Kati Marton Read Online Free PDF Page A

the untapped sensuality and the strength of character that until then Edith had masked behind a southern belle’s veil of frivolity had found a focus. “He came in from the Blue Room,” she wrote later, “lookingso distinguished in his evening clothes and with both hands held out to welcome me. When I put mine in them and looked into those eyes—unlike any others in the world—something broke down inside me, and I knew I could and would go to the end of the world with or for him.”
    Theodore Roosevelt had scoffed that Woodrow Wilson possessed all the passion of “an apothecary clerk.” But Wilson’s women knew better. During his first marriage, Woodrow had written about the temptations he felt when he was away from his wife. He dared not stay overnight in New York on his own, given “the imperious passions” that fired him. At least at home, he wrote her, he “must stay out of mischief.” His temptations, he told Ellen, meant “not one wit of real infidelity to you—it is anatomical and not of the heart.” Ellen Wilson’s reaction to this astonishing missive is not recorded.
    By the end of May 1915, Woodrow’s “siege” must have been successful, for he wrote, “I venture to say, my Lady, my Queen, that never in your life have you looked so wonderfully beautiful as I have seen you look when the love tide was running in your heart without check …. I have seen a transfiguration, and it has filled me with as much awe as ecstasy! I can’t think this morning, I can only feel and only realize the exquisite thing that happened to me, the beautiful love I have won …. the sweet woman who has given it to me.”
    The American people scarcely would have recognized their stern Presbyterian leader. But in those pretelevision days, politicians could present almost any image of themselves. Wilson conveyed the image of a church elder who read Thucydides in his free time. With his soaring oratory—tinged with a faint Scottish burr—invoking the blessing of God, his speeches often sounded like sermons. His idealism and his morality were the qualities that Americans associated with him. Few people saw the man Edith fell in love with.
    His personal happiness was in stark contrast to the turmoil around him. Though Edith rejoiced when Secretary of State Bryan resigned, much of the country was shocked. Americans were divided over the prospect of engagement in a European conflict. While they wanted the president to defend their right to travel safely on the seas, they did not necessarily want to go to war over it. In 1915, Wilson shared that view.As the European conflict grew daily closer, the president had a secret source of strength. “My love for you,” he wrote Edith, “has come to me in these days when I seem to be put to the supreme test of my life, like a new youth …. You are oh so fit for a mate for a strong man!”
    Though not yet married, the president wanted Edith by his side. He invited her to the summer White House in Cornish, New Hampshire, where, away from the prying eyes of the capital, the couple spent lazy days picnicking and reading to each other. “When we walked, we would try to forget that lurking behind every tree was a Secret Service man,” Edith wrote later. By mid-August, they were secretly engaged. Wilson began in earnest to prepare her for the role of full presidential partner. Statecraft, he assured her, was not so very intellectually taxing. “Don’t you see,” he told Edith, “how comparatively easy it is to keep … a very complicated public matter in your head when a dispatch or memorandum about it turns up every day?”
    Wilson’s daily love letters to Edith were now accompanied by packets of state papers, with his handwritten marginal notes. He expected her not just to read them but also to comment on them. There was only one other person on whom the president relied for both political and emotional support, Colonel Edward Mandel House, a transplanted southerner, his most