In the article posted to the right, the relationship Woodrow Wilson enjoyed with the much admired editor-columnist from the the N.Y. World, Frank Cobb (1869 – 1923) is recalled – specifically that night before the President declared war on Germany.
“I’d never seen him so worn down. He looked as if he hadn’t slept – and he said he hadn’t. He said that he was probably going before Congress the next day to ask for a declaration of war, and he’d never been so uncertain about anything in his life as about that decision. For nights, he said, he’d been lying awake, going over the whole situation; over the provocation given by Germany, over the probable feeling in the United States, over consequences to the settlement and to the world at large if we entered.”
The article is composed of portions of John L. Heaton’s book on the newspaperman, Cobb of the World (1924) and illustrated with images of the actor Richard Gaines as he played Wilson in a 1942 Broadway production about the president, In Time to Come (directed by Otto Preminger).
