In conversation, House avoided direct clashes or open antagonism, allowing the other person to speak freely while concealing his own thoughts on an issue. People who were his enemies often had no idea. As one former senator said of House, “He can walk on dry leaves and make no more noise than a tiger.”16 When Wilson was president, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was deceived into believing he and House were close friends. House went out of his way to nurture this misperception, all the while working behind Bryan’s back to undermine him in the eyes of the president and to poach increasing swaths of responsibility from him.
House understood human nature. Having worked with so many political candidates over the years, he understood the dark forces that often inspire their decisions to seek public office. As he tucked into a beautiful dinner of Wilson’s favorite foods and listened to the future president expound on where he would like to take the country, he might have let his mind drift just long enough to wonder what dark secrets inspired Wilson’s need to be president. Why would Wilson abandon a comfortable life in relatively quiet Trenton for the bloody Roman Colosseum of Washington, DC? He was about to find out.
II
The Art of Manipulation
Part of the myth surrounding Colonel House involves the idea that he somehow manipulated Wilson into pursuing actions that the president might otherwise not have taken. Like most myths, this one contains a kernel of truth. House did indeed know how to pull Wilson’s strings, but he rarely convinced the president to do anything to which he was strongly opposed. It was in those areas where the two men shared general agreement that House’s powers were most potent. The sly colonel learned that when Wilson trusted a person, he was unusually open to suggestion. It almost did not matter who made the recommendation or what the context was. House took advantage of Wilson’s loyal, trusting nature, not just to stay in his good graces, but also to reinforce his own personal influence in the White House. Some around the president could see what House was up to, but Wilson either could not or would not.
The year Wilson and his right-hand man entered the White House, the country was in the midst of a major economic transition and was experiencing explosive economic growth. But not everyone was benefiting. For hundreds of years, the principal drivers of the economy had been agrarian, but a second industrial revolution following the Civil War had changed that. American cities were swelling with a huge influx of workers, many of whom had left family farms or had come from overseas looking for work in the heavy industries of the Northeast and Midwest. Muscled-back cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh and New York strained under the collective weight of reams of forged steel, barrels of refined oil and seemingly endless wagonloads of coal. The change was making some Americans enormously rich, even as the least fortunate among them were introduced to a shocking degree of deprivation.
Andrew Carnegie was one of the lucky ones. He got in on the ground floor of the steel industry and, in time, rose to become one of the wealthiest humans to ever walk the earth. He tried to avoid ostentatious displays of wealth, but he was not above the occasional splurge. He owned a sixty-room mansion on East 91st Street in New York City—a mini Versailles on the edge of Manhattan. Every morning he would wake to the soft, wafting melodies played by his personal organist in his reception room below. Carnegie would rise from his bed and look out the window down into an English garden. To the south, less than an hour away, on Mulberry Street, in what is now Chinatown, the men and women, boys and girls who worked for him slept rough and huddled together in the street for warmth, under squat tarps precariously assembled each night over heating grates.
The rise of progressivism in Wilsonian America was not just about correcting the huge economic disparities between the rich and poor. In the early 1900s, even the middle classes were suffering, as rolling stock market crashes threatened the banks and the financial security of everyday Americans. Protecting the working class from corporate greed became a theme of the 1912 presidential election. Wilson made a number of speeches around the country advocating economic opportunity for all, through genuine bank and tariff reforms. His speeches would become known collectively as the “New Freedom Platform,”17 and, after his victory, it became the focus of the first two years of his administration. Colonel House was at his side as he contemplated a total reorganization of the US banking system.
House functioned as an unofficial adviser to Wilson. He held no formal office and received no salary but was nonetheless a central figure in the administration. The fact that Wilson would involve House so intimately in his work, given his lack of an official portfolio and how little he understood high finance, speaks to Wilson’s trust in his friend.
“What I like about House is that he is the most self-effacing man that ever lived,” Wilson said. “All he wants to do is serve the common cause and to help me and others.”18 The colonel worked hard to present himself to Wilson as a selfless and supportive friend, because this was the only real way to get on with someone as self-absorbed as Wilson. The president needed to believe that he was the faultless, unerring center of the universe. House did what he could to perpetuate the charade. In his memoirs, he describes his method of working with Wilson:
I never argue with the president when we disagree, any more than with any other man, beyond a certain point. When we have talked a matter over and we find that we are opposed upon it, I drop it—unless and until I come across some other piece of evidence to support my views. When the president asks for suggestions in drafts of speeches, I nearly always praise at first in order to strengthen the president’s confidence in himself which, strangely enough, is often lacking.19
Though he might have disagreed with Wilson, House always couched his comments in terms of approval and praise. His flattery of Wilson knew few limits. House would tell him, for example: “I do not put it too strongly when I say you are the main hope left to this torn and distracted world. Without your leadership, God alone knows how long we will wander in the darkness.”20
House admitted to his biographer, Charles Seymour, that he fully accepted the fact that in order to work with Wilson he had to constantly stroke his ego. He believed that if he displeased Wilson at any point, their relationship might come to an end.
The compliments House heaped upon Wilson were so extreme that most people would consider them absurd, but Wilson’s ego was so fragile that he greedily devoured even the most obsequious compliment. “You are so much more efficient than any public man with whom I have heretofore been in touch, that the others seem mere tyros.”21 There was something almost immoral in the way House would shamelessly feed Wilson’s ego. House must have recognized that there was something unhealthy about Wilson’s excessive need for affirmation. But whatever the source of this deep need in Wilson, House was only too happy to oblige.
If he was lacking for something sufficiently saccharine to say, House would pass along praise from others. He told Wilson that after his war address to Congress, a British diplomat told him “If Shakespeare had written the address it could not have been more perfect.”22 On another occasion, House passed on a letter from an English friend comparing Wilson to Lincoln. After his wife, Ellen, died, Wilson came to rely on House’s extraordinary support even more.
Wilson, in his grief, would roam the halls of the White House at night in tears, talking to himself. His friends and family were genuinely concerned for his mental and physical health. House was abroad when he received the news of Ellen’s passing and rushed home to help his friend. He knew Wilson would need him more than ever.
Ellen developed Bright’s disease in the summer of 1914 and was overtaken quickly. In her last days, Wilson sat by her bedside for hours on end, watching over her as she slept. The president was by Ellen’s side, silently gazing out her bedroom window, when she took her last breath. “God has stricken me almost beyond what I can bear,”23 he later said to a friend. Wilson’s constant need for support made him the type of man who needed to have a companion in his life. Ellen had been
his counselor, his cheerleader, and even his research assistant. She was deeply woven into the fabric of his life. As Wilson lay in bed years later, recovering from a stroke and contemplating his own death, he confessed to his daughter that he owed everything he was and had to Ellen.
Her death drove Wilson into a deep depression. He would sit for hours, staring silently into space. His doctor, Cary Grayson, visited his room one morning to find him sitting alone, with tears streaming down his face. Dr. Grayson wrote to a friend, “A sadder picture, no one could imagine. A great man with his heart torn out.”24 Wilson visited Colonel House in New York in seek of comfort from his dear friend. Together they would walk the late-night streets of the city. During one of these walks, Wilson confided to his friend that he had hoped some mad stranger would come along and put him out of his misery. “I don’t think straight any longer and have no heart for the things I am doing.”25
The closest Wilson and House would ever be was in the months following Ellen’s death. That summer, Wilson invited the colonel to his vacation home in New Hampshire for three days. House stayed in Ellen’s old room next to the president’s, and they shared a bathroom. With tears in his eyes, Wilson told House intimate stories about his love for Ellen. He shared photos, letters and poems. From August 1914 to January 1915, House visited Wilson in the White House thirteen times, staying in Ellen’s old bedroom. They would sit, talk and read together for hours during these visits. House’s warm, easygoing and supportive nature made him the perfect companion for Wilson during his time of grief.
Ellen Wilson died the day after war erupted in Europe. At a time like this, other presidents might use the demands of the office to distract themselves from their grief, but Wilson was the type of man who seemed to need the stability of companionship to find the motivation to work. For a time, House was the source of that companionship, but it eventually became clear that Wilson needed something more. When Dr. Grayson introduced him to his friend Edith Galt, the dark clouds over Wilson began to lift.
He was captivated by Edith. She was independent-minded, smart and a striking beauty. Wilson seized the moment and swept her up into his life. Within months of their meeting, they were engaged.26 Within a year, they were married. One of the darkest periods of his life had finally come to a close, and he could now turn his thoughts to the many pressing problems facing his administration, not least of which was the war across the Atlantic that some were calling for the US to join.
Wilson’s marriage marked the beginning of another highly productive period in his life, but it also set in motion a chain of events that would bring to a painful end his relationship with his closest friend. Edith’s memoirs betray her lack of affection for the colonel. If Edith appeared to like House at all, it was only for the president’s sake. She seemed to have problems with all the men working for her husband. She thought Wilson’s chief of staff, Joseph Tumulty, was crude and lacking in the decorum one should expect of someone working so closely with the president. She thought even less of House, revealing her assessment of the “strange little man” in a note to Wilson: “House looks like a weak vessel and I think he writes like one very often.”27
Years later, she described him in even less complimentary terms, making it known she considered him indecisive, unproductive, fawning and an intellectually dishonest amateur.28 Given her distaste for House, it is not difficult to imagine Edith played an active role in the fracturing of relations between the two friends. Indeed, on at least two occasions, Edith attempted to orchestrate House’s removal from Wilson’s orbit by urging his appointment as ambassador to the UK.
III
The Co-dependent Presidency
As World War I drew to a close, House and Wilson’s relationship was beginning to show signs of wear. The colonel was spending most of his time in New York, and with Edith now the dominant force in Wilson’s life, the president had fewer reasons to seek out House’s companionship. The Versailles peace conference following the war was a chance for the two friends to reconnect.
Though House was not Wilson’s secretary of state and, in fact, held no official portfolio of any kind in the administration, Wilson chose House to be his principal adviser during the talks. (Wilson did not have a close relationship with his cabinet members, and he rarely involved himself in their work. The one exception was foreign affairs, in which he shared a keen interest with House. Together they ran circles around Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing.)
Wilson and House began the conference virtually inseparable, meeting sometimes on-the-hour to review strategy and to let off steam. Soon, however, the president noticed House was behaving differently than usual. For years, for the sake of their relationship and to strengthen his own influence in the White House, the colonel had enabled Wilson’s worst impulses. But he recognized that the conference was a historic opportunity for them both. House believed he owed it to himself, the nation and Wilson to be more forthcoming and assertive than was his custom with the president, given their mutual goal of securing lasting world peace. So when the treaty seemed to be in trouble almost from the start and House thought Wilson was at fault, for the first time ever he began to openly criticize him. Sensitive to criticism of any kind, Wilson disliked this shift in attitude and began distancing himself from his right-hand man.
The president took a brief break from the conference to attend to pressing business back in Washington. When he returned to the conference, he no longer seemed happy to work with House.
First, as recorded in House’s diary, Wilson stopped consulting him on issues. Before, they used to spend hours comparing notes before and after important meetings. Now the time scheduled for their private meetings together was shortened and the number of meetings reduced.
Next, Wilson abandoned the habit of keeping House in the loop on important matters as he had done so carefully in the past. This had an impact not only on their relationship, but also on the conference. As Wilson resettled into the rhythm of meetings of the “Big Four” countries, he refused to even invite House to join him in the most important gatherings between the principals. The other leaders brought their advisers with them, but Wilson chose to go alone. He even insisted that the minutes of any meeting he attended not be circulated to House.
House struggled to understand why the president suddenly refused to speak to him. His critics believe the change in Wilson’s behavior when he returned from Washington was not only a result of Edith’s influence, but also a response to House’s own actions.29 At the conference, House had been appreciably less deferential than usual toward Wilson at precisely the time when—surrounded by so many world leaders—the president’s ego required more stroking than ever. In the relative calm and familiar surroundings of Washington, it had been natural for House to continually kowtow to the president, but in Paris, with the stakes so high and under intense pressure, he may have found it difficult to keep up the facade. During one noteworthy incident, French prime minister Clemenceau walked into a room where House and Wilson were talking. He announced that he had come to discuss an important matter with House (not with the president). The two men excused themselves to go to an adjacent room, where they spoke privately—leaving Wilson waiting in the other room alone. Given Wilson’s ego, he undoubtedly was offended. What information could Clemenceau be sharing with House that could not also be shared with the president of the United States?
Wilson also may have been annoyed to find on his return to Paris that House’s name was appearing in the European newspapers almost as frequently as his own. The House that Wilson thought he knew preferred to lurk in the shadows, away from the attention of the press. Edith Wilson, who attended the conference with the president, collected copies of European newspaper articles about the proceedings and, one day, confronted House with them, asking why his name came up again and again. In response, House gathered up the articles and left the room, refusing to discuss the matter. Edith later learned from the president’s physician, Dr. Grayson, that House and
his son had been feeding the newspapers stories that made House look good at the president’s expense.
For the first time in their relationship, Wilson saw House as a competitor. The president had never before had to share credit with House for the work they did together. House understood Wilson’s personality well enough to know the president did not like to share credit and had built an entire method of approaching Wilson to prevent such a misunderstanding. He made a point of never directly challenging the president; never pushing his ideas on him; and, whenever Wilson made a decision, acceding to the president’s judgment regardless of his own views on the matter. But, when it came to the supremely important peace accords, House had at times taken a different tack.
One major area of contention that grew between them was House’s recommendation that the US Senate be involved in the peace negotiations. Wilson had fervently opposed this idea, because he did not want to share the credit. Ordinarily House would have stopped there, but he recognized that sign-off from key senators was critical to winning eventual congressional support for the treaty. He pressured Wilson to organize a dinner with important senators during his brief trip back to the US. Wilson reluctantly agreed, but at the dinner the senators realized that Wilson cared little for whether they personally supported the agreement or not. They left the meeting resentful and determined to kill the agreement. Embarrassed at his failure to win their support, Wilson never forgot that it had been House who suggested the meeting. Wilson always bristled at doing things to which he was opposed, and now that the colonel had been a source of that kind of frustration, Wilson’s attitude toward him began to change.
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