According to House, he was eleven when his mother died and in his early twenties when his father followed. Judging from the paucity of information he left about them, his relationship with his parents was not a close one. His father gets the lion’s share of House’s remembrances, but only for how the wealth he provided enabled House to pursue a life in politics. Reflecting on House’s account, a reader must surmise that the lack of a driving parental influence in his life increased the importance of his relationships with his brothers—which was intensely competitive, hierarchical, and often violent.
He was born a decade before the start of the Civil War in a boisterous and male-dominated household outside Houston, Texas—the youngest of seven boys—where the only way to get noticed was to be more reckless than the last. His father set the standard. Thomas House was a wealthy entrepreneur who built his fortune outrunning the law. At various times, and sometimes all at once, he was a banker, a cotton and sugar planter and a gun runner for the Confederacy. He raised his boys to be young gentlemen, but he also gave them the unsupervised run of the plantation. Like characters out of Lord of the Flies, the boys erected their own personal fiefdom. In the hierarchy they established, where age mattered (though not as much as courage), they carried guns and knives and fought like men.
The boys raced ponies through the countryside and played “gunfight” with real guns and ammunition. House’s oldest brother suffered a severe gun wound to the face during one of the games and House himself almost killed two boys.
Living in such a household must have taught House at an early age that if he wanted to get noticed, he would need to fight above his weight. He was the smallest among his brothers, but he was no less violent.
His favorite brother, Jimmie, the one he emulated, was the most reckless of them all. Jimmie died at age sixteen after a careless fall from a homemade trapeze. House almost lost his own life in a similar way when, at age twelve, the rope he was swinging from snapped unexpectedly. He fell and hit his head on a wagon wheel and was bedridden for days. House wrote in his memoirs that the experience changed him forever. Before he fully recovered, he contracted malaria, and the effects of the disease ravaged his health. The reckless, violent little ruffian became a fragile, delicate boy. From then on, he would always be struggling with, or recovering from, some illness. He no longer had the strength, and perhaps even the nerve, to live the boisterous lifestyle he had before. From then on, to get his way, he would need to use his brains, not his fists.
While studying at Cornell, the young House received word of his father’s death. Since his mother had already passed, he and his brothers were now on their own. House returned to Texas and was elected by his brothers to manage the considerable estate their father had left behind. After selling off the plantations and rearranging the stock and bond portfolios, each of the House brothers was left with a sizable annuity. With his financial future secure, House turned his thoughts to starting his own family.
By his early thirties, he had a wife, two daughters and one of the largest homes in Austin. House was a man of means, but he was bored. To liven things up, he decided to get involved in politics, but he was unsure where he might fit. He struggled with the idea of running for office,3 discouraged by the less than striking personal image he cut, but he knew he could at least use his wealth to influence events from behind the scenes. His interest in politics may have had its origins in the lively political discussions the House family had around the dinner table when he was a boy. His father briefly served as mayor of Houston and throughout his life remained politically active, regularly inviting famous political friends over for dinner. Young Edward was old enough to have gotten to know many of them and was undoubtedly impressed by what he saw.
His full political awakening may have occurred during the 1876 presidential race between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden, a race that would stand as the closest in history until the 2000 campaign between George W. Bush and Al Gore. House was eighteen years old in 1876, and, like so many others at the time, was swept up in all the excitement of the campaign. As a boy, he might have envisioned himself one day running for the presidency, but at forty he was less optimistic about his chances. After careful reflection, he decided he had neither the stamina nor the physical presence to run for office.
He had become a petite, balding man, about five foot six, with a slender build and what might be described as a pencil-thin neck. His large, intelligent, cat-like eyes made him look like he had just stepped out of a Modigliani painting. He had a small head, a severely receding chin and a conspicuous pair of ears that protruded like the handles on a trophy cup. He might have thought his manicured mustache lent his face an air of dignity, but in fact he just looked like a turtle with a mustache. His movements were slow and delicate—some thought them reptilian. His voice had a thin huskiness that one biographer compared to the inside voice one uses in church. And, he wilted in hot weather like a character in a Tennessee Williams play.
Once he decided he preferred managing a campaign to running as the candidate himself, he used his wealth and connections to find the right candidate. His goal was to fashion himself as the powerful presence behind the throne, but he needed to find the right person to back. At first, he thought Texas governor James Hogg would be the right fit. Hogg was running for reelection, and House knew a victory in a statewide governor’s race would help establish his reputation as a key political operative. Hogg was victorious, but his relationship with House did not work out as hoped. Hogg was a man of deep political experience and connections and strong views about his own abilities. He was not the kind of candidate who needed much advice, and House quickly understood that the consigliere role he had envisioned for himself might never materialize under Hogg. His next campaign would present him with a more pliable subject.
Charles Culberson was a talented deep thinker who needed a lot of emotional support. He liked the glamour of politics, but he found the groveling and backslapping demoralizing. House devoted himself to helping ease his mind and to raising his spirits during the numerous times that Culberson seriously considered walking away. They would become close friends and have a successful, decades-long partnership. The relationship was a tremendous boost to House’s career. House used his role as campaign manager to create the statewide operation on which he would rely for the rest of his life in Texas politics. The Culberson gubernatorial victory put House on the map as an important player among state politicos, and it helped convince House where he belonged.
If the Culberson campaign made House’s name, it was the campaign to elect Joseph Sayers governor that transformed him into a Texas legend. Sayers was a mediocre politician who lacked the charm and charisma of Hogg and the intelligence of Culberson. And, he was not much of a campaigner. In fact, he spent much of the governor’s race in Washington, DC, where he was serving out his term as a congressman. He was not driven to be governor: he looked at the office merely as an honorable capstone on a long political career. House used his keen understanding of state politics and his good relations with the African-American and Mexican-American communities to outmaneuver all of Sayers’s competitors. The victory was one of House’s proudest achievements, but Sayers was not open to suggestion the way Culberson was, and House had a difficult time working with the new governor. The relationship helped House make two important discoveries about himself: he had the confidence and resources to get almost anyone elected governor in Texas, and, although he liked being in the company of powerful politicians, he hated the backslapping and the circus atmosphere.
His next campaign, to elect Samuel Lanham governor, would be his last. He literally phoned it in. His statewide operation was so well developed at that point that he could hand off the day-to-day operations to others. House did not feel strongly about Lanham, but he knew he could influence him, so he backed him. He had started to spend more of his time outside of Texas, in hopes of finding a candidate who could help him reach the next phase of his career, when his old f
riend Governor Hogg offered to introduce him to the famous politician William Jennings Bryan. Hogg thought that Bryan’s gifts as an orator and House’s skill as an organizer was the perfect combination for winning the White House.
House tried working with Bryan but quickly realized that, for many of the same reasons he and Hogg did not mesh, he and Bryan were also a bad fit. Bryan was far too set in his ways and independent to be open to persuasion. And House was not going to put his resources at the disposal of a man he could not sway in the end—so he looked elsewhere.
The kind of candidate he was seeking would be difficult to find. Such a man would need to be a progressive in order to win working-class voters and a strong Democrat. He would also need to be from the North, yet appealing to Southern and Western populists. More importantly, for House’s sake, the man would need to be just emotionally dependent enough to be open to House’s personal brand of persuasion—which relied on heaping spoonfuls of flattery and subtle psychological manipulation. House had given up on the idea of finding such a candidate and was considering running his old friend Culberson for the nomination when someone offered to introduce him to the exciting young governor of New Jersey.
Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House could not have been better suited to each other in temperament. House was shameless in his capacity for flattery and skilled at seeming to shrink in the presence of larger personalities. Wilson craved exactly such adoration and deference. Wilson was a man who adored being adored. House must have been elated at having found a candidate who was the complete package: brilliant, handsome, eloquent, a natural campaigner and breathtakingly insecure. As he pondered this new relationship, House might have wondered how Wilson came to possess such a peculiar combination of qualities.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (or Tommy, as he was called), was born in 1856 in Staunton, Virginia, a small town not much larger today than it was then. He was the youngest child and the only boy in a deeply religious family headed by an ambitious Presbyterian minister whose love seemed to come at a price. Tommy spent much of his youth worried that he would never be able to live up to his father’s expectations, because, long after most boys his age had begun schooling, Tommy could not read or write. He was nine before he learned the alphabet and twelve before he could string letters into words.
Historians have speculated wildly about the reasons for Wilson’s reading difficulties. Wilson himself suggested4 he had been a lazy child, perhaps a little too secure in the comfort of being the baby of the family to want to exert himself too much. One pair of historians have suggested that he willfully refused to learn to read, as a way of defying his domineering father—a well-read and eloquent writer and public speaker, but one possessed of a biting and sometimes caustic sense of humor5—whom he resented for belittling him in public and insulting his intelligence.6 Another historian, Edwin Weinstein, has argued that Wilson might have suffered from a developmental form of dyslexia,7 pointing to Wilson’s lifelong difficulty with numbers (arithmetic requires some of the same parts of the brain as reading), his poor spelling and his inability to learn German and French no matter how hard he tried. Dyslexia was not known to science in Wilson’s day, but there was clearly something terribly wrong.8
It seems likely that Wilson did suffer from dyslexia but, as an adult, overcame the disability by sheer force of will. In order to appreciate the full extent of his achievements in life and his extraordinary work ethic, one has to bear in mind the difficulties he faced. Despite his late start in life and the daily, sometimes excruciating tasks of reading and writing, he excelled as a scholar. He earned a law degree, got a PhD and went on to write important works of political science. Burdened as he was with dyslexia, the sheer effort and rigid self-discipline necessary to accomplish such sustained scholarship over so many years testifies to the almost superhuman will he possessed.
His struggles with dyslexia, and the disappointment he must have felt in himself for those struggles, may not have been the only reasons Wilson came to be so emotionally needy. Doubts he felt about the love of his father and mother may have also played a role.
Professors Alexander and Juliet George have theorized that Wilson was emotionally scarred by the experience of not being able to read.9 They speculate that his deep need for acceptance in later life was partly the result of his perceived inadequacy in the eyes of his father. They suggest that Wilson emerged from his youth with the belief that his father’s love was conditional, a belief that left him with a deep and enduring sense of insecurity.10 Even after Wilson had attained a measure of professional success, he remained unsure of himself in the presence of his father. In their famous biography, the Georges tell a story in which, during one of Wilson’s speeches, he seems visibly unsettled by seeing his father in the audience.
Woodrow’s relationship with his mother also had its challenges. To those outside of the Wilson household, Janet (or Jessie, as she was often called), was a conundrum—fiercely loyal to her family and capable of great kindness and sensitivity to strangers, but often standoffish with those whom she regarded as below her social class. She has been described by biographers as a joyless woman, aloof and severe and, perhaps, scarred by a deeply troubling childhood.11
As a girl, Janet just barely survived the voyage of immigration with her parents from Europe. Swept overboard into bitterly cold water, she saved her own life by grabbing hold of a rope trailing behind the ship. The experience left her with a lifelong fear of storms, and, according to Wilson, it inspired his own fear of open water. Not long after arriving in the US, Janet’s mother died. Her father remarried quickly but paid little attention afterward to Janet. The feelings of abandonment she must have felt as a result of these experiences left her with a negative outlook on life that was sometimes shared by her children. Wilson once said of his mother, “When I feel badly, sour and gloomy and everything seems wrong, then I know that my mother’s character is uppermost in me.”12
By the time he and Colonel House met, however, the sensitive young Tommy—who had faced disappointment, intense struggle and emotional uncertainty—had transformed himself into the brilliant, ambitious, charismatic and desperately needy man that House knew could someday be president. The question in House’s mind was whether he would be there when Wilson crossed the finish line.
Just days after their first meeting, House invited Wilson to dinner in his Gotham Hotel apartment. They dined alone. House went to great lengths to make the occasion as comfortable for Wilson as possible and took time before the meeting to research his guest.
House was told that Wilson was a man of deep religious conviction (some even said he believed God had called him to run for the presidency) and a man of remarkable eloquence who was not afraid of engaging critics forcefully and directly with an oratorical style that was part university scholar, part Calvinist preacher. He had moved an aggressive legislative agenda through the New Jersey assembly by verbally bludgeoning his opponents into submission. As House and Wilson talked together over an intimate dinner, House could not help but be impressed.
The Woodrow Wilson sitting before House on that autumn evening in 1911 was already a man of extraordinary accomplishment. In the past decade, he had risen to the presidency of an Ivy League university, where he instituted educational reforms that would one day impact the curricula of every institution of higher learning in the nation—an act that alone secured his place in history. Then, without ever holding a public office, he was elected governor of New Jersey. He ran circles around the legislature, introducing the most progressive agenda of any governor in the history of the state. And now, after only two years in office, Wilson sat before House as a credible candidate for the presidency of the United States.
He even looked like a president. He was fifty-six years old, and, though he was just under six feet tall, his slender frame made him look taller. His smartly tailored suits and high lapels enhanced the effect. His face had Nordic qualities—angular, with high cheekbones, a strong chin, a sharp nose and full lips. H
is prominent ears drooped severely at the lobe, and all of his energy was compressed into expressive, heavily hooded blue-gray eyes. His movements were compact and purposeful and his smile toothy, uneven, and colored by neglect. A tic in his left eye indicated when he was upset or overtired, and a serious stroke, suffered in 1906, left him with a noticeably flaccid handshake.
If their meeting was like most of Wilson’s meetings, he did all the talking. What struck a listener most when conversing with Wilson was the perfection of his speech. He did not pause or struggle for words when he spoke—the river of his thoughts flowed uninterrupted. There were no unnecessary gestures or vocal effects. His grammar was flawless and his diction unimpeachable. He held a listener’s attention with familiar metaphors, colorful imagery and lofty, poetic pronouncements. House recognized that Wilson was a far more brilliant communicator than Bryan or Hogg or even Culberson—perhaps the best he had seen.
Unlike their relatively brief first meeting, their dinner lasted for hours. They covered every imaginable topic, and, according to House, they were in agreement on every subject. Afterward, House recorded his thoughts in his diary: “We found ourselves in such complete sympathy in so many ways that we soon learned to know what each was thinking without either having expressed himself. I think he is going to be a man that one can advise with some degree of satisfaction.”13
Later, House recalled the dinner in a conversation with a friend, saying that he was surprised they had gotten on so well. “From what I had heard…I was afraid that he had to have his hats made to order [because of his inflated ego,] but I saw not the slightest evidence of it.”14
Looking at House, Wilson saw a calm, unintimidating little man with an almost feminine softness. He described House later as “mild, unassuming, unobtrusive, gentle, deferential, confidential and intimate.”15 What Wilson saw in House was partly a persona the colonel had cultivated for the purpose of putting people at ease. While he may have seemed meek, House was rarely passive.
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