Preface

The deathbed admonition of Woodrow Wilson's angelic, admiring first wife, Ellen, that her husband, a great man, should not become a lonely great man, paved the way to his remarriage. Enter Edith Bolling Galt — and the rest is "history," idealized, sanitized, and indeed, invented in her autobiography: a story played out in Washington and Paris and around the world, against the guns of World War I and the partisan cross fire over the eventual refusal of the United States to join the League of Nations. The story of Wilson's second marriage, and of the large events on which its shadow was cast, is darker and more devious, and more astonishing, than previously recorded.

From the morning of October 2, 1919, when Woodrow Wilson suffered coronary thrombosis, and a paralyzing stroke, Edith insisted that her husband, the twenty-eighth president of the United States, was yet a dynamic leader, an indispensable visionary, physically enfeebled only temporarily. Though she acknowledged that she studied every paper sent to her by various cabinet secretaries and senators and had tried to digest and present in tabloid form matters that in her view needed imper ... read full excerpt from: Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House ebook