“To put it in its most understated and modest way,” Columbia University professor Michael Rosenthal said last week,”I think I have to say that Butler wanted to run the world.” Mr. Rosenthal was speaking of the longtime president of Columbia, Nicholas Murray Butler, the subject of his new book, “Nicholas Miraculous”(Farrar, Straus & Giroux).The event took place at Low Library and was co-sponsored by Friends of the Columbia Libraries and the Columbia University Bookstore.

Butler “really was a miraculous figure of enormous energy, enormous accomplishment, enormous ego, enormous flaws, and enormous narcissism,” Mr. Rosenthal said. He was a man whose ambitions were never parochially “limited to Columbia, nor were they national or even international in scope: They were finally nothing less than intergalactic.”

Mr. Rosenthal said Butler’s choice of “Cosmos” as his pen name for a series of articles he wrote for the New York Times in 1916 “tells us more about Butler than he understood.” As does the quip that amused Lord Halifax, who heard that “Butler had no intention of dying until there was a vacancy in the Holy Trinity.”

Mr. Rosenthal described various accomplishments and achievements of Butler’s, including his appointment as president of Teachers College at 25, adding 11 buildings to Columbia’s campus in his first 10 years; as well, John Dewey came to Columbia during Butler’s presidency (Butler had pursued Albert Einstein and Henry James to no avail). But Mr. Rosenthal’s lecture showed that one of Butler’s greatest skills was drawing publicity to himself.

“He was an extraordinary self-promoter for whom any day that he wasn’t on the front page of one paper or another was a lost day. And I can tell you: Reading through 144 volumes of clippings, there were very few such days.” This “master of distribution and saturation”was on the cover of Time and twice profiled by the New Yorker, among other publications. He distributed his dinner guest lists to the press. “There was no meeting that he had, no word that he ever spoke that he didn’t feel entitled to distribute to the world.” Mr. Rosenthal said. “When Butler spoke, the world listened.” Why? “Because Butler made sure they got the message.”

One form of publicity is accolades. “Every possible form of honor came to him one way or another,” Mr. Rosenthal said. When Butler received the Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown of Romania, the Philadelphia Record editorialized:

He already holds every nonstop, long-distance, endurance, and weight-carrying record in this department of endeavor. His latest acquisition … is simply another scrap of adornment for the most lavishly decorated member of the human race. It may be, indeed, the last, for the supply must be about exhausted, and there is only a remote possibility that new nations will be formed or new seats of learning founded for the purpose of adding illustrious initials to his name.

William Nelson Cromwell, cofounder of the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, offered Butler this 80th birthday greeting in 1942: “The effulgence of your glorious career obliterates time which gave to the world the miracle of your existence.” Cromwell added, “Such work, such influence, and such benefaction as your existence has manifested will never die.” Butler may have been “lavishly decorated,” but, sadly, he “more or less disappeared from human memory” the day after his funeral, Mr. Rosenthal said. He went on to say that researching the book had the feeling of unearthing “one of the best-kept cultural secrets” of the last century.

Mr. Rosenthal also discussed Butler’s ability to manipulate others. He helped organize his Columbia predecessor Seth Low’s campaign for mayor so that he could ascend to the presidency himself, only to later criticize Low for having had political aspirations. Butler went on to wage a losing campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920 and 1928, but a winning campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize, which he received in 1931.

Butler’s campaign slogan “Pick Nick for Picnic in November” alluded to his being a man of the people. As Mr. Rosenthal said, Butler was anything but. He had “what can only be described as a tropism toward the rich and powerful” such as Andrew Carnegie, Theodore Roosevelt, and Warren Harding. “He cultivated all people of power and prestige,” Mr. Rosenthal said.

After the talk, one audience member said it was sad that Butler never found anything in the whole world more magnificent than himself. Mr. Rosenthal acknowledged that “Butler’s narcissism was total” but said “it doesn’t make him any less fascinating.”

gshapiro@nysun.com