First Ladies (17 page)

Wilson’s fog of personal grief lifted when a rain shower canceled his golf game one March day in 1915 and he found himself drinking tea with the temporary White House hostess, his cousin Helen Bones, and her friend, forty-two-year-old Edith Gait. A widow, Mrs. Gait’s interest in politics seemed close to zero. She claimed she had not even known who had been running for President in 1912—an astonishing statement for a resident of Washington, D.C. An astute woman in other ways, Edith Gait successfully managed her late husband’s jewelry store, considered the best in the capital. Independent as well, she traveled abroad, bought her stylish clothes in Paris, and drove her own electric automobile.

The lonely fifty-eight-year-old President was smitten from the moment he saw her. Edith’s hair was a dark, sultry red; her figure was not uncharitably described as Junoesque—and her apparent political naivete only increased his ardor. Wilson was essentially a teacher, and he adored the idea of educating this beautiful woman in the intricacies of the subject that was absorbing his every waking hour. At least as important, they were both southerners by birth and upbringing, with exacting preacher fathers. If you believe in destiny—and after a few years in the White House most people subscribe to some version of that faith—here were two souls that seemed meant for each other.

Wilson saw Edith as often as the demands of his office permitted, taking her for rides in White House cars, inviting her to dinners, teas, and even baseball games. By the last week in April, she was dining at the White House every night, and the President was addressing letters to her as “Dear Friend.” He talked to her with total frankness about his desperate attempts to play peacemaker between the belligerents in Europe, and his dread that America would be sucked into the war. She confessed that her first marriage had been unhappy and described her well-to-do widow’s life as mostly boring and empty. She hinted that she considered herself no longer capable of experiencing love. In her restlessness, she was thinking of a long trip to the Orient.

After dinner on May 4, 1915, Woodrow Wilson took Edith Gait out on the South Portico, with its view of the Washington Monument soaring into the moonlit sky. He told her that he loved her and asked her to marry him. Edith’s instinctive response was resistance. She said they had not known each other long enough—she was not sure how she felt about him. Wilson pleaded that in the White House time had a special dimension; days were mere minutes, weeks, hours. In this fearful condensation a lonely man was threatened with destruction. When she returned to her house on Dupont Circle, Edith wrote the President a letter that revealed to him—and perhaps to herself—how deeply he had stirred her:

Edith described “this little poem” as something she had learned “years ago,” never dreaming that someday it would perfectly express what was in her heart. She went on to assure Wilson that she wanted to help him. She would consider it an “unspeakable pleasure and privilege to be allowed to share these tense terrible days of responsibility…. I am a woman—and the thought that you have need of me is sweet!” She ended by pledging him “all that is best in me—to help, to sustain, to comfort” and sent her spirit “into the space that separates us to seek yours. Make it a welcome guest.”

Scholars now think Edith is the author of the poem. Libraries have been ransacked without finding the original. While she was writing it and the letter that followed, Wilson lay sleepless in the White House in near despair, thinking he had been rejected. In the dawn he wrote her a letter which began with a sonnet from Shakespeare, “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,” and another poem in sonnet form which he may have written himself, about the song of a thrush to his mate at morning, and how it reminded him of her. He told her he would try to bear his grief and dismay—“terrible companions in the still night.” He ended by begging her not to go to the Orient. “Don’t put every burden on me,” he pleaded.

Edith’s letter crossed this one and enabled the sleep-starved Wilson to stagger through a day of mounting international tension. The Germans were smashing the British and French on the Western Front and rampaging into Russia. The secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, impatient with the pro-Allied tilt to Wilson’s neutrality, was threatening to embarrass him by resigning. The President responded to Edith that night, in spite of being “infinitely tired—in brain and body and spirit.” Her letter, he wrote, was

He begged her to stop thinking of him as a “public man.” He told her she had not yet “looked with full comprehension on your friend and lover, Woodrow Wilson.” He described himself as a “longing man, in the midst of the world’s affairs, a world that knows nothing of the heart he has shown you and which would as lief break it as not.” He could not face this wolfish world with his “full strength” unless she loved him.

Could any woman on earth resist such a proposal? Especially since this response had barely reached Edith Gait’s door when the most horrifying news of the war exploded in Wilson’s face. A German submarine had torpedoed the thirty-two-thousand-ton British luxury liner
Lusitania
off the Irish coast, drowning over 1,000 men, women, and children, including 124 Americans. More than two thousand telegrams demanding war with Germany poured into the White House. On top of this came shocking British reports of German atrocities in Belgium. After the war, almost all were found to be fabrications, but at the time most Americans believed them.

Secretary of State Bryan whipsawed the President by insisting the drowned Americans should not have been on the
Lusitania
in the first place. He tended to believe the German contention that the liner was carrying weapons as well as passengers. (We now know it was.) The anguished Wilson turned to Edith for advice. She responded with bewilderment: “Why should I be chosen to help you?… The thought makes me tremble and grow afraid.”

Previously Wilson had told her about his problems with Bryan, and she had responded mischievously that he should fire the secretary of state and appoint her in his place, so she could see him every day. But she soon realized the
Lusitania
crisis had carried them to a far more serious point in their political and personal relationship.

Wilson’s response was a long letter, at the heart of which was embedded a simple cry: “I
need
you.” He begged her not to doubt that “blessed fact.” He urged her to think of him as he worked on a speech he was scheduled to make in Philadelphia to four thousand newly naturalized citizens and also on his note to Germany about the
Lusitania
. “Every sentence would have greater force and meaning if I could feel your mind and heart were keeping me company,” he wrote.

Edith rushed to the White House and gave Wilson her reply in writing as he was leaving for Philadelphia: “If you with your wonderful love can quicken that which has lain dead so long within me, I promise not to shut it out of my heart but bid it welcome—and come to you with the joy of it in my eyes.”

It would be nice to report that Wilson’s speech in Philadelphia was a huge success. It was full of soaring rhetoric about the meaning of America and the value of the chance a free society gave immigrants for a new life. But at the close he could not resist a comment on his neutrality policy: “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”

Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt led a chorus of denunciations, accusing Wilson of moral double-talk and rank cowardice. But Wilson stuck to his policy. His note to Germany was stern but did not threaten war. Edith was now a presence in this struggle. “Oh, how I have needed you tonight, my sweet Edith,” the President wrote. “What a touch of your hand and a look into your eyes would have meant to me of strength and steadfastness as I made the final decision as to what I should say to Germany” Later, when he had finished the note, he told her that he felt “you have been by my side all evening, for a strange sense of peace and love has been on me as I worked.”

As spring lengthened into summer, Wilson’s passion for Edith intensified. He saw her so often—on the presidential yacht, at the White House, in impromptu visits to her house—tongues began to wag. His closest advisers started to worry about the impact of a hasty marriage on his chances for reelection. Meanwhile, one of his old loves, Mary Hulbert Peck, showed up at the White House demanding a loan of seventy-five hundred dollars to bail her son out of bankruptcy. All his life Wilson had been attracted to pretty, vivacious women. His first wife, Ellen, had been amazingly tolerant of these infatuations, most of which remained platonic. But Mrs. Peck may have been an exception. She had letters from Wilson that would have ruined him politically if she showed them to a newspaperman. He gave her the money—a mistake.

Meanwhile, Edith inspired him to get tough with the Germans. They had answered his
Lusitania
note in a rather obnoxious way. Wilson told Edith that “when I see your eyes alight with the holiest thing in the world and hold you close in my arms and kiss you with pledges as deep as my soul,” he was ready to give the Germans the answer they deserved. I hate to criticize a President my father considered one of our greatest, but there are times during his pursuit of Edith when Wilson seems unhinged.

He showed her a draft of his reply to the Germans, and she assailed it with startling severity. “There was nothing of you, yourself, in it and therefore it seemed flat and colorless,” she told him.

Wilson went back to work on the note. “I have strengthened it in many ways and hope I have brought it nearer the standard my precious sweetheart, out of her great love, expects of me,” he wrote. Has any other woman gone from managing a jewelry shop to influencing the course of world history in four months? Edith Gait’s ascent leaves one openmouthed.

The revised note was so tough, Secretary of State Bryan said it would lead straight to war and refused to sign it. Edith told Wilson to let Bryan go. On the day he resigned, shaking the Democratic Party to its foundations—his support had won Wilson the nomination in 1912—the President wrote Edith three letters.

She responded to these and other messages about politics with rapture. “Much as I enjoy your delicious love letters,” she wrote, “I believe I enjoy even more the ones in which you tell me what you are working on… for then I feel I am being taken into partnership as it were.” There was the magical word that won Edith’s hitherto empty heart.

Escaping Washington’s beastly summer, Edith retreated to Cornish, New Hampshire, where Wilson soon joined her. Surrounded by carefully chosen friends and relatives, they managed to keep the press at bay. On June 29 they consummated their love and Edith responded with

During the rest of that summer of love and into the fall, Woodrow Wilson shared every aspect of his presidency with Edith. He showed her notes from the German Foreign Office, from the Mexican President, from Haiti (a headache then as now), from the American ambassador to England, often laced with critical comments that would have provoked an international upheaval if she had mentioned them to anyone. He was taking with utmost seriousness the task of educating Edith to be his political partner.

Gradually, this heady combination of love and political power made Edith critical of the men around Wilson. She took an especially strong dislike to his secretary, Joseph Tumulty, partly because of what she called his “commonness” and partly because he was emphatic about urging Wilson not to marry Mrs. Gait before the 1916 elections.

Tumulty was a shrewd, affable Irish American from Jersey City. Without him Wilson would never have survived his political baptism as governor of New Jersey. In the White House, he kept Wilson in touch with shifts in public mood and was the President’s chief liaison with Congress and the press.

Next Edith went to work on Colonel Edward House, the Texan who had made himself invaluable to Wilson as his personal envoy to the warring powers. From reading his letters, Edith decided he was a “weak vessel.” Wilson thought she was “partly right” but defended the colonel, who had played a crucial role in his 1912 campaign, as a “noble and lovely character.” Nevertheless, a wound had been inflicted on this relationship too.

In October of 1915, Wilson and Mrs. Gait announced their engagement. This inspired Wilson’s secretary of the treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, to try to scare the President into renouncing or at least delaying marriage. McAdoo, who had married the President’s daughter Eleanor in 1914, hoped to succeed Wilson in 1920. He said he had received an anonymous letter from California, warning him that Mary Hulbert Peck was threatening to release Wilson’s compromising letters to the press—and reveal his even more compromising seventy-five-hundred-dollar loan.