Dreamers and Deceivers (10 page)

He knew the letter’s recipient would understand. Edith Bolling Galt was, after all, a widow herself.

The White House

Washington, D.C.

March 18, 1915

Edith Galt arrived that afternoon wearing a long black dress imported from Paris and with a severe preoccupation about her shoes. Her walk to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had been a muddy one and her shoes were now unrecognizable.

The forty-two-year-old Galt, who readily informed friends that she was a direct descendant of Pocahontas, entered the old, elegant mansion and cast a glance at Ike Hoover, the chief usher. Hoover stared back at her with a look he might’ve given to someone suspected of stealing the candlesticks.

Galt had arrived at the White House that afternoon at the request of the president’s cousin, Helen. The poor girl had been in a state of deep depression since the death of the First Lady. Edith’s friend, Cary Grayson, had implored her to come and visit Helen for months. Over time, Edith and Helen had formed a friendship—so much so that they had spent that afternoon walking the muddy streets of Washington. Now, at Helen’s insistence, she had come inside the White House for a cup of tea.

Though she did not think herself a political sort, Edith marveled at being in the same building where Jefferson had dined, where Lincoln had planned for war, where the Roosevelt children once roamed. As she turned the corner of the old house, Edith struggled not to gasp: there, walking down the long hallway toward them, were her old friend Cary Grayson and a tall man with graying hair. Both were dressed in golf clothes that seemed to have been made by a blind tailor.

“Mr. President, this is Edith Galt,” Grayson said.

Wilson’s eyes twinkled. “Mrs. Galt,” he said. “How do you do?”

She smiled. “Good afternoon, Mr. President.”

As she apologized for the state of her shoes, her curious violet eyes looked down to note that the president’s boots were just as muddy. They both laughed at their unseemly attire.

Edith knew immediately that she had captured the president’s attention, though it was hardly a surprise—she was quite accustomed to attracting the interests of men. They seemed to like her boldness.

Eyeing Grayson, who watched the meeting with great interest, Edith never for a moment considered that he and Helen might have engineered this seemingly chance encounter.

The White House

Washington, D.C.

March 21, 1915

As the motion picture finished—the first ever to be screened at the White House—President Wilson declared it a triumph. D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation
was “like writing history with lightning,” the president gushed. “And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

The film, which depicted the Civil War era, had caused riots in major cities like Boston and Philadelphia for its praise of the Ku Klux Klan and its depiction of domineering and deceitful former slaves taking advantage of white southerners during Reconstruction. The president, whose own administration had worked to resegregate portions of the civil service and the U.S. military, found little in the film to
quibble with. In fact, Wilson knew that news of the film’s White House screening would only help the Klan’s efforts to use the film to boost recruitment—and he was just fine with that.

Washington, D.C.

March 25, 1915

Edith tore open the package that had arrived at her townhome directly from the White House.

In the weeks since they’d met, President Wilson had invited her over to dinner and welcomed her to frequent private discussions in his Oval Office study, where they’d held forth on issues great and small. They bonded over their mutual status as widowed spouses and their southern heritage. They reminisced about the poverty of plantation owners and farmers after the Civil War and about their bewilderment over the loyalty that Negroes still seemed to show their old masters. They discussed the state of Europe and Wilson’s fears of American involvement in the Great War.

Now the president had taken the next step in a hurried courtship. Opening the package, she pulled out a note, signed “From your sincere and grateful friend.” Then she glanced over the accompanying book, one that had been the subject of a recent conversation. British author Philip Gilbert Hamerton was one of Wilson’s favorites, as was this particular book:
Round My House: Notes of Rural Life in France in Peace and War
. The book advanced a theme that he’d spoken about often in their private discussions: that the nations of the world weren’t so different. They just needed to understand each other better.

That he would share so many insights with a woman who was basically a stranger demonstrated to Edith just how much Wilson longed for a replacement for his recently departed Ellen. Edith found him to be such a desperately lonely man that it made her sad.

But she liked him, too. He was kind and attentive, and she could also see he was brilliant. Edith was sure he had great things ahead for his presidency, as long as someone was there to help keep his spirits up.

The White House

Washington, D.C.

May 4, 1915

After the dinner guests dispersed, Wilson escorted Edith onto the South Portico. In the two months since they’d met, he’d been sending her letters like a lovestruck teenager. “I need you as a boy needs his sweetheart and a strong man his helpmate and heart’s comrade,” he had written. But even she was shocked by his latest declaration.

Under the moonlight of a clear night sky, the president of the United States had fallen to one knee and proposed marriage.

Edith tried to conceal a gasp. Marriage was so impractical: She was sixteen years his junior; he was still mourning his wife; and the White House staff eyed her like a soldier would an enemy walking into his camp. “It’s too soon to be asking such a question,” she replied. “What would people say?”

“I don’t care,” Wilson said. “I need you.”

“If I must give you an answer tonight,” she replied, “then my answer must be no.”

Wilson offered a wide grin. “You don’t have to answer me tonight.”

Washington, D.C.

September 24, 1915

Edith and Colonel House sat across from each other, a teapot stationed in the middle of the table. “May I pour you another cup, sir?” she asked him softly.

House nodded. “Thank you, madam.”

She knew why they were meeting. Colonel Edward House was Woodrow Wilson’s confidant, longtime advisor, and close friend. And she was the usurper that he intended to tame. This meeting, Edith knew, was to be House’s chance to put her in her place—at least, that’s what he believed. Ellen had a different plan in mind for their discussion.

For some time after Wilson’s unexpected proposal, Edith had gone
back and forth about what to do. She knew that Ellen was considered something akin to a saint since her passing. The White House servants sneered when Edith entered the mansion or deigned to sit in a chair where St. Ellen had once rested. She had feared, too, the reaction of the press—not to mention the snobbish society ladies whose whispers filled the city. Then there was the reaction of the president’s children: What must they think of their father replacing their beloved mother so soon?

Edith prided herself on being a woman of considerable means, and cherished independence. She didn’t need a husband.

Still, she mused, Wilson was a loving, gentle man. A visionary. And how many women would turn down a chance to be the First Lady of the United States?

After days of indecisiveness, Edith’s mind was finally made up by something her lawyer said. Confiding her dilemma in him, the lawyer told her that it was her destiny to hold in the palm of her hand the weal or woe of a country.

That was all she needed to hear.

The rest of Wilson’s team was not as certain of Edith’s potential as her lawyer had been. Edith suspected they were conniving to delay the wedding, or even to break up the couple altogether. She also knew that Colonel House would be the linchpin of any of these plans. Which is exactly why she had decided to meet with him.

“You know, the president speaks of you with great affection,” Edith told House, as wisps of warm mist rose from their teacups. “He admires your ability to place problems in perspective.”

She watched as House beamed with delight. “That’s wonderful to hear, Mrs. Galt.”

House told her that he believed Wilson had the potential to be a great peacemaker in the war. He said that the president’s proposal to end the conflict could be “the greatest event in human history excepting the birth of Christ.”

Edith nodded sagely as the old, puffed-up fool prattled on. She’d taken an almost instant dislike to him, and she resented Wilson’s naïve declarations of House’s wisdom and prudence. She suspected that House did not approve of her, or of their upcoming wedding, but she
was also confident that he would leave their meeting believing that he had Edith’s support and approval. House was a necessary evil, at least for now.

After tea, she drove him around the city in her electric car and then deposited him at the White House, where she was certain he would provide a favorable report to the president and not object to their plans for a December wedding.

United States Capitol

Washington, D.C.

March 5, 1917

“I, Woodrow Wilson, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Chief Justice Edward Douglas White paused. “So help you God?”

Wilson paused to regain the steam in his voice, then responded, “So help me God.”

Edith was at her husband’s side when he, in a long frock coat and silk top hat, removed his hand from the Bible, the same he’d used as New Jersey governor, and bent down to kiss it.

She was the first First Lady in American history to stand beside a president at the public swearing-in ceremony, and also the first to ride with a new president in the inaugural parade—a sign to most Wilsonians of Edith’s utter devotion to her husband.

The day had started overcast and misty, Edith noted, but then the sun had broken through—an encouraging sign, she hoped, that the country would also see sunshine rather than the dark cloud of war. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson had won reelection under the slogan “He kept us out of war.”

Wilson’s narrow defeat of Republican Charles Evans Hughes had been a little too close for comfort. But now it was all over, and Edith’s tireless support during the campaign had won her praise from nearly all corners.

Now standing at the apex of power, she could scarcely believe she
had ever let something as trivial as finding out about her future husband’s long affair with Mary Peck stand in the way of her destiny to become First Lady. She was confident she’d cured him of his serial infidelities, just as she’d cured the press of their irrational distaste for her. She particularly enjoyed the favorable coverage she was now receiving from many Washington journalists, whom she’d worked assiduously to charm since becoming First Lady while accompanying her husband on nearly all of his official trips. Noting her influence, the
Louisville Courier-Journal
wrote that “[o]mnipotence might be her middle name.”

She could live with that.

United States Congress

Washington, D.C.

April 6, 1917

The discovery of a German plot to encourage Mexico to go to war with the United States left the president with no other choice. Addressing both sessions of Congress, Wilson announced that a state of war now existed between America and Germany.

When he signed the war declaration, Edith handed him the same gold pen he had given her as a gift.

“Use this,” she said.

Washington, D.C.

July 14, 1917

Edith looked on with disgust. From the window, she could see the crowds of women swarming Lafayette Park across from the White House and making their way to the front gates. The National Woman’s Party was commemorating Bastille Day by demanding the right to vote. They carried outrageous banners with the French Revolution slogan, “Liberty. Equality. Fraternity.” But to make such a vulgar display with the country at war? It made her sick.

Privately, she and the president had long bemoaned the suffragist
movement, finding it to be a deplorable embarrassment. “Universal suffrage,” Wilson had once declared, “is at the foundation of every evil in this country.” During his reelection campaign, Wilson had differed sharply with Republican Charles Evans Hughes, who supported a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote.

The group continued their display on her front lawn, until finally they were arrested for unlawful assembly. The president had counseled leniency toward the women—but Edith, thinking him too benevolent and forgiving, was adamant that they all be arrested.

United States Congress

Washington, D.C.

January 8, 1918

Wilson had a mission. With an overriding belief in his own abilities, he thought it might not even be too much to say that it was a mission from God. The Great War was proving to be one of the bloodiest conflicts in history. So much senseless violence. So much that might have been prevented had nations simply reasoned together.

Encouraged by a plea for peace from Pope Benedict XV the previous September, President Wilson had assembled a brain trust to help craft a plan. The participants were pulled from top Ivy League universities and met in New York, under the direction of Colonel House, to devise a plan that would end all future wars.

Now, addressing both chambers of Congress, Wilson declared his Fourteen Points for peace. The last, and most important, of these called for the formation of an association of nations guaranteeing “the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and the right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.”

Wilson’s League of Nations proposal, as he first envisioned it, would ban “unethical” behavior, such as espionage or dishonesty, by member states. These rules would be enforced by a global governing body that could punish offenders by cutting off trade and imposing blockades.
An international tribune would administer justice, just like a court might do in the United States.