The President Who Was Not

WHEN THE CHEERING STOPPED by Gene Smith. 307 pages. Morrow. $5.95.

Though few historians have recorded it and not many voters realized it at the time, the U.S. has already had, in effect, a woman President. Her name is Edith Boiling Gait Wilson.

For 17 months, while Woodrow Wilson lay grievously ill in his White House bedroom, his wife Edith was his only contact with the outside world. Gene Smith, 34, a Washington freelance reporter, who once worked for the New York Post, spent months burrowing through the huge mass of Wilson papers in the Princeton University library.

His major treasure trove was the still-unpublished diary of Wilson's doctor, Admiral Gary Grayson, which contained many a clinical detail that Grayson had discreetly left out of his own book about Wilson, published in 1960. Though his history sometimes reads like soap opera, Smith is a conscientious researcher, as Historian Allan Nevins acknowledges in an admiring introduction. Biographer Smith demonstrates that Edith Wilson was much more powerful than anyone has suspected, and her husband much more incapacitated.

Protected from Politics. The descendant of a proud patrician but impoverished Virginia family, Edith Boiling Gait came to Washington with her first husband, who was a jeweler. When Gait died, she took over the jewelry shop. Though not active in Washington society, Edith met the President in 1915 through a mutual friend. Wilson's first wife had died less than a year before, and he was charmed by Edith. She was gay, outgoing, voluble. The prim schoolmaster began to clown in front of her. He was heard warbling, "O you great big beautiful doll." Eight months after they met, Wilson and Edith were married.

The first years of marriage were full of triumphs: Wilson was reelected, the war was won, and Europe received Wilson with tumultuous enthusiasm as the idealist peacemaker who promised to end war through a new League of Nations. But the Peace Conference soon bogged down, opposition to the League of Nations built up, and Wilson grew depressed. Exhausted but stubborn, he decided to stump the country for the League. In September 1919, he started out on a grueling 27-day tour by rail of most of the states, but at Pueblo, Colo., he suffered a stroke.

Only Wilson's private secretary, Joe Tumulty, his doctor, Admiral Cary Grayson, and Edith knew his true condition. For five months Wilson lay flat on his back. His wife had to read to him. If a document needed his signature, his wife guided his trembling hand. His face was set in a senseless smile. At times, he would cry inconsolably. In contrast to the almost embarrassingly candid reports on Eisenhower's physical condition, Wilson's entourage of doctors constantly issued bland, reassuring medical bulletins.

The day after Wilson had returned to Washington, Secretary of State Robert Lansing went to the White House with a copy of the U.S. Constitution, pointedly read the article on the presidential succession and urged Tumulty and Grayson to declare the President disabled. Red with rage, Tumulty snapped: "He has been too kind, too loyal and wonderful to me to receive such treatment at my hands." Tumulty and Grayson warned Lansing that if anyone tried to remove the President, they would fight him tooth and nail.

All letters, documents and memoranda passed through Mrs. Wilson's hands and rarely reached the President. Occasionally, she would pen an answer herself, scribbling illegibly around the margins. She received Cabinet members in the room adjoining the President's, insisted she was expressing the President's wishes. They had to take her word for it.

"I Hate Lansing." Virtually every important Democrat in the U.S. was willing to accept the reservations to the League of Nations charter offered by Massachusetts' Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Sr.--if only in order to have it ratified. They tried to see Wilson, but Edith stood in their way. The President, she announced, was absolutely opposed to any compromise and she felt the same way herself. Edward Grey, the British wartime Foreign Secretary, made a trip to the U.S. to offer his support in the fight for the League. Edith refused to see him because one of his aides, she said, had once insulted her. Grey went home, and the League was voted down. Meanwhile, other crises were neglected: serious strikes, race riots, soaring prices, widespread unemployment. Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson's biographer and editor of the Wilson papers, noted in his diary: "Our Government has gone out of business."

The Cabinet might have pressed harder for Wilson's resignation had the Vice President not been Thomas Marshall. Onetime Governor of Indiana, Marshall had been put on the ticket to balance Wilson's Eastern intellectuality. Marshall's major claim to fame was a remark he once made in Senate debate: "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar." He was the first Vice President to supplement his income with lecture tours. The alternatives, he said, were to "resign or steal." The thought of his becoming President terrified him as much as everybody else.

Since Wilson had taken to bed, Lansing had been calling a Cabinet meeting once a week. When Wilson got wind of this, he sent Lansing a blistering note, accusing him of disloyalty and demanding his resignation. "I hate Lansing," Mrs. Wilson told Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. Wilson replaced Lansing with Bainbridge Colby, a New York lawyer with no experience in foreign affairs.

Flowers for the League. Eventually, Wilson was able to get up and about. Every morning at 10:30 he watched a movie. Afternoons, he went for a drive, his gaunt, waxlike face frozen into an eerie smile. If another car passed him, he would order the Secret Service to overtake the driver and question him. Brooding over the matter, Wilson wrote his Attorney General to ask if the President had the power to try speeders on the spot.

By April 1920, Wilson was well enough to attend Cabinet meetings. But he had trouble concentrating, would break off in the middle of a sentence and stare into space. He repeated the same jokes, kept musing over the defeat of the League. Waving his arm vaguely he said that the League's last resting place was near by, and every morning he put fresh flowers on the grave.

The Cabinet soon learned to its horror that Wilson planned to run again, and his wife was as eager as he. Democratic chieftains frantically tried to dissuade Wilson, but there was no convincing him--or Edith. By careful maneuvering, they managed to keep Wilson's name from being put before the Convention, and James Cox was nominated. When Wilson heard the news, he burst into a stream of obscenities. Cox campaigned as an all-out backer of the League, but Wilson considered the League his personal possession and would do nothing to help Cox. He was sure Harding would lose. "You have no faith in the American people," he lectured a doubter on election day. "A great moral issue is involved." Harding won in the biggest landslide in 100 years.

Edith outlived her husband and died in 1961. In all that time, she had very little to say about her role in the White House and she refused all interviews. Nor did she mellow toward her enemies. At 85, she still referred to Henry Cabot Lodge as "that stinking snake."

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