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Preface
The deathbed admonition of Woodrow Wilson's angelic, admiring first wife, Ellen, that
her husband, a great man, should not become a lonely great man, paved the way to
his remarriage. Enter Edith Bolling Galt -- and the rest is "history,"
idealized, sanitized, and indeed, invented in her autobiography: a story played out in
Washington and Paris and around the world, against the guns of World War I and the
partisan cross fire over the eventual refusal of the United States to join the League of
Nations. The story of Wilson's second marriage, and of the large events on which its
shadow was cast, is darker and more devious, and more astonishing, than previously
recorded.
From the morning of October 2, 1919, when Woodrow Wilson suffered coronary thrombosis,
and a paralyzing stroke, Edith insisted that her husband, the twenty-eighth president of
the United States, was yet a dynamic leader, an indispensable visionary, physically
enfeebled only temporarily. Though she acknowledged that she studied every paper sent to
her by various cabinet secretaries and senators and had tried to digest and present in
tabloid form matters that in her view needed imperatively to go to the president, "I,
myself," she protested, "never made a single decision regarding the disposition
of public affairs. The only decision that was mine was what was important and what was
not, and the very important decision of when to present matters to my husband." In
fact, she could recall only one instance when she had acted as intermediary in an official
matter, "except when so directed by a physician."
As the White House became hushed and secretive, Edith Wilson assumed what she defined
as her stewardship. When access became tantamount to power, however, the handful of
statesmen, historians, and politicians who experienced her new authority tended to
describe her in more formidable terms, as female regent, secretary of state,
supersecretary, and ultimately, the first woman president of the United States. She had
become keeper of the key to the now impregnable White House and to the president himself
(Edith's turbulent handwriting conveys her invalid husband's mumbled and cryptic answers,
such as they were, on all presidential correspondence of that period), while official
Washington pleaded for her intervention on crucial domestic and international issues.
Edith herself categorically repudiated the allegations concerning her exercise of power.
It was always "others" who meddled with the truth, whereas she would set and
keep the record straight. In writing her autobiography, My Memoir -- a testament to
the heroic presidency of her husband -- she presumed to take an "oath to tell the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth -- so help me God."
No one would prove more adept than she at publicizing this image of Woodrow Wilson and
his Edith struggling valiantly and succeeding in the White House. In addition to writing
her Memoir, which reflects her recasting of facts and prejudices, she subsidized
the author whom she appointed to compile the eight-volume biography Woodrow Wilson,
Life and Letters, and exercised her authority over every word uttered in the film Wilson:
The Rise and Fall of an American President, produced in Hollywood in 1944. That film,
a benevolent tour of the twenty-eighth president's life, depicts the melancholy scene,
immediately following Wilson's severe stroke, in which his physician assures Edith there
is no need for her husband to consider resignation in favor of the vice president. To the
contrary, with certain precautions and support, administered by Edith, he is declared to
be entirely capable of conducting the government of the United States. In conforming with
this heartening prognosis, Wilson does, in the film, reappear on the White House veranda
as an able, cheerful invalid. Though one might assume that the dialogue revolving around
the momentous decision that Wilson remain in office should be attributed to the
scriptwriter Lamar Trotti, its source is Edith Wilson's own Memoir. Her name fails
to appear among the screen credits, but a deputy of Mrs. Wilson's was on the scene to
affirm her story line. Ray Stannard Baker, her husband's anointed and openly partisan
biographer, whose "absurd scenario picture" of the president "as a
stainless Sir Galahad" was denounced by Winston Churchill, is listed as one of the
two technical advisers.
Baker did not disappoint Edith Wilson's confidence. The film was the fulfillment of her
life's work to exalt her husband. Wilson without blemishes was to be compared to
Washington and Lincoln, the rectitude of his position regarding the League unquestionable,
his opponents in that pursuit indefensible, his physical disabilities negligible, and his
intensely affectionate correspondence with a third woman, outside his two marriages,
excluded.
Eluding the eyes of occasional skeptics of "the White House of Mysteries," Edith
Wilson retained a host of acolytes, including several senior historians, who accepted her
interpretation. Perhaps they knew her as a youthful widow and were of a generation too old
(and too gentlemanly) to believe that the Southerner with the soft, musical voice might
have deceived them, or that any such woman might arrogantly preempt power and deliberately
distort her country's history. One of her prominent champions, for example, acknowledges
that "Mrs. Wilson's memory is often faulty, colored by her preconceptions,"
while simultaneously insisting that her Memoir is an "essential
document." With such support, Edith Wilson has had her way with history -- and might
have continued to do so but for recently disclosed medical reports dating back to 1919,
which refute the romantic story she assiduously devised. All turned to ashes on the
Memorial Day weekend in Upperville, Virginia, in 1990, when the sons of Wilson's physician
and confidant Cary Grayson -- James Gordon Grayson and Cary T. Grayson Jr. -- released the
original diagnoses made by their father and his colleague Dr. Francis X. Dercum on the
occasion of Wilson's stroke. These papers make it clear for the first time that on October
2, 1919, Wilson suffered a devastating trauma, so extensive that it precluded anything
"more than a minimal state of recovery." Given Wilson's beclouded presidency,
the late Arthur S. Link, dedicated editor of sixty-nine volumes of The Papers of
Woodrow Wilson, who regarded the task as a "divine call," and who had
originally dismissed the idea that Edith Wilson ran the government after her husband's
illness as "pure nonsense...more into the realm of legend than scholarship,"
would concede, on further thought and almost wistfully, that "Edith emerges as the
master of the cover-up (such as it was), doesn't she?"
Though Wilson, due no doubt to his frail health, never managed to write the history of his
presidency, a multitude of surrogates -- and one has the impression that everyone
attending the Paris Peace Conference kept a diary -- abundantly filled the void. Yet
Wilson, who appeared to the world as a dogmatic idealist, more preacher than diplomat, did
leave behind a confessional autobiography in his correspondence with three women. Those
letters reveal throughout the seasons of his life the rise and fall of a narcissistic,
ambitious, sensual, dependent, emotionally vulnerable, and physically impaired man, who
led the United States during World War I. The intimate letters -- to Wilson's treasured
first wife, Ellen, and subsequently to his epistolary beloved, Mary Allen Hulbert Peck,
with whom he maintained an extensive correspondence until his remarriage -- help to
prepare us for the whirlwind courtship and capitulation of the widower of eight months to
the reverential Edith Bolling Galt. Flattering and possessive and physically attractive,
she was soon his lover and trusted political adviser. Wilson met Edith Bolling Galt in
March 1915; he proposed marriage in May. In June she acknowledged her joy in being taken
into a "partnership as it were." By August, Wilson gave affirmation of their
shared lives and work. By December, they were man and wife. There would be much to learn
about his new partner, his "strange, lovely Sweetheart," and there is no doubt
that Edith revealed her "secret depths" with style and imagination and,
according to her whim, with more than a tinge of fantasy. By the time her formidable
talent for fiction was disclosed, the damage was done. Her victims included her husband's
closest and trusted adviser, Colonel Edward Mandell House, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge,
Secretary of State Robert Lansing, and a renowned British ambassador; and of course, the
president himself.
The revelation of the physical and mental condition of the invalid Woodrow Wilson
alters history's pious perception of him as a star-crossed victim of other people's
frailties, rather than as a deeply flawed man. Princeton's Arthur Link and his staff have
accordingly cautioned biographers and historians who write of Wilson as, in those last
years, a reasonably healthy and responsible person to reconsider his impulsive, irrational
behavior "with some understanding of its causes." The truth of his incapacity
naturally poses grave questions of its consequences for world affairs. Link seems to imply
that a healthier Wilson would have been a more conciliatory diplomat. Entry into the
League of Nations could have transformed the record: "In a world with the United
States playing a responsible, active role, the possibilities of preventing the rise of
Hitler were limitless."
We must therefore consider whether events leading to the Second World War might have
been recast had Edith Wilson permitted the vice president, Thomas R. Marshall, to supplant
her incapacitated husband in the White House in 1919. Given Marshall's reasonable
temperament, is it not possible that he might have reached a compromise with Henry Cabot
Lodge over the degree to which Americans ought to involve themselves in foreign wars, and
have thus led the United States to membership in the League of Nations? Such great
questions are central to my reconsideration, in the present book, of the role and
influence of Wilson's wife during "one of the most extraordinary periods in the whole
history of the Presidency." Edith Wilson was by no means the benign figure of her
pretensions; the president far less than the hero of his aspirations. On closer
examination, their lives are a sinister embodiment of Mark Twain's tongue-in-cheek
observation that he "never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that
anybody would believe."
Excerpted from EDITH AND WOODROW © Copyright 2001 by Phyllis Lee Levin. Reprinted with permission by Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. All rights reserved.
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