Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House
By Phyllis Lee Levin
Scribner, 606 pages, $35
Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our Recent History
By Kati Marton
Pantheon, 414 pages, $25
Woodrow Wilson, America’s 28th president, is remembered most keenly as the inflexible idealist who destroyed health and career in his crusade to create a U.S.-led League of Nations. His failure to achieve his dream is a story of personal flaws compounded by physical frailty. But it is also about the powerful woman who stood at his side.
Edith Wilson, his second wife, did her best to control what history would record about her role and her husband. She wrote her memoirs and oversaw an authorized biography of him. In “Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House,” Phyllis Lee Levin, armed with recently available medical evidence, sets out to tell a more truthful version.
Hers is a startling, dark tale of how an unelected woman with no particular talent for politics took over the presidency. In the glare of our present 24-hour news cycle, no first lady could hope to achieve the subterfuge Edith Wilson pulled off.
No one would argue with the contention that the wife of a president has the potential for tremendous influence on an administration’s style and content. And that’s the theme of Kati Marton’s “Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our Recent History,” a look at the Wilsons and 10 other couples who have hung their hats at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
To a degree, both books serve as timely codas to Hillary Clinton’s recent roller-coaster ride through the White House. In her repeated attempts to reinterpret her role as first lady, Clinton showcased the predicament most presidential wives have faced with the curtains pulled: how to cope with living in the people’s house with a husband who has suddenly become the most important person in the world.
For Edith Bolling Wilson, there was no equivocating. Although Teddy Roosevelt declared, “‘You can’t cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts so much like the apothecary’s clerk,'” Woodrow Wilson did have an eye for the ladies. When his first wife, Ellen, died during his first term as president, she left a frail and grieving widower to run the country.
Edith, though Southern as well, was cut from a far different cloth than her predecessor. Amiable and striking in her brunette beauty, she had grown up poor and liked affluence better. She was a widow who threw herself into the whirlwind courtship that embarrassed Woodrow’s friends and aides with its passion. Letters and long drives filled the couple’s days, and soon Edith married a man and an office. From the start, even before his health began to deteriorate, Edith cast herself as his amanuensis, his sounding board, his shadow presence.
The fact that she sat in on Cabinet meetings and that she did her best to isolate her husband from his closest adviser, Col. Edward House, the man credited with refining the president’s political judgment, are but two indications of how she insinuated herself into his work, and not for the better. With her fierce loyalty, Edith bolstered Woodrow’s worst trait, a self-righteous arrogance that only intensified as his second term developed.
The Wilsons went to Europe in December 1918 to share the triumph of the World War I peace the president had engineered. Some of his American advisers told him not to go, to keep his mystique alive at a distance. But the first president to cross the Atlantic while in office surely craved the hero’s welcome he had yet to receive at home. “Edith and Woodrow” spells out in painstaking detail how this victory turned to dust after the couple returned home. The Senate was not prepared to rubberstamp the Treaty of Versailles as the president had negotiated it. Worse, he had been weakened by the strain of the trip.
He came home a sick man, with a rigidity of thinking that caused his neurosurgeon to describe him as “‘a veritable caricature of his former self.'” In October 1919, still wrestling with the Senate over the treaty, he suffered a devastating stroke that paralyzed his left side. Suddenly he was “a wreck of a man,” one who struggled to talk and swallow and, worst of all, could no longer concentrate. Edith’s solution was to assume his job and create a conspiracy of silence around him.
Edith Wilson was a culprit, but hardly the only one, in the unhappy ending to her husband’s presidency. Wilson’s relationships with other associates, including House, suggest his megalomania required people who would always flatter and praise.
And there was another, more-compelling possibility: Wilson’s untreated high blood pressure, which dated from the early 1900s, may have exacerbated his increasing inability to compromise. At least one of his doctors thought so, which, if true, makes Edith less the person responsible for her husband’s failure than simply a foolish woman who thought she could run the country.
“Edith and Woodrow” brings to mind “No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin. But there are striking differences. Levin, who relies largely on correspondence and written documents, doesn’t set the scene or flesh out the characters as well as Goodwin, and the Wilsons are neither as colorful nor as interesting as the Roosevelts. Nor are they as likable — at least, in Levin’s telling. A small but odd quirk of the book is that while she always stays a critical distance from her two main subjects, Levin sounds downright tender when describing Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, the man most responsible for bringing down the treaty in the Senate — a principled man, Levin writes, who had good reason to think Wilson a naive negotiator.
A notable attribute of Kati Marton’s “Hidden Power” is the balanced hand she takes with her subjects. In a work of pop history that entertains more than it enlightens, she looks at most of the couples who have occupied the White House in the 20th Century (she omits the Hoovers, Coolidges and Eisenhowers with the argument that there’s so little to say) to examine how these relationships served the Union and the individuals in question. Although Marton interviewed some of the first ladies in her book, her research is mostly secondhand, and the book reads more like a series of Vanity Fair articles than a work of historical scholarship.
Gossipy but informative, each snapshot is so different that collectively all they can prove is that complex men become president, and they tend to have complex marriages. Another point Marton drives home is how those marriages usually reflected their times — or perhaps they were designed to look that way by the spin doctors who have long inhabited the White House.
The book divides the first ladies it profiles into roughly two groups, those who pursued their own agendas and those who put their husband’s first. Marching to their own beat were Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, Jacqueline Kennedy, Betty Ford and Hillary Clinton, while those more inclined to adapt their style to complement their husbands’ were Edith Wilson, Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush.
Within this frame, the personal stories are often painful. In Marton’s telling, Roosevelt’s evolution as a champion of the poor and oppressed was a direct response to her husband’s marital infidelity and her inability to forgive and forget. Kennedy and Johnson took a more practical view of their husbands’ philandering, while Nixon, according to Marton, lived in a shell of a marriage from the late 1950s on: Politics was Richard Nixon’s mistress.
Of all the marriages, Ford’s feels the healthiest, even if she wasn’t always. The main reason is that Gerald Ford was not only loving but also supported her honesty without regard to its political repercussions, whether she was talking about her breast cancer or treatment for drug addiction. But, as Marton points out, their good relationship probably has a lot to do with the fact that Gerald Ford, who assumed office after Richard Nixon resigned, was an accidental president.
“It is hard not to conclude from the Fords’ fulfilled partnership and failed presidential bid that devoted husbands rarely make successful presidents,” she writes. “History is driven by needy, dominating, narcissistic personalities who let nothing and no one stand in their way.”
