My Memoir The second Mrs. Woodrow Wilson began life as a small-town Virginia whose sister's marriage and residence in Washington D.C. had led to her own, as Mrs. Norman Galt. When her first husband died, leaving her a widow at 36, Edith Bolling Galt took an active role in the stewardship of his business affairs, and spent much of her subsequent time travelling abroad. Eventually she returned to Washington where fate, in the form of her friend, the White House physicians furnished a social link to the bereaved President Wilson, whose own first wife had died the year before, in 1914. The closely documented chronicle of Edith Wilson's White House years reveals the human side of the intellectual President, gratefully pursuing companionship and struggling with the pressures and uncertainties of the War and then the debacle of America's failure to join the league. Mrs. Wilson attempts to set the record straight on a number of political incidents and personalities, and describes her own role in the affairs of state during Wilsons illness. While she frequently indulges a conventional first-ladys hero-worship of her husband, her confident powers of recall offer a fund of information and insight, and suggest the qualities that made her a woman of power. |
