to be used as symbols of the dark and the bright in America's twentieth century approach to the world. No other President was ever so unabashed an imperialist as Theodore Roosevelt. He is remembered as the Rough Rider with the big stick, the man who grabbed Panama and built the canal while Congress argued about it. The Reagan Administration at its most bellicose evoked the mythic imagery of Teddy Roosevelt.
In contrast, Woodrow Wilson has become a symbol of the highest and sometimes unattainable aspirations of American foreign policy. "Wilsonian idealism" is a term still encountered in foreign policy debate, and one which is still used sometimes as an expression of admiration and sometimes as a statement of implied criticism. Idealism and failure are the two sides of our myth of Wilson. He is remembered not as a President who won a war, but as the President who lost the peace at Versailles and who could not bring the U.S. into his fondest creation, the League of Nations. In some ways, Wilson has been cast in the same role of high minded failure later filled by Jimmy Carter.
Yet our statesmen and leaders fall back, almost instinctively, on Wilsonian language when a policy must be justified to the American people. The U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf in the late summer of 1990 might "really" be intended to guard oil supplies, but President Bush cast it as pursuit of a "new world order," a thoroughly Wilsonian expression.
In myth, then Woodrow Wilson represents the unattainable heights to which American diplomacy aspires, and Theodore Roosevelt the depths of naked self interest and armed intervention to which it too often sinks. And in international diplomacy, as in other branches of politics, myth helps shape reality. America talks softly, in Wilsonian tones, and carries a Rooseveltian big stick.
Yet far from being polar opposites, the foreign policy ideas and conduct of Theodore R...