ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses three Presidents who seem to have forgotten that power means persuasion. Different as they were in other ways, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Lyndon B. Johnson came to share in their Presidencies a common pattern: a process of rigidification, and a movement from political dexterity to narrow insistence on a failing course of action despite abundant evidence of the failure. The chapter describes that the political tragedies had developed out of inner dramas in which themes of power and themes of conscience struggled for preeminence. President Wilson, then, demonstrated the most intense personal commitment to the League of Nations treaty throughout his struggle. As with Wilson, Hoover's struggle was not a matter of opinion, not a matter of experiment and compromise in the face of uncertainty, but a war for a principle–that "above all".
