Kati Marton (8 page)

Woodrow Wilson, partially paralyzed by a stroke, and his wife, Edith, motor through Washington, March 21, 1920.

Edith was the last hope of those still determined to save the treaty and the League. Senator Hitchcock implored Edith to ask her husband to accept the Lodge reservations limiting American participation in the League. She agreed to try. “Woodrow, for my sake,” she pleaded, according to her own memoirs, “won’t you accept these reservations and get this awful thing settled?” The tired, sick president shook his head. “Little girl,” he pleaded, “don’t you desert me now. That I cannot stand. Can’t you see that I have no moral right to accept any change in a paper I have signed without giving every other signatory, even the Germans, the right to do the same thing?” Fearful for his health, Edith vowed never again to “ask my husband to do anything dishonorable.”

Wilson’s unyielding position on the League pushed his supporters on the Hill into a corner. The choice was between democracy and imperialism, Wilson insisted. The upcoming presidential elections should be a “great and solemn referendum” on the treaty. He commanded his supporters to vote for ratification of the Versailles Treaty with no reservations and reject all compromise. Had Wilson still been in full command of his once powerful political and verbal skills, he probably would have found enough common ground between the isolationists and his supporters to bridge the gap. But he no longer had the strength to try.

On March 19, 1920, the treaty meant to end the war that would end all future wars was rejected by the Senate. “I feel like going to bed and staying there,” the architect of the peace sighed. During the sleepless night that followed the defeat, he told Grayson, “If I were not a Christian, I think I should go mad, but my faith in God holds me to the belief that He is in some way working out His own plans through human perversities and mistakes.”

America retreated into isolationism. One by one, the vanquished and the victorious mocked Wilson’s vision of a just peace. Without the support of the most powerful country, the League of Nations was powerless to stop Germany, Italy and Japan as they moved toward another world war.

So effectively had Edith nurtured the illusion that Wilson was on the mend that he refused to designate his successor. Sometime during the spring of 1920, in his feeble scrawl, Wilson even started a file entitled “3d Inaugural.”

On March 4, 1921, a pale, withered Wilson rode from the White House to the Capitol with Warren G. Harding, the Republican who had won a landslide victory over Democrat James M. Cox. Out of office, Wilson had planned to write a book summarizing his political philosophy. He produced a single page, “A Dedication: to E.B.W., I dedicate this book because it is a book in which I have tried to interpret life, the life of a nation, and she has shown me the full meaning of life. Her heart is not only true but wise; her thoughts are not only free but touched with vision; she teaches and guides by being what she is; her unconscious interpretation of faith and duty makes all the way clear; her power to comprehend makes work and thought alike easier and more near to what it seeks. [Signed,] Woodrow Wilson.” He never wrote another line. Wilson died at his home in Washington on February 3, 1924. The last word he uttered was “Edith.”

But Edith’s fierce devotion did not end with her husband’s passing. When told that Senator Lodge had been named as an official delegate to her husband’s funeral, she fired off a note to him: “As the funeral is private and not official and realizing that your presence would be embarrassing to you and unwelcome to me I write to request that you do not attend.” Lodge had no choice but to honor her wish.

SO ENDED THE WHITE HOUSE’S GREATEST LOVE STORY,
with a tragic outcome. Edith lived for four more decades, long enough to see her husband’s vision vindicated by the creation of the United Nations. She had shared but nine of her eighty-nine years with him, four of them more as nurse than wife. Until her last breath, she was convinced she had done the right thing, enabling her husband to hold on to the presidency.

In retrospect, it is astonishing to realize how great her powers were in the last eighteen months of Wilson’s presidency. A woman with two years of formal education, bred for the drawing room, opposed to women’s suffrage, had not only assumed most presidential powers but the control of the flow of information to the country. It was an unprecedented situation for this or any other democracy.

It is doubtful any first lady will ever again wield the power Edith did. The Twenty-fifth Amendment assures a smooth succession in case of
presidential illness or incapacity. Moreover, one of the benefits of modern media scrutiny is that it forces the government to be open, even in times of crisis. Woodrow Wilson’s gaunt White House portrait has continued to remind succeeding residents of the sometimes high cost of the presidency, and the potential risk of a commander in chief who falls in love while in office. It is supremely ironic that the man forever associated with open diplomacy clung to power through a cover-up.

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THOUGH LESS THAN A DECADE AND A HALF SEPARATES THE WILSONS AND
the Roosevelts, the journey takes us from the most private couple to occupy the White House in the twentieth century to one of the most public. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt redefined the roles of president and first lady; he with his buoyant, expansive, imaginative leadership,
she with the power of her moral force. Through their example, their leadership and FDR’s legislative record, it is no exaggeration to say that together they transformed the nation. All their successors have been measured against them.

Franklin and Eleanor constructed brave and rich lives for themselves and, in the process, touched millions of people. Each redefined the office they held and left it permanently altered. Franklin transformed the Democratic Party and the country’s political culture. This High Church Episcopalian saw that the tradition of self-reliance did not work when too many were hungry and unemployed. He acted on his belief that the government of a modern industrial state must provide food for the hungry and jobs for those who want to work. It is impossible to measure the exact impact of Eleanor’s compassionate spirit and obstinate prodding on the New Deal. No one, however, can doubt her role in Franklin’s personal and political evolution.

More has been written about this couple than any other in presidential history. Every facet of their lives has been documented, analyzed and held up for public scrutiny. Yet succeeding generations must study the Roosevelts to test their own notions regarding the intersection of marriage and power. By contemporary standards, theirs was not a “good” marriage. Still, for most of their tenure, they thrived in the White House—and the nation was enriched by the presence there of these two singular personalities. In fact, Eleanor and Franklin’s identities and contributions were vastly more separate and distinct than Bill and Hillary Clinton’s. But then the freedom and the creativity with which the Roosevelts were allowed to manage their affairs over a half century ago is beyond the reach of present-day presidential couples.

Unlike Hillary, Eleanor did not have to plead with the public and the media for a “zone of privacy.” The culture of the time deemed it her right. Leading separate lives enabled the Roosevelts to preserve their marriage without the American people knowing the emotional cost of the effort. But the White House has sheltered other imperfect marriages that did not produce such an activist first lady. Imbued with extraordinary stamina and idealism, Eleanor was a born reformer who, in a different time, might have become a missionary. She took full advantage of her position as first lady to do her heart’s bidding. If her husband gave her
full rein to do so, it was because it suited both his personal and political needs. Ultimately, the country benefited from the Roosevelts’ unconventional union. They were, in many ways, the first modern couple to occupy the White House.

THE PARTNERSHIP DID NOT START OUT THAT WAY.
Eleanor and Franklin were born into the most privileged of nineteenth-century New York society, a world to which one either did or did not belong. Both sets of parents possessed money, land, connections and a strong sense of entitlement. The Roosevelts on both sides emulated the values, tastes and pretensions of the British aristocracy. Like the rest of their social class, their parents’ energy and focus was spent in the ritual migrations of the East Coast privileged class: from New York to Long Island, Newport or Maine, and the yearly tours of the Continent. Their calendars were marked with metronomic precision: the opening of the Opera, the coming-out parties, high teas and regattas. Everyone within their circle knew his or her place, knew the rules and certainly knew the other players within the circle.

Franklin, the only child of an elderly Hudson River squire and his much younger wife, was the center of his parents’ universe. His childhood was spent in Hyde Park, New York, in one of the great river houses on a large forested estate. Until he left for boarding school at Groton, the household revolved around this extraordinarily handsome and good-natured little boy. Franklin’s struggle as an only child was to snare a bit of freedom from his excessively loving, overly protective mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt. She wanted too much from her child, so he learned to keep his own counsel. Dissembling became a key to Franklin’s survival. No one—not his wife, not his children, not the women he loved—ever pierced the protective shell he began to construct during those early years. The fact that his nearest friend lived a mile and a half away reinforced the boy’s self-reliance and isolation from his peers. What Franklin was prepared for, first at Hyde Park and later at Groton and Harvard, was a life of ease among those of his own class. He set off for the world a breathtakingly secure man, skillful at keeping his emotional distance with charm and good manners.