A. Scott Berg didn't enroll at Princeton until almost 100 years after Woodrow Wilson did. But by now, Berg is well acquainted with the man who led the nation into World War I and promoted (but couldn't get the U.S. to join) a League of Nations to help end all wars. "Wilson" is the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer's most ambitious book. From his Hollywood Hills home, Berg (holding a tiger-handled umbrella in honor of the Princeton mascot) is a one-man band of research and writing, and never more intensely than in unveiling the game-changing 28th president of the United States.

How would Wilson have handled the issues President Obama faces?

We live very much in a world Woodrow Wilson created. I believe all our foreign policy goes back to a single sentence in a single speech he gave on April 2, 1917, that the world must be made "safe for democracy." The bulk of our economic policy is based on the federal reserve system, which Wilson introduced.

The friction between the executive and legislative branches today is the most intense since the days when the Democratic Woodrow Wilson encountered an increasingly hostile and Republican Congress.

The big difference between Obama and Wilson is that Wilson maintained a constant dialogue with Congress, where I now find Obama often lurching from crisis to crisis. I think he was able to get more legislation passed and was better able to articulate why he wanted legislation passed....