Kati Marton (3 page)

THIS BOOK DOES NOT DEAL
with every twentieth-century presidential couple. The stories of Warren and Florence Harding, Calvin and Grace Coolidge and Herbert and Lou Hoover simply do not resonate today. They were not figures who, by force of their personalities or their actions, shifted historic currents. The long shadows cast by their predecessors, the Wilsons, and their successors, the Roosevelts, eclipse them.

All presidential couples since the Roosevelts, save one, are included because each has something to teach us about the intersection of power and marriage and about the evolving role of women in society. The exception is Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower. Like the Hardings, Coolidges and Hoovers, the Eisenhowers did not leave a deep, historic imprint as a couple. Mamie’s role in the presidency was a simple extension of her many years as a dutiful army wife. She played no significant role in her husband’s administration. As a couple, the Eisenhowers were a nostalgic throwback and suited America’s postwar age of conformity.

This is a work of history and interpretation, and wherever possible I have used primary sources: extensive interviews with participants and eyewitnesses to the presidential events, oral histories and correspondence. I have also relied to a considerable extent on presidential studies by Michael Beschloss, Alan Brinkley, Robert Caro, Robert Dallek, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Henry Graff, David Maraniss, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Carl Anthony Sferraza, Jr. and others. They are listed, with my thanks, in the notes that follow the text.

The lights of public scrutiny turn ever brighter on the occupants of the modern White House. The twenty-four-hour news cycle, the constant need to fill the airwaves, leaves them ever less privacy. Leadership needs a certain aura to thrive, but mystery is no longer available to the president. We live in peaceful, prosperous times, but we do not yet know
the long-term consequences of stripping our leaders to their under-shorts.

Our system endows the presidency with the powers of both the chief of state and the head of government. The president can rise to great heights, but to do so he needs a strong relationship with the people, a relationship based on more than competence. For this reason, and perhaps a residual nostalgia for the monarchy that once ruled the colonies, there has always been a regal tint to the office. Paradoxically, the most decent presidents, and best husbands, have not always excelled in the office; Carter, Ford and the senior Bush come to mind. Thus, one can argue, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has, that a public obsession with the private lives of presidents is not healthy for the nation. No less a figure that the nation’s most revered ex-first lady shared this view recently. In January 1998, observing the White House sex scandal and the nation’s addiction to it, Lady Bird Johnson expressed concern. “We will all lose,” she told me. “We are narrowing the number of people who will be willing to run.” But there will always be those “consumed whole” by the temptation to claim a place in history. May they choose their partners carefully and well. Like it or not, the state of presidential marriages matters to us all. As we shall see.

F
OOLS FOR
L
OVE

ON JANUARY 1, 1900, TWO THOUSAND WASHINGTONIANS BRAVED THE BITTER
cold and falling snow and patiently waited for the White House doors to open for the traditional New Year’s reception. They came by trolley and in elegant carriages to mark the dawn of a new century and with it, as the presence of dozens of diplomats in the queue signaled, America’s emergence as one of the world’s most powerful nations.

The day also marked the hundredth anniversary of the death of George Washington, but America was now an altogether different country
than the fledgling republic bequeathed by Virginia’s “First Gentleman.” In the past twenty years, seven million Americans had abandoned roots and rural traditions and joined the great urban migration. “America fever” was sweeping the muddy villages and mining towns of Central and Eastern Europe. An entire Italian family could buy steerage tickets from Naples for as little as $15. Half a million immigrants were expected to arrive in New York that year. The combination of the rich land, a fearless, mobile population and breathtaking new technology—from the combine to alternating-current electricity—was allowing America to challenge the rest of the world.

Inside the White House resided a Victorian man and his withdrawn, sickly wife. William and Ida McKinley, good-natured, well liked and unchallenging, had little interest in the new age. While the country had stretched and grown, the White House had not. It had been built as the home of the president of a small republic. The presidential offices were a rabbit warren of jumbled rooms, alongside the First Family’s private quarters. A handful of men in formal morning attire, black cutaway coats, gray-and-black-striped trousers and silk ties jockeyed for space in the overcrowded, ill-lit offices. Down the hall in the presidential bedroom, Ida spent much of her time crocheting. She neither had, nor wished for, her own staff or an office of her own. But the American people felt close to their president, who was still accessible to citizens. When he was in residence in the White House, hundreds of them arrived every weekday, expecting to meet him.

It would take another year and an assassin’s bullet to bring to power the first twentieth-century president, Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was not content for the United States to be the world’s economic giant; his sights were set on global military and diplomatic might. Colorful and ebullient, he and his coolly confident second wife, Edith, were the first modern presidential couple. They and their six children filled the mansion with the boisterousness associated with the family. Roosevelt decreed that henceforth the Executive Mansion would be called the White House, a name he considered less stuffy and more in line with the democratic image he intended to convey. Edith, meanwhile, began to institutionalize the office of first lady. She persuaded Congress to finance
the mansion’s modernization, adding the West Wing and—for the first time—allocating space for the first lady’s offices. She hired the first fulltime White House social secretary. Edith ran the White House with the ease and detachment of a born chatelaine, though she treated the public and political aspects of the role with aristocratic disinterest. Nevertheless, in both style and substance, Edith and Theodore Roosevelt virtually initiated the ascendancy of an imperial presidency. Though Edith did not personally make use of the first lady’s own pulpit, she helped lay the foundation for her successors. Another Roosevelt would take it into territory Edith never could have imagined.

Helen Herron Taft, the wife of President William Howard Taft, who succeeded Roosevelt, achieved a number of breakthroughs as first lady between 1909 and 1913. She was the first woman to be allowed a seat within the bar of the Supreme Court, the first to publish her memoirs and the first to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. But her historic role is overshadowed by the second Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, with whom this narrative of marriage and power truly begins.

Edith Wilson became first lady during a period when the inherent inequality between men and women—society’s patriarchal nature—was beginning to be questioned. Since the 1890s American women made up one-third of college students and more than one-third of professional workers. Edith, however, seemed content with the crumbs of education reserved for a Victorian woman. She wanted no part of the generation of college-educated women who were forming local suffrage associations and going door-to-door to enlist support. She would have found repellent Theodore Dreiser’s
Sister Carrie,
which sparked a national scandal. So great was the uproar caused by this story of a country girl who uses sex to climb out of poverty that the publisher was forced to withdraw the book after selling only 456 copies. Another book,
What a Young Husband Ought to Know,
fared better. The book advised men that “the sexual impulse in the male … marches like a mighty conqueror, arousing and marshaling the mightiest human forces [leading to] the attainment of the world’s greatest and grandest achievement in art, in letters, in inventions, in philosophy, in philanthropy, and in every effort that is to
secure the universal blessing of mankind.” The book went on to assure readers that with patience and self-control, husbands could teach their wives to accept sex as a necessary hardship on the road to motherhood.

Edith willingly accepted the role her nineteenth-century southern upbringing assigned to her. She embraced the Victorian feminine ideal of the virtuous, compliant and passive child/woman. She proudly proclaimed both her disapproval of women she called “devils in the workhouse” and her adherence to women’s subservience to men. She called Woodrow Wilson “My Lord and Master” and he called her “Little Girl”—not for her the nascent female solidarity movement. Yet no presidential wife ever wielded more real power than she did, the first lady who said she wished only to be a good wife.

The Wilsons’ story is perhaps the most poignant in the chronicles of presidential marriages, and among the most controversial. In rapid succession it encompassed death, bereavement, unexpected bliss and sudden physical decline. It is also the story of an astonishing White House cover-up in which the first lady was the main perpetrator. At a time when American women still could not vote, rarely held jobs beyond that of a domestic or a grade-school teacher, a woman ran the White House and the executive branch. Woodrow and Edith embody the White House’s greatest love story, one that had the most tragic outcome for the nation and the world.

NO CEMENT BARRIERS
or electric fences imprisoned the White House’s residents in the early years of the century. At first glance, it was just a very large house in the heart of a medium-sized city. Until the 1860s, Washington had remained a winter outpost where politicians converged to debate a handful of subjects not controlled by the states. Humidity drove residents away for the summer. New York was the country’s financial capital, Boston its cultural mecca. But the Civil War had changed Washington, as it became the hub of wartime operations. “Slowly,” historian Henry Adams wrote, “a certain society had built itself up about the Government. Houses had been opened and there was much dining; much calling; much leaving of cards.”