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sharing a secret, the president would write secret messages in longhand and Edith would encode them in her own handwriting. Wilson would then type the code numbers out on his typewriter. She also decoded incoming messages for him. Edith was privy not only to the secret presidential code but to the personal code between Wilson and House. As she later noted proudly, “In this way I followed day by day every phase of the mosaic which he was shaping into a pattern of statecraft, and we continued this partnership of thought and comradeship unbroken to the last day of his life. It was a rare privilege, and except for formal interviews with officials, I always ‘sat in’ when one or two people we knew came to discuss policies. In that way I was never a stranger to any subject, and often able in small ways to be of help.”
    Each day Edith awaited the arrival of his “big envelope” of state documents. “I am afraid this has been another wretchedly busy day for you,” she wrote on August 13, 1915, “for I know from the manifold things I found in my big envelope today—how thoroughly you are going into things. You are a dear person to take the time to write little sentences on each of the papers you send me …. I felt so queer this afternoon reading all these reports from the different theaters of war, sitting here in my quiet room …. I, an unknown person, one who had lived a sheltered, inconspicuous existence now having all the threads in the tangled fabric of the world’s history laid in my hands—for a few minutes—while thestronger hand that guides the shuttle stops long enough in its work to press my fingers in token of the great love and trust with which you crown and bless my life.” She may have felt “queer” about all this statecraft dropping in her lap, but she eagerly awaited more. “Is it true that you have asked the Secretaries of War and Navy to give you suggestions for preparedness for war?” she asked him.
    By now she was as enthralled by the political partnership as the emotional. “Much as I enjoy your delicious love letters,” she told him, “I enjoy even more the ones in which you tell me … of what you are working on … then I feel I am sharing your work and being taken into partnership as it were.” In one of her more revealing passages she wrote, “I love the way you put your dear hand on mine while with the other you turn the pages of history.”
    The Washington press corps of the time respected the president’s privacy. It now seems remarkable, but no photographs of the president leaving Edith’s home near Dupont Circle were ever taken. But the capital’s rumor mill was active, passing on stories of the commander in chief in love. The salons savored each new morsel, but Wilson’s political allies were troubled. In September 1915, House, along with a handful of Wilson’s Cabinet members including Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo—Wilson’s son-in-law—and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, agonized over the potential political cost of Wilson’s infatuation. Daniels, Wilson’s oldest friend in the Cabinet, was chosen to warn Wilson against a too early remarriage. Less than a year after his wife’s death and one year before the presidential elections of 1916, his friends feared the affair could be politically damaging. When Daniels said that he could not perform as “Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of Cupid,” McAdoo was dispatched with a clumsy blackmail conspiracy based on an event that had taken place years earlier, and had caused the only real crisis in Wilson’s first marriage.
    In 1907, during a Bermuda holiday recommended by his doctor, Woodrow, unaccompanied by Ellen, began what was delicately called “an intimate friendship” with another vacationer, Mary Peck Hulbert. What actually transpired between them is a matter of some dispute, butclearly something happened—enough to lead Wilson into a continued correspondence