Edith and Woodrow

"Rightly so. All these books, even if you are not interested in first ladies or American politics, are great studies of human interaction and the balance of power in marriage. Levin’s book is very fascinating because she used a lot of new documentation. It really gives us a glimpse into the life of the Wilsons in the White House that we had never had before. It brings a depth of detail that had always been missing from these stories. It used formerly unavailable White House memos, and reports by the president’s personal physician. The role of first lady, certainly by the mid-19th century, exposed these women to the great writers, the great thinkers and the great heroes of this country and the world. The Wilsons were the first presidential couple to go overseas while they were in office. Europeans had never seen a US president’s wife and Wilson was seen as a hero in France and Belgium and England. Flowers were thrown at their feet. What resulted was a global shift in the perception regarding the role of a president’s wife. Edith was everywhere with him. They were at Buckingham Palace in 1918, just after World War I ended, with Queen Mary and King George V. Clemenceau even arranged for her to slip into the Hall of Mirrors when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. She was the only woman there. The trip to Europe was for her a procession of personal adulation. It all went to her head. She was a first lady whose love of her husband grew possessive to the point where she began to bash people who were less than slavishly adoring. She convinced Wilson to get rid of his secretary of state. There is nothing in anything she wrote to indicate that she felt any responsibility to any constituency other than her husband and herself. That selfishness led her to perceive her husband’s stroke as something that needed to be covered up. She insisted that under no circumstances would he resign and under no circumstances would he relinquish the reins of power, even temporarily. She arranged an ad hoc way to get around his incapacity and shield others from learning about his true condition by making decisions for him. She would go into his bedroom, claim to ask him questions and come out with what she said was a transcription of his wishes. Yes. Nobody was ever allowed to see him without seeing her first and she insisted on always being present. She cut him off from his cabinet and from any intelligent advice. She also cut him off from his three beloved daughters from his prior marriage. His first wife had died, in the White House, only a year prior to his marriage to Edith, and unlike Edith she had been a very intelligent woman who helped him write his speeches. Edith Wilson was the opposite—a narrow-minded bigot and an example of the worst kind of influence a first lady can have. That is correct. She insisted that the administration not compromise on a single article of the treaty. She insisted on an all-or-nothing vote."