Kati Marton (4 page)

In the waning years of this era, Woodrow Wilson, a man past his middle age, and Edith Bolling Galt, a woman well into hers, fell in love and carried on an ardent affair in the White House.

The fifty-nine-year-old president was widowed in 1914, during the second year of his first term. Ellen Axson Wilson’s sudden death coincided almost exactly with the outbreak of World War I, and the convergence of the two events shattered Wilson’s well-ordered world. His famously stern demeanor masked a passionate and emotionally needy man. It is hard to imagine an isolation greater than the one that fell over him, suddenly alone in that house. Wilson had always preferred the company of women to that of politicians. His daughter Nell recalled, “Father enjoyed the society of women, especially if they were what he called ‘charming and conversable.’” His first wife and daughters had been the core of his existence. “My heart has somehow been stricken dumb …,” Wilson wrote at the time of Ellen’s death. “She was beyond comparison the deepest, truest, noblest lover I ever knew.” The following year he would marry again.

In March 1915, Edith Galt recalled later, “I turned a corner and met my fate.” Invited to tea at the White House by a cousin of the president, she stepped off an elevator and ran into Wilson. Edith would later revealingly recall the encounter primarily in sartorial terms. How fortunate, she wrote, that she had “worn a smart black tailored suit which Worth had made for me in Paris and a tricot hat which I thought completed a very good looking ensemble.”

Wilson was immediately smitten. Invitations to dinner and hand-delivered letters from the White House to her town house soon crossed Washington almost daily. So did shipments of Edith’s favorite flower, orchids. “The orchids carried a certain significance,” White House chief usher Irwin Hoover recalled, “and when she appeared it would always be with just one of them, worn high on the left shoulder.”

Two hundred and fifty surviving letters chronicle their love affair in remarkable detail. They form an indispensable window into the passionate courtship and the simultaneous entry of the United States into world affairs. “My dear Mrs. Galt,” Wilson wrote on April 28, 1915, “I have ordered a copy of Hamerton’s
Round My House ….
I hope it will give
you pleasure—you have given me so much! If it rains this evening would it be any pleasure for you to come around and have a little reading—and if it does not rain, are you game for another ride?”

On the surface, they seemed almost bizarrely unsuited. At forty-two, she was tall and buxom. Wilson was ramrod straight and thin as a rake. His face was long, his features sharply chiseled and lined. Her face was smooth, her cheeks full. Where she was impulsive, he was logical and loved elaborate argument. Where he was rational and careful, she was jealous, self-indulgent, intuitive, judgmental and seemingly fearless. He was a scholar who loved the company of books and, at the same time, a deeply moral man who believed America must be an example to other nations. Edith was interested primarily in travel and fashion. A substantial portion of her memoirs is devoted to descriptions of what she wore to which historic event. Politics, she thought, was a bore.

But deeper ties pulled Woodrow and Edith together. Both were Virginians, Edith the granddaughter of a slaveowner, the child of once prosperous gentry. Both were enthralled by the romance and the mythology of the Old South. As a little boy, Wilson had seen Robert E. Lee pass through Atlanta after the surrender. Though he had no southern ancestry, Wilson once said that the South was the one place on earth where nothing had to be explained to him. Edith shared this powerful connection to land and place and spoke with a soft southern lilt that Woodrow admired. Left financially independent by her first husband, she combined traditional southern charm with the surface worldliness of a well-traveled woman. With neither a husband nor children to look after, Edith was a free spirit, with the seductive air of a much younger woman.

Events in Europe intensified the courtship. Wilson was under tremendous pressure during those early months of 1915. The Kaiser’s army had launched gas warfare against the French and British. Germany warned American travelers that if they sailed on British ships, they did so “at their own risk.” In his letters to Edith, Wilson shared his innermost thoughts. “Here stands your friend, a longing man, in the midst of a world’s affairs—a world that knows nothing of the heart he has shown you …. Will you come to him sometime without reserve and make his strength complete?”

On May 4, 1915, Wilson took Edith onto the south portico of the White House and, drawing his chair close to hers in the chilly air, told her he loved her and asked for her hand in marriage. Feigning shock, as her nineteenth-century upbringing prescribed for such a sudden proposal, Edith turned him down. “You cannot love me,” she wrote him that same night, “for you really don’t know me, and it is less than a year since your wife died.”

But she kept the courtship going, adding, “I am a woman—and the thought that you have need of me is sweet!” Still, she seemed to shun her suitor’s more explicit physical advances. She told him that her first marriage had been “incomplete.” Her reserve only enhanced his zeal. “For God’s sakes,” he wrote her, “try to find out whether you really love me or not.”

The presidency was a powerful courtship tool for Wilson. He made Edith feel that she shared the burden of the office. During the very week Woodrow first proposed marriage, on May 7, 1915, German submarines torpedoed the great British liner
Lusitania,
killing 1,200 civilians, including 128 Americans. “I need you,” the president wrote two days later, “as a boy needs his sweetheart and a strong man his helpmate and heart’s comrade …. Do you think that it is an accident that we found one another at this time of my special need and that it meant nothing that we recognized one another so immediately and so joyously?… I hope you will think of me tonight. I shall be working on my speech of tomorrow evening and on our note to Germany. Every sentence of both would be freighted with greater force and meaning if I could feel that your mind and heart were keeping me company.” That night, in what some historians have called “a state of ecstasy,” the president gave one of his most powerful speeches.

On May 10, Edith wrote Woodrow that his “wonderful love can quicken that which has lain dead so long within me.” As American neutrality hung in the balance, the president personally typed a letter of protest to the German government. The same day he wrote his beloved. “And, oh, I have needed you tonight, my sweet Edith! 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.”

In another letter he wrote her the same day, Woodrow’s mind was not on Germany but on his overwhelming physical desire, which he made clear was not yet “complete.” Referring to himself in the third person, Wilson wrote her the very next day, virtually announcing his intention to consummate their relationship. “He has been permitted a sacred enterprise: there is a heart to be rescued from itself—which has never known that final divine act of self surrender which is a woman’s way to love and happiness. If she cannot be taken—taken away from herself by siege,
she must be taken by storm
—and she shall be!”

How seductive it must have been to have this austere, powerful man want her. “The clock is striking midnight and I must go to bed. I have on my wrapper and am by the window,” she replied. “I also have on one pair of the lovely white silk stockings [a gift from Wilson] and they are a joy—and make me feel so very rich …. A fond and very tender kiss my precious Woodrow before we put out the light—and I feel your dear arms fold around me.”

While their personal drama continued, Wilson wanted her involved in affairs of state. He described his troubles with Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, who opposed the president’s hard line with Germany. And Edith offered her opinions without reserve or much understanding. “I think it will be a blessing to get rid of him [Bryan],” she wrote on May 5, “and might as well frankly say I would like to be appointed in his place—then I should have to have daily conferences with you—and I faithfully promise not to interfere in any way with your continuing to do all the work!” The tone was playful, but this letter marks her entry into affairs of state—with ultimately historic consequences.

“And how you can hate too!” Wilson replied. “Whew! I fancy this very sheet lying before me on which you have written about Mr. Bryan is hot under my hand …. And yet Sweetheart, I must add that in my secret heart (which is never secret from you) I love you for that too. For he is a traitor, though I can say so as yet only to you.”

All the untapped sensuality and the strength of character that until then Edith had masked behind a southern belle’s veil of frivolity had found a focus. “He came in from the Blue Room,” she wrote later, “looking
so distinguished in his evening clothes and with both hands held out to welcome me. When I put mine in them and looked into those eyes—unlike any others in the world—something broke down inside me, and I knew I could and would go to the end of the world with or for him.”

Theodore Roosevelt had scoffed that Woodrow Wilson possessed all the passion of “an apothecary clerk.” But Wilson’s women knew better. During his first marriage, Woodrow had written about the temptations he felt when he was away from his wife. He dared not stay overnight in New York on his own, given “the imperious passions” that fired him. At least at home, he wrote her, he “must stay out of mischief.” His temptations, he told Ellen, meant “not one wit of real infidelity to you—it is anatomical and not of the heart.” Ellen Wilson’s reaction to this astonishing missive is not recorded.

By the end of May 1915, Woodrow’s “siege” must have been successful, for he wrote, “I venture to say, my Lady, my Queen, that never in your life have you looked so wonderfully beautiful as I have seen you look when the love tide was running in your heart without check …. I have seen a transfiguration, and it has filled me with as much awe as ecstasy! I can’t think this morning, I can only feel and only realize the exquisite thing that happened to me, the beautiful love I have won …. the sweet woman who has given it to me.”

The American people scarcely would have recognized their stern Presbyterian leader. But in those pretelevision days, politicians could present almost any image of themselves. Wilson conveyed the image of a church elder who read Thucydides in his free time. With his soaring oratory—tinged with a faint Scottish burr—invoking the blessing of God, his speeches often sounded like sermons. His idealism and his morality were the qualities that Americans associated with him. Few people saw the man Edith fell in love with.

His personal happiness was in stark contrast to the turmoil around him. Though Edith rejoiced when Secretary of State Bryan resigned, much of the country was shocked. Americans were divided over the prospect of engagement in a European conflict. While they wanted the president to defend their right to travel safely on the seas, they did not necessarily want to go to war over it. In 1915, Wilson shared that view.
As the European conflict grew daily closer, the president had a secret source of strength. “My love for you,” he wrote Edith, “has come to me in these days when I seem to be put to the supreme test of my life, like a new youth …. You are oh so fit for a mate for a strong man!”

Though not yet married, the president wanted Edith by his side. He invited her to the summer White House in Cornish, New Hampshire, where, away from the prying eyes of the capital, the couple spent lazy days picnicking and reading to each other. “When we walked, we would try to forget that lurking behind every tree was a Secret Service man,” Edith wrote later. By mid-August, they were secretly engaged. Wilson began in earnest to prepare her for the role of full presidential partner. Statecraft, he assured her, was not so very intellectually taxing. “Don’t you see,” he told Edith, “how comparatively easy it is to keep … a very complicated public matter in your head when a dispatch or memorandum about it turns up every day?”

Wilson’s daily love letters to Edith were now accompanied by packets of state papers, with his handwritten marginal notes. He expected her not just to read them but also to comment on them. There was only one other person on whom the president relied for both political and emotional support, Colonel Edward Mandel House, a transplanted southerner, his most trusted unofficial adviser. “Mr. House,” Wilson said in 1913, “is my second personality. He is my independent self …. If anyone thinks he is reflecting my opinion by whatever action he takes, they are welcome to the conclusion.” Allies since the early days of Wilson’s political ascent, Wilson and House had an intense melding of personalities, hopes and ambitions. “Talking to him,” Wilson said, “is like talking to myself.”

Wilson was anxious that Edith and the shadowy Texan become friends. “I feel about your character and the disinterested loyalty of your friendship,” Wilson wrote Edith, “just as I have so often told you I felt about House.” But Wilson would soon learn how fierce she was in her judgments—and how possessive of him. “I know what a comfort and a staff [House] is to you … but he does look like a weak vessel and I think he writes like one ….”

House was not her only target among the president’s inner circle.
She also went after Joseph Tumulty, the president’s loyal secretary, a fixture since Wilson’s days as governor of New Jersey. Edith found Tumulty entirely too Irish Catholic and middle-class. “My idea [regarding Tumulty],” she observed, “may be colored by his commonness.” With foreboding, Wilson replied, “You are a little hard on some of my friends … you Dear … House and Tumulty for example; but I understand and am able to see them, with your mind as well as with my own.” The president was hopeful that Edith would come to appreciate his aides.