This question has popped up before, there's a pretty good discussion of it here

Maybe someone else will post their thoughts. I would suggest that humans tend to like all our heroes totally heroic, all our villains totally villainous, and really love surprise: therefore all the variations in print on "Things you Thought You Knew About History That Aren't Really True".
Lots has been said for and against Wilson. Wilson was a Progressive when that was a very new, cool thing , presiding over a US that was quite pleased with itself and optimistic, and a scholarly man with vision of how to achieve world peace. At the end of WWII, when the UN had been created and hopes were high, Wilson got quite high marks for being prescient- his League of Nations was deprived of US support and it was convenient to assume that if it had gotten it, WWII might have been avoided. This is the man of whom Arthur Link would write several volumes of glowing biography - and not finish. Move ahead some decades, and some people would like to say Progressive governments work against the magic of the marketplace, that WWII would have happened with or without the US at the League. And the strong racism that was considered a slight foible in 1900 ( and an expected one from a blue-blood Virginian) is now taboo.