First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  May 4, 1915

  Your dear love fills me with a bliss untold

  Perfect, divine,

  I did not know the human heart could hold

  Such joy as mine,

  But it does more for me, it makes

  The whole world new

  Dreams and desires within my soul

  it wakes more high and true

  Than aught I have ever known

  For I do see, with sad surprise

  how far I am beneath your thought of me.

  For, lover wise, you’ve crowned me queen

  of grace and truth and light

  All pure and good

  In utter faith have set me on the height of womanhood.

  Since you exalt me thus, I must

  not prove your wisdom vain,

  Unto those mighty heights, oh help me

  wondrous love I must attain!

  Edith described “this little poem” as something she had learned “years ago,” never dreaming that someday it would perfectly express what was in her heart. She went on to assure Wilson that she wanted to help him. She would consider it an “unspeakable pleasure and privilege to be allowed to share these tense terrible days of responsibility…. I am a woman—and the thought that you have need of me is sweet!” She ended by pledging him “all that is best in me—to help, to sustain, to comfort” and sent her spirit “into the space that separates us to seek yours. Make it a welcome guest.”

  Scholars now think Edith is the author of the poem. Libraries have been ransacked without finding the original. While she was writing it and the letter that followed, Wilson lay sleepless in the White House in near despair, thinking he had been rejected. In the dawn he wrote her a letter which began with a sonnet from Shakespeare, “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,” and another poem in sonnet form which he may have written himself, about the song of a thrush to his mate at morning, and how it reminded him of her. He told her he would try to bear his grief and dismay—“terrible companions in the still night.” He ended by begging her not to go to the Orient. “Don’t put every burden on me,” he pleaded.

  Edith’s letter crossed this one and enabled the sleep-starved Wilson to stagger through a day of mounting international tension. The Germans were smashing the British and French on the Western Front and rampaging into Russia. The secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, impatient with the pro-Allied tilt to Wilson’s neutrality, was threatening to embarrass him by resigning. The President responded to Edith that night, in spite of being “infinitely tired—in brain and body and spirit.” Her letter, he wrote, was

  the most beautiful note I ever read, whose possession makes me rich.

  Every glimpse I am permitted to get of the secret depths of you I find them deeper and purer and more beautiful than I knew or had dreamed of If you cannot give me all that I want… it is because I am not worthy. I know instinctively you could give it if I were—and if you understood—understood the boy’s heart that is in me and the simplicity of my need, which you could fill so that all my days could be radiant.

  He begged her to stop thinking of him as a “public man.” He told her she had not yet “looked with full comprehension on your friend and lover, Woodrow Wilson.” He described himself as a “longing man, in the midst of the world’s affairs, a world that knows nothing of the heart he has shown you and which would as lief break it as not.” He could not face this wolfish world with his “full strength” unless she loved him.

  Could any woman on earth resist such a proposal? Especially since this response had barely reached Edith Gait’s door when the most horrifying news of the war exploded in Wilson’s face. A German submarine had torpedoed the thirty-two-thousand-ton British luxury liner Lusitania off the Irish coast, drowning over 1,000 men, women, and children, including 124 Americans. More than two thousand telegrams demanding war with Germany poured into the White House. On top of this came shocking British reports of German atrocities in Belgium. After the war, almost all were found to be fabrications, but at the time most Americans believed them.

  Secretary of State Bryan whipsawed the President by insisting the drowned Americans should not have been on the Lusitania in the first place. He tended to believe the German contention that the liner was carrying weapons as well as passengers. (We now know it was.) The anguished Wilson turned to Edith for advice. She responded with bewilderment: “Why should I be chosen to help you?… The thought makes me tremble and grow afraid.”

  Previously Wilson had told her about his problems with Bryan, and she had responded mischievously that he should fire the secretary of state and appoint her in his place, so she could see him every day. But she soon realized the Lusitania crisis had carried them to a far more serious point in their political and personal relationship.

  Wilson’s response was a long letter, at the heart of which was embedded a simple cry: “I need you.” He begged her not to doubt that “blessed fact.” He urged her to think of him as he worked on a speech he was scheduled to make in Philadelphia to four thousand newly naturalized citizens and also on his note to Germany about the Lusitania. “Every sentence would have greater force and meaning if I could feel your mind and heart were keeping me company,” he wrote.

  Edith rushed to the White House and gave Wilson her reply in writing as he was leaving for Philadelphia: “If you with your wonderful love can quicken that which has lain dead so long within me, I promise not to shut it out of my heart but bid it welcome—and come to you with the joy of it in my eyes.”

  It would be nice to report that Wilson’s speech in Philadelphia was a huge success. It was full of soaring rhetoric about the meaning of America and the value of the chance a free society gave immigrants for a new life. But at the close he could not resist a comment on his neutrality policy: “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”

  Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt led a chorus of denunciations, accusing Wilson of moral double-talk and rank cowardice. But Wilson stuck to his policy. His note to Germany was stern but did not threaten war. Edith was now a presence in this struggle. “Oh, how I have needed you tonight, my sweet Edith,” the President wrote. “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” Later, when he had finished the note, he told her that he felt “you have been by my side all evening, for a strange sense of peace and love has been on me as I worked.”

  As spring lengthened into summer, Wilson’s passion for Edith intensified. He saw her so often—on the presidential yacht, at the White House, in impromptu visits to her house—tongues began to wag. His closest advisers started to worry about the impact of a hasty marriage on his chances for reelection. Meanwhile, one of his old loves, Mary Hulbert Peck, showed up at the White House demanding a loan of seventy-five hundred dollars to bail her son out of bankruptcy. All his life Wilson had been attracted to pretty, vivacious women. His first wife, Ellen, had been amazingly tolerant of these infatuations, most of which remained platonic. But Mrs. Peck may have been an exception. She had letters from Wilson that would have ruined him politically if she showed them to a newspaperman. He gave her the money—a mistake.

  Meanwhile, Edith inspired him to get tough with the Germans. They had answered his Lusitania note in a rather obnoxious way. Wilson told Edith that “when I see your eyes alight with the holiest thing in the world and hold you close in my arms and kiss you with pledges as deep as my soul,” he was ready to give the Germans the answer they deserved. I hate to criticize a President my father considered one of our greatest, but there are times during his pursuit of Edith when Wilson seems unhinged.

  He showed her a draft of his reply to the Germans, and she assailed it with startling severity. “There was nothing of you, yourself, in it and therefore it seemed flat and colorless,” she told
him.

  Wilson went back to work on the note. “I have strengthened it in many ways and hope I have brought it nearer the standard my precious sweetheart, out of her great love, expects of me,” he wrote. Has any other woman gone from managing a jewelry shop to influencing the course of world history in four months? Edith Gait’s ascent leaves one openmouthed.

  The revised note was so tough, Secretary of State Bryan said it would lead straight to war and refused to sign it. Edith told Wilson to let Bryan go. On the day he resigned, shaking the Democratic Party to its foundations—his support had won Wilson the nomination in 1912—the President wrote Edith three letters.

  She responded to these and other messages about politics with rapture. “Much as I enjoy your delicious love letters,” she wrote, “I believe I enjoy even more the ones in which you tell me what you are working on… for then I feel I am being taken into partnership as it were.” There was the magical word that won Edith’s hitherto empty heart.

  Escaping Washington’s beastly summer, Edith retreated to Cornish, New Hampshire, where Wilson soon joined her. Surrounded by carefully chosen friends and relatives, they managed to keep the press at bay. On June 29 they consummated their love and Edith responded with

  A Pledge:

  I promise with all my heart absolutely to trust and accept my loved Lord and unite my life with his without doubts or misgivings.

  During the rest of that summer of love and into the fall, Woodrow Wilson shared every aspect of his presidency with Edith. He showed her notes from the German Foreign Office, from the Mexican President, from Haiti (a headache then as now), from the American ambassador to England, often laced with critical comments that would have provoked an international upheaval if she had mentioned them to anyone. He was taking with utmost seriousness the task of educating Edith to be his political partner.

  Gradually, this heady combination of love and political power made Edith critical of the men around Wilson. She took an especially strong dislike to his secretary, Joseph Tumulty, partly because of what she called his “commonness” and partly because he was emphatic about urging Wilson not to marry Mrs. Gait before the 1916 elections.

  Tumulty was a shrewd, affable Irish American from Jersey City. Without him Wilson would never have survived his political baptism as governor of New Jersey. In the White House, he kept Wilson in touch with shifts in public mood and was the President’s chief liaison with Congress and the press.

  Next Edith went to work on Colonel Edward House, the Texan who had made himself invaluable to Wilson as his personal envoy to the warring powers. From reading his letters, Edith decided he was a “weak vessel.” Wilson thought she was “partly right” but defended the colonel, who had played a crucial role in his 1912 campaign, as a “noble and lovely character.” Nevertheless, a wound had been inflicted on this relationship too.

  In October of 1915, Wilson and Mrs. Gait announced their engagement. This inspired Wilson’s secretary of the treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, to try to scare the President into renouncing or at least delaying marriage. McAdoo, who had married the President’s daughter Eleanor in 1914, hoped to succeed Wilson in 1920. He said he had received an anonymous letter from California, warning him that Mary Hulbert Peck was threatening to release Wilson’s compromising letters to the press—and reveal his even more compromising seventy-five-hundred-dollar loan.

  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 i
f 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.