clinton, of Reagan. Even George Washington was threatened with impeachment late in his second term. In Wilson’s case, he couldn’t get Congress to ratify the treaty he had taken such pains to negotiate. Nor could he get Congress to join the league he fathered.

And finally, Wilson suffered a stroke that would precipitate the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. For 18 months, the president was secluded in the White House, out of touch with the public, seen only by a select few. It was said the nation was being run by first lady Edith Galt Wilson.

What a story! What dramatic impact.

Then why is this comprehensive biography of the man who coaxed and cajoled a nation into the modern era such a stupendous letdown?

It’s the writing. Wilson scholar John Milton Cooper can never keep this exciting narrative flowing forward for more than three sentences at a time. There were 95 million Americans in 1912, and you sometimes suspect Cooper’s goal is to name each one of them.

This is the Wilson biography “of record.” Just imagine: The love of the president’s life is dying in the White House and Cooper is droning on endlessly about tariffs. Every congressman who uttered a word on tariffs needs to be identified and quoted. When is so much detail too much detail? When you can’t find the story through the endless pages of congressional rhetoric.

Much of this biography must be pure delight for students of the legislative process, but for most of us, it reads like a legal brief. There’s a great yarn buried somewhere in the author’s published notebooks, if only the reader could dig it out.

And that —just like the overshadowing of President Wilson by FDR — is too bad.

If one works at it with due diligence, as the lawyers like to say, you can almost see a flesh and blood man, a southern Presbyterian christened Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who bridged the gap between a 19th century nation struggling to unify itself and a 20th century world leader and champion of democracy. Almost.

Edward Cuddihy is a retired Buffalo News managing editor.

Woodrow Wilson

By John Milton Cooper Jr.

Knopf

702 pages, $35