What do biographies of minor figures contribute to our understanding of history? Calling Colonel Edward House “minor” makes sense only in relation to the master he served: President Wilson. House himself never held public office. Indeed, he was not even a colonel; it was an honorific bestowed on him during his wheeling and dealing days in Texas politics. House was a Warwick, a “proud setter up and puller down of kings” – a quotation from Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” that Godfrey Hodgson uses in “Woodrow Wilson’s Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House” (Yale University Press, 336 pages, $35) as an epigraph to the chapter titled “The Texas Kingmaker.”

Arthur Link and Wilson’s other apologist biographers have sought to minimize House’s role in promoting Wilson to the highest office and then sustaining him there, especially during Wilson’s successful first term. Mr. Hodgson rightly rehabilitates House, building on the work of Louis Auchincloss, whom Mr. Hodgson deems Wilson’s most perceptive biographer.

In 1916, House declared, “from the first meeting and up to today I have been in as close touch with Woodrow Wilson as with any man I have ever known.” And Wilson reciprocated: “House is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one. … If anyone thinks he is reflecting my opinion by whatever action he takes, they are welcome to the conclusion.” Mr. Hodgson reports that Wilson would wander in his robe into House’s bedroom at the White House to say good night. And Wilson would say to House, “You are the only person in the world with whom I can discuss everything.”

“Everything” included poetry and whether Wilson should marry Edith Galt, who became Wilson’s second wife and House’s nemesis. House did not care for the second Mrs. Wilson, and when her husband became disabled by a stroke, she was finally able to sever the bond between the two men.

What happened? Ultimately, House failed in his great mission to place Wilson at the center of the world stage. Up to a point House did succeed brilliantly, making Wilson the focal point in the peace negotiations that ended World War I, established a League of Nations, and liberated lands such as Poland and Czechoslovakia. But because Wilson saw himself as a world savior, he deplored House’s willingness to compromise with the Allies on a peace treaty. Indeed, Wilson did not like to call the British, the French, or the Italians his allies, since he viewed himself not merely as a victor in war but as an arbiter of world peace.

House became too European, in Wilson’s view, too willing to make deals with crafty statesmen like Lloyd George and George Clemenceau. Even worse, House advocated concessions to the Senate, which had its doubts about a League of Nations that would limit American sovereignty. Wilson wanted to fight for what was right. House wanted to use friendly persuasion, resorting to harsher tactics only when absolutely necessary. To House, it was not enough to be right; to Wilson, it was not enough to win if he did not do so entirely on his own righteous terms. History, Mr. Hodgson implies, has sided with House, since the Senate did not approve of American participation in the League of Nations and Wilson’s own influence among European leaders steadily diminished after his triumphal first appearance at the peace conference in Paris.

Eager to refute historians who have disparaged House, by suggesting he took too much credit for what Wilson did achieve, Mr. Hodgson dwells too much, perhaps, on the political and diplomatic wrangling that eventually estranged Wilson and House. But the biographer also presents a brilliant portrayal of these parallel lives in passages such as this:

Wilson saw politics not as a map, with stubborn irremovable features – rivers and mountains – but as theorem inscribed with luminous simplicity on a sheet of white paper. House saw political leadership as a matter of dealing with people as they were.Wilson saw it as a matter of a being superior in wisdom and virtue – i.e., himself – leading weaker brethren toward the plane he inhabited. House’s admiration for his friend remained undiminished to the end. But by the end of 1918, his diary reveals that he was beginning to understand the political limitations that went with Wilson’s gifts of intellect and rhetoric.

As fine as this passage is, it is not complemented by any understanding of what happened to these two men as men.

How did Wilson and House cope with their loss of each other? Mr. Hodgson cannot answer the question – in part because Wilson left no record of what his separation from House meant to him. And House, eager to preserve his best memories of Wilson and his own status as the president’s “right hand,” never quite leveled with anyone – maybe not even with himself – about how he reacted to his banishment.

Nevertheless, I have this nagging feeling that Mr. Hodgson has ignored an opportunity. Like any biographer who is protective of his subject, he may have overlooked testimony that he finds distasteful. He refers, for example, to the memoirs of Cary Grayson, Wilson’s physician and close friend, who told a “great many ill-natured anecdotes about House.” Does “ill-natured” mean untruthful? Mr. Hodgson says no more – not even in a footnote where he might have explained what he found so “ill-natured” about Grayson’s anecdotes.

What is missing from this biography is any investigation of precisely what it was about House as a personality that may have alienated Wilson and his entourage. Mr. Hodgson portrays House as the friendliest of human beings, able to get along with nearly anyone. But House’s manner, his way of conducting himself in the company of Wilson and his acolytes, is not explored.

It is the biographer’s job to muck as deeply as possible into the mire of troublesome relations, however blameless his subject may seem.

crollyson@nysun.com