Kati Marton (6 page)

Though Wilson hated war, he cast America’s declaration of war as a moral crusade: to make the world safe for democracy. “We will not choose the path of submission,” the president proclaimed, his words almost drowned out by the applause that punctuated nearly every sentence. He called for war without hatred against the German people, a war “to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world.”

“Through the cheering multitudes we drove slowly home in silence,” Edith wrote. “The step had been taken. We were both overwhelmed.” Though she could not then foresee it, her husband’s long agony had begun. Wilson himself understood what he had unleashed: “Think what it meant,” Wilson said to Tumulty, “the applause of the people in the Capitol and the people lining the avenue as we returned. My message tonight was a message of death to our young men. How strange to applaud that!” Thereupon, Tumulty recalled later, Wilson dropped his head on his desk and “sobbed like a child.”

Edith and Woodrow, closer than ever, began the day at 5
A.M.
and ended it at midnight. Theirs would now become a wartime presidency. Edith canceled all White House social functions. “The khaki of our Army and the blue of our Navy uniforms began to give color to the streets of Washington,” she wrote. The president led a united country in the gigantic business of turning from a peacetime to a wartime economy.

Early in 1918, Wilson again summoned a joint session of Congress to
lay down the terms for peace, and to outline his plan for the League of Nations. He fervently believed he could bring the Allies around, if he could only meet them face-to-face. When, on November 11, 1918, an exhausted and humbled Germany signed the Armistice, Wilson proposed a peace conference to be held in Paris.

But at the height of his fame, Wilson had begun to lose touch with his own people. He had turned the peace process partisan, urging voters in the 1918 congressional elections to reelect a Democratic majority, so he could be “your unembarrassed spokesman at home and abroad …. A Republican majority,” he warned, “would be interpreted by the other side of the water as a repudiation of my leadership.” The move backfired, as the country sent a Republican majority to both houses. Without consulting the Republican leadership, Wilson now prepared to go to Europe. He chose only one Republican for the Paris delegation, a gentle retired diplomat named Henry White.

On December 4, 1918, Edith and Woodrow stood on the bridge of the
George Washington,
watching the New York skyline and the thousands of people who lined the waterfront slowly disappear from view. He was the first sitting president to leave the United States. Eleven battleships escorted the presidential party on its crossing. Among those accompanying the president were Wilson’s doctor, Cary Grayson, and Edith’s secretary, Edith Benham. Observing the Wilsons’ closeness, Benham wrote, “The more I am with the Wilsons, the more I am struck with their unrivaled home life. I have never dreamed such sweetness and love could be.”

Europe, scorched by the worst war in its history, awaited not an American president but the Second Coming. Nearly the entire population of the French city of Brest crowded the quay, bearing banners that read “Hail the Champion of the Rights of Man” and “Honor to the Founder of the Society of Nations.” From their Paris-bound train the Wilsons glimpsed men, women and small children solemnly saluting as the train sped by. Two million Parisians thronged the streets of the capital to hail the president. Deafening cheers of
“Vive Vil-son”
and bouquets of violets rained on Woodrow and Edith’s open carriage. “I saw General Foch pass, Clemenceau pass, Lloyd George, generals, returning
troops,” an American reporter wrote, “but what Wilson heard from his carriage was something different, inhuman—superhuman.”

For the first time in half a century, the chain that traditionally bars the great Arc de Triomphe was removed so the Wilsons could ride under the arch all the way to the Concorde. Long columns of French soldiers stood sentry on either side of the president’s procession. Edith was overwhelmed. “Roofs were filled,” she wrote, “windows overflowed, until one grew giddy trying to greet the bursts of welcome that came like the surging of untamed waters.” On their black mounts, the gold-helmeted Garde Républicain escorted the Wilsons through the gates of the Murat Palace, their home for the duration of the peace conference. “The world and his wife were there,” Edith recalled, “all in their smartest attire with uniforms and medals conspicuous in the foreground …. I was towed along through room after room, and being a head taller than [the President of France], I felt like a big liner with a tiny tug pushing her out from her moorings.”

The British repeated this ecstatic welcome. The Wilsons became the first commoners ever to stay in Buckingham Palace, the guests of King George V and Queen Mary. In Rome, the Wilsons’ reception had an almost religious fervor. Woodrow was hailed as “the god of peace,” bells rang out and people lit candles next to his photograph in churches and in shops.

With the pomp that accompanies both war and peace in the Old World, the Paris peace conference convened on January 12, 1919. There was no cheering inside the richly paneled and tapestried conference rooms of the Quai d’Orsay. Hard men, unimpressed by the austere American, gathered around long tables to press their claims. All Wilson wanted from the conference was a “just peace” and a world organization to maintain it. Against nationalistic arguments, he managed to force acceptance of several key points, at great cost to his psyche and health. “Seeing him growing grimmer and graver, day by day,” Edith wrote later, “how I longed to be a man so I could be of more help to him. All I could do was to try to soothe him with a finer fancy, touch him with a lighter thought.” Wilson was able to prevent the French from dismembering Germany, and blocked much of Italy’s attempt to seize territory along
the Adriatic, which he deemed essential for the survival of the new state that would become Yugoslavia. But he was forced to yield to France and Britain on punitive war reparations from Germany. Remarkably, however, most of his Fourteen Points survived. Wilson’s proudest achievement, the League of Nations, became part of the covenant of the Treaty of Versailles.

AN OCEAN AWAY,
the political currents were shifting. The United States was once again turning inward, losing interest in Wilson’s dream of a new international order. The president had been absent for three months, a political lifetime. Tumulty, left behind, now urged his chief’s return to Washington. When Wilson did return, he found a changed capital. The war was over, and the Republicans were on the attack. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Wilson’s longtime foe, declared the League of Nations unacceptable. More moderate Republicans asked that Wilson dilute the language regarding America’s responsibility in future European conflicts.

Physically and emotionally drained by the peace conference, Wilson, who had a history of frail health, was not up to the horse trading. The once nimble politician came home the rigid prophet. Instead of working to win them over, Wilson dismissed enemies of the League as “blind and little provincial people … the littlest and the most contemptible.” The battle between Lodge and Wilson turned intensely personal, polarizing Congress and, soon, the country. Wilson argued that peace without the League was ridiculous to contemplate. Peace
with
the League would sacrifice America’s sovereignty, Lodge shot back. Edith noticed a weariness in her husband that sleep could not cure, and signs of paranoia. She tried as best she could to shelter him from stress.

Back in Paris in late March 1919 for the second phase of the peace conference, Wilson saw his dream slipping away. He had left Colonel House in charge of interim negotiations at the conference. “House has given away everything I had won before we left Paris,” Wilson confided to Edith. Indeed, contrary to the president’s wishes, House, anxious for a compromise, had yielded on fundamental Wilsonian principles. Unwittingly playing into Lodge’s hands, House agreed to separate the League
of Nations from the peace treaty. Edith described her husband’s shock. “He seemed to have aged ten years, and his jaw was set in that way he had when he was making superhuman effort to control himself. Silently he held out his hand, which I grasped.”

Rather than giving House a chance to explain, Edith fueled her husband’s anger at the colonel, whom she said she would never see again. The president was in the grip of a two-front war—the Republicans at home, the Allies in Paris. Wilson approached his toughest battle with Edith as his only confidante.

On April 3, 1919, Wilson ran a fever of 103 degrees. He was attended by Dr. Grayson, the White House physician who had been looking after the president since his first term. Grayson, a debonair young naval officer, had a distinct advantage over Wilson’s other aides: the doctor and Mrs. Wilson had a prior history; she had first met him in 1903 when she had suffered a miscarriage during her first marriage. In fact, Grayson was indirectly responsible for her meeting the president. He did not pose a threat to Edith.

Edith, more fiercely protective of Woodrow than ever, almost never left his side. She described his heartbreaking decline during a trip to a cemetery for fallen American soldiers in France:

In late April, Wilson suffered a mild “cerebral incident.” The once unfailingly courteous Wilson now snapped at servants in his official Paris residence, accusing them of being spies for the French government. He
sat mute during meals and exhibited wild mood swings, from euphoria to depression. His emotions burst through unchecked. “Mr. Prime Minister,” he exploded at Lloyd George, “you make me sick!”

Years before, when Wilson first decided to give up academia for politics, his first wife had had a premonition. In a letter to her brother, Ellen voiced an agony familiar to wives of politically ambitious men. “Maybe these husbands ought not always to be encouraged to get the things to which their ambitions lead them, but how can wives who love them do anything except help them? … even when it is right, it may wear out their strength and health and spirits and yet they will never be happy unless they get it.” Her prophecy seemed to be coming true.

Wilson’s physical decline was accompanied by a shift in the power balance of his marriage. Until then, Woodrow had been the teacher, the wise counselor, the man showing the way to the untutored woman. Now Edith became the strong one, assuming more and more responsibility for them both.

Henceforth, Edith’s decisions would increasingly have national consequence, as Wilson relied more than ever on her and, to a lesser extent, on Dr. Grayson. From such routine tasks as placing his calls, to the less routine one of trying to shore up his slipping memory, Edith was by his side. In large measure due to her distrust of House (not to mention his failures at the conference), the long and close relationship between Wilson and his adviser had frozen into formality. The two men who once professed to be brothers never saw each other again after the Paris conference. House never recovered from his loss. “My separation from Woodrow Wilson,” he later wrote, “was and is to me a tragic mystery …. While our friendship was not of long duration it was as close as human friendships grow to be …. Until a shadow fell between us I never had a more considerate friend.”

ON JUNE 28, 1919,
the sound of cannon fire reverberated through Versailles’ Great Hall of Mirrors as Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and the others signed the treaty that officially ended World War I. “I love to think of my husband as he looked that day,” Edith recalled. “I felt a curious
tightening of my throat as I looked at this dear figure, grown more slender in those months, but alert and alive.” For Wilson, the greatest achievement of the peace conference was the League of Nations, which he hoped would keep the new countries free and the old imperial powers in check. Now, in late June, the architect of the Versailles Treaty sailed home. “Already the sense of freedom from that unremitting labor was relaxing the look of strain,” Edith noted, “and the happy thought of going home made him radiate content.”