First Ladies (18 page)

A distraught Wilson’s first thought was not of the damage to his presidency but of Edith. He told her the whole story of his indiscretion
with Mrs. Peck and offered to release her from their engagement. That only made her love him more than ever. “I will stand by you—not for duty, not for honor—but for love—trusting protecting, comprehending love,” she told him. Negotiators managed to defuse Mrs. Peck.

On December 18, 1915, the President and Mrs. Gait were married at her house on Twentieth Street and took a train to Hot Springs, West Virginia, for a honeymoon at the palatial Homestead Hotel. When Colonel Edmund Starling, the head of the Secret Service detail, entered the presidential car the next morning, he saw Wilson, still in his wedding tailcoat, top hat, and gray morning trousers, whistling a tune. As the startled Starling watched, the President clicked his heels in the air and began singing: “Oh you beautiful doll! You great big beautiful doll!”

Wilson’s renewed zest for life may well have had a lot to do with the vigorous campaign he waged for reelection in 1916. He became the first Democrat to win a second consecutive term since Andrew Jackson in 1832. Edith accompanied her husband everywhere. When he introduced her from the platform, she received enormous applause, proving the American people were far less stodgy than Wilson’s cautious advisers with their worries about him offending “standards” by marrying too soon after his first wife’s death.

On the second floor of the White House, where Ellen Axson Wilson and her husband had maintained separate bedrooms, the huge Lincoln bed was moved into Wilson’s room and the new First Couple shared it nightly. They spent almost as much time together during the day. Edith sat beside the President in the Oval Office from eight to ten thirty while he answered mail and signed documents. Usually she spent this time reading important diplomatic messages in “the drawer”—the most secret part of Wilson’s desk—often decoding them in the process.

At White House receptions, Wilson taught Edith how to shake hands hundreds of times without winding up in a hospital for special surgery. His formula was to put the middle finger down and cross the index and ring finger above it. That way, people could not get a grip and the welcomer’s hand slid through the guest’s hand almost
untouched. Edith claimed Wilson’s technique worked beautifully At any rate, she was a great success as a White House hostess.

Edith Wilson often worked in the Oval Office beside Woodrow Wilson. She frequently read confidential papers in the diplomatic drawer of his desk
.
(AP/Wide World Photos)

When Colonel House returned from Europe, he was shocked to discover that Wilson expected him to report his supersecret negotiations with the warring powers not only to the President but to the First Lady. Ever the diplomat, the Texan struck a secret deal with Edith—in return for her support, he would help her get rid of Tumulty, whom he considered a rival as well as a political liability because he was a Catholic. Their unsavory intrigue, which did neither of them any credit, seemed to triumph when Wilson yielded to Edith’s repeated urging and fired Tumulty at the beginning of his second term. But the heartbroken New Jerseyan, who worshiped Wilson, begged the President to change his mind and Wilson relented. Tumulty had no illusions about who had tried to cut his throat. The result left Wilson woven in a web of antagonistic advisers, not a good formula for sound politics or presidential peace of mind.

Soon after his reelection, Wilson’s renewed attempts to build momentum for a negotiated “peace without victory” collapsed when Germany announced it would resume unrestricted submarine warfare and began sinking American ships. The President asked Congress to declare war in a magnificent speech that converted the decision into a crusade to make the world safe for democracy. How many times I heard my father describe the way that speech transformed Missouri and the rest of the Midwest, where people had voted for Wilson on the basis of the 1916 campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war.”

Edith continued to work at the President’s side as America plunged into a frantic effort to create an army and ship it to France before Germany won the war. She introduced austerity into White House entertaining, joined the Red Cross, and bought some sheep to trim the White House lawn, releasing men for war work. When Wilson, tormented by the thought of young Americans dying in France, drove himself relentlessly, she turned protector and coaxed him away from his desk to go horseback riding or take a night off at the theater. Dr. Cary Grayson, the White House physician, had warned Edith that Wilson suffered from arteriosclerosis, making overwork especially dangerous for him, because it increased the risk of a stroke or heart attack.

After some harrowing months in the spring of 1918, when it looked as if massive German offensives on the Western Front were unstoppable, the weight of American manpower and the exhaustion of the German army and civilian populace ended the war with startling suddenness on November 11,1918. The Germans accepted an armistice based on Wilson’s proposals for a negotiated peace. But this good news came too late to rescue Wilson and the Democratic Party from a dismaying defeat in the 1918 congressional elections, giving the Republicans control of both houses of Congress.

At least part of the cause of the debacle was the ongoing feud between Edith and Joe Tumulty. He had urged the President to issue a call for a Democratic Congress to support him in the peace negotiations. Edith wanted the President to appear nonpartisan—above politics
—in the midst of a war. The Republicans, led by Teddy Roosevelt, denounced Wilson’s idea of a negotiated peace and called for Germany’s unconditional surrender. They persuaded American voters to all but repudiate the President. A furious Edith became even more hostile to Tumulty’s opinions—and more sure of her own.

Wilson had been working on a draft of his idea for a League of Nations to prevent another war. He still wanted a peace without victory (without vengeance and punishment) and wondered if he should go to Europe to make sure it was achieved. All his advisers—Colonel House, Joe Tumulty, his son-in-law McAdoo—urged him to stay home and let his secretary of state do the negotiating. They feared the British and French, bitter over their terrible battlefield losses, were going to insist on peace terms that were far from Wilson’s benevolence. Only Edith told Wilson he
must go
.

We have seen—and will see—other occasions when First Ladies changed the course of history. But this advice from Edith Wilson must rank near the top of any conceivable list. Most historians have concluded it was bad advice. Not only was it a mistake for the President to handle difficult negotiations personally—he also abandoned domestic politics at the worst possible time, with his Republican enemies in control of Congress.

With Edith at his side, Woodrow Wilson toured Europe while millions cheered. But this hero worship turned many Americans against the President and his First Lady. They seemed oblivious to soaring inflation and serious labor unrest back home. The year 1919 saw a staggering thirty-six hundred strikes. With its leader three thousand miles away, the Democratic Party drifted, headless and divided. Worse, at Edith’s urging, the President jettisoned Colonel House and other advisers he had brought to Paris, making himself largely responsible for the peace conference’s results.

Wilson came home with a treaty that was a virtual parody of a peace without victory. It saddled the Germans with huge reparations that wrecked their economy and forced them to accept a clause stating they were guilty of starting the war. Wilson admitted the treaty was imperfect, but he claimed the defects could be corrected in the
League of Nations. He attached the “Covenant” for this great experiment in idealism to the treaty, demanding that the Republican-controlled Senate ratify both in the same vote. The reply to this political brinkmanship was a resounding
no
.

Although the President was exhausted from the strain of months of negotiating in Paris, he decided to take his case to the American people and scheduled a whistle-stop tour across the nation. Edith and Dr. Grayson tried to talk him out of it, but he dismissed their pleas. With passionate idealism that awed and thrilled her, Wilson reminded his wife that he had sent Americans to die in the trenches of the Western Front to achieve this treaty, which he saw as a guarantee of world peace. “I cannot put my personal safety, my health, in the balance against my duty,” he said. “I must go.”

In blistering September heat, Wilson struggled through the hostile Midwest to California, where he drew huge, cheering crowds. By then he was teetering on the brink of collapse, tortured by insomnia, headaches, and attacks of indigestion and asthma. “Let’s stop,” Edith begged him. “Let’s go somewhere and rest!” Wilson refused. He had become a President even the most loving wife could not protect from himself and the murderous pressures of history.

In Pueblo, Colorado, Wilson’s condition became truly alarming. One side of his face collapsed, he could barely talk, and he wept uncontrollably. Edith canceled the rest of the trip. The train raced back to Washington with the President writhing in agony. Alas, the rescue was too late. Three days after he returned to the White House, Wilson suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed on one side. For days he lay in a coma. One historian has called it a “wonder and tragedy” that he lived. It is hard not to agree with both sides of that observation.

Even after he emerged from the coma, Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated within the meaning of that word in the Constitution, and he could, perhaps should, have been removed from office. But many of the people around him objected strenuously to abandoning the White House. The First Lady was not one of them. In her memoirs she told of asking the doctors if they thought the President should resign. The
neurologist in charge of the case convinced her, she claimed, that doing so would deprive Wilson of his motivation to recover. It would be better if he remained President, providing she could protect him from “every disturbing problem” for several months.

Edith asked him how this tranquillity could be achieved at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The doctor told her it was up to her to screen the problems and select the very few that merited the President’s attention. The neurologist insisted that Wilson’s mind was unimpaired by the illness—a judgment historians now consider ludicrous. Even in 1918 the doctor should have known that “mind” involves more than abstract thinking. While his mental processes retained their clarity, the President’s emotional makeup was profoundly altered. He wept with no warning, grew vastly agitated over trifles, and developed an almost paranoid view of his political opponents. This was not difficult, I should add; the enmity between Wilson and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the leader of the Republican opposition, was lethal well before Wilson’s collapse.

Edith naturally shared this view of Lodge, who was willing to accept the treaty and the League of Nations only with numerous “reservations” to protect American sovereignty. She and others in the inner circle feared that if Wilson resigned, the vice president, Thomas Marshall, would be willing to compromise with Lodge. The struggle became a clash between idealism and realism. Unquestionably, Woodrow Wilson was a great spokesman for the idealistic side of the American character. But in 1919 his damaged brain was unable to distinguish the limits of idealism in politics.

When he was healthy Wilson had been a genius at making such distinctions. He used to tell a story about a steamboat that bumped into a mudflat on a dark night on the Mississippi. One of the passengers asked the captain why he did not steer by the stars, which glittered brightly above them in a clear sky. “We are not going that way,” the captain said. A ship can steer by the stars on the open ocean, but they are useless on a river. Like the captain, the politician has to follow the winding course of the darkened river of national life and occasionally collide with unexpected obstacles.

A great many Democratic senators, Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, Colonel House, Tumulty, and Lord Grey, the British special ambassador, thought Wilson should compromise with Lodge and the Republicans. But the President remained intransigent, and the First Lady, keeper of the presidential sickroom, declined to let any of them present their arguments. Colonel House’s numerous letters were never even opened until the Wilson papers were deposited in the Library of Congress in 1952.

Once, as the struggle roared to a climax, Edith wavered, trying to rescue her husband from his self-imposed ordeal. She urged him to accept Senator Lodge’s reservations “and get this awful thing settled.”

“Little girl,” Wilson said. “Don’t you desert me. That I cannot stand. Better a thousand times to go down fighting than to dip your colors in dishonorable compromise.”

On November 19, 1919, the Senate voted on the treaty and the league. Wilson needed a two-thirds majority. Instead he was buried in a tidal wave of nays, fifty-three to thirty-eight. Toward midnight the First Lady tiptoed into the sickroom to tell her husband. She was trembling inwardly; she thought the news might kill him. Instead, after a long silence, he said: “All the more reason why I must get well.”