Partner to Power

by K. Ward Cummings

  House of course knew that Wilson did not like being pushed, but he also recognized that the peace treaty would never win congressional support without the help of key senators. He thought it would be a huge strategic mistake not to include Congress and changed his regular behavior toward Wilson to make this point.

  House had reason to be concerned about the health of the treaty. Wilson’s many strategic miscalculations during the conference were seriously harming its chances for success. Almost from the start, Wilson carelessly neutralized his most important piece of leverage by making it known that the only thing he really cared about was the creation of a League of Nations. The European powers supported this notion, but knowing Wilson’s commitment to it gave them an important advantage over him. They concealed their support for the League and instead used it as leverage to achieve their own objectives.

  Another critical negotiation mistake was difficult for Wilson to avoid. One of his greatest strengths had always been his skill as an orator. Most audiences were moved by the biblical imagery and strong moral authority of his ideas. Yet his European counterparts could not relate and were often left unmoved. They would pass notes among themselves during his speeches ridiculing Wilson for his earnestness. He discovered too late that his unyielding moral pronouncements were difficult to walk back from. They left no room for compromise and limited his ability to maneuver.

  Perhaps Wilson’s greatest mistake was his decision, after he returned from Washington, to work alone. By refusing House’s help, he cut himself off from an important intelligence resource and a perspective that could have expanded his options and improved his decision-making. Not consulting another set of eyes on the proceedings impaired his ability to see the chessboard in its entirety. And as a result, he could not see all the opportunities that lay within his grasp.

  House must have suspected from the start that Wilson was too uncompromising to be a good negotiator. And he was not surprised in the end, when Wilson produced a final treaty that might have been much better had he been willing to follow House’s advice and include the Senate in the negotiations. Some historians have suggested that Wilson’s characteristic unwillingness to compromise was a part of his Calvinist ethos, which required that he be measured not just by his actions, but also by his words: because he invested his positions with moral attributes, to compromise them would be tantamount to compromising his faith. Wilson may have viewed the conference as very much like a battle between the forces of good and evil.30 He did not realize it, but this was precisely the reason he needed someone like House, who had a more pragmatic perspective.

  It is not clear whether there was a single incident that ended the relationship between Wilson and House. Their story is largely one-sided, since House went to great lengths to control the historical narrative about their work together. This is also the reason that details about their rift are so murky. Some historians think the disagreement was largely Edith Wilson’s doing:31 she slowly chipped away at her husband’s confidence in House in order to push him out. Another theory is that they simply grew apart as Wilson came to rely more on his wife for advice. He turned to his First Lady for help with all sorts of matters—personal and official. He even regularly shared state secrets with her.

  Some historians think the break between Wilson and House was a long and drawn-out process.32 Others think it was abrupt. In one popular version of the narrative, Wilson returned to Paris from his brief trip to Washington to find that House had negotiated away all the important gains they had made before he left for the US. When Wilson got settled in Paris again, House was invited to the president’s rooms to discuss the latest developments. They met alone. After a long and heated conversation, House left abruptly, and the president was visibly angry. If this is in fact how events played out, whatever was said during that private meeting closed the door on their relationship forever.

  No matter how they parted ways, one thing is clear: after the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson and House, two men who had been the closest of friends, never spoke again.33

  IV

  House: Partner to Power

  It is not unusual for quasi-governmental officials like Colonel House to serve in positions of power in the White House. When Harry Hopkins embarked on his hazardous trip to London in 1941 to make first contact with Churchill on President Roosevelt’s behalf (see the introduction), he did so after having resigned from government service for health reasons. However, there have been nagging concerns over such figures, as the recent controversy over President Donald Trump’s children working as White House advisers shows. Yet if past is prologue, it appears that men and women like Colonel House and Ivanka Trump are here for the foreseeable future. One of the reasons House has been such a frequent subject of study, especially in recent years, is that his story helps expose the secret lives and activities of these shadow figures. For some historians, House has come to represent what is most troubling about these individuals—lack of accountability.

  Many Americans in Wilson’s day did not know that, while working on some of the most vital affairs of the administration and speaking on the president’s behalf, House was not actually an official government employee. Even at the height of his power, few were aware of his personal beliefs or his qualifications for the duties he regularly performed for Wilson.

  Though he was not a member of the cabinet, at various times, and often at the president’s direction, House performed special duties that fell within the portfolios of actual cabinet officers—Secretary of State Robert Lansing, for one. Despite his power and the consequential decisions he made on Wilson’s behalf, House had not been confirmed by the US Senate, and, as an outsider, he was not subjected to the same scrutiny as actual government employees enjoying the same level of influence. It was as if House functioned under a cloak of secret presidential immunity that granted him all the authorities of an “assistant president for foreign affairs” without any of the customary oversight. As the saying goes, all help is good help until something goes wrong.

  A cabinet member acting on the president’s behalf with malicious intent could at least be impeached for misconduct. Of course, if House had broken the law, he could have been prosecuted, but he could also have easily been pardoned. Impeachment of a cabinet official, by contrast, is reversible only with great difficulty and the involvement of the Congress and the judicial system.

  Colonel House and the Trump children will not be the last such figures to walk the corridors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The criticisms faced by the Trump family underscore the reasons why understanding the role and actions of these figures should be a priority for the president and the American people alike.

  The relationship between Wilson and House shows why it takes a special kind of individual to be a right-hand man or woman. Such a person has to be willing to subsume his goals and desires, and even his personality, in ways that most people would find unacceptable. For some advisers, like Alexander Hamilton, displays of devotion on this scale can be a grating experience. For others, like Colonel House, such sacrifices are a bargain that they are only too happy to enter into. But even among those who accept this arrangement willingly, there are some who take their service to the extreme. Louis Howe was one such figure.

  Howe sacrificed his financial security, his health, and even a relationship with his family to serve Franklin Roosevelt. When Roosevelt contracted polio, it changed Howe’s life forever.

  FIGHTING BACK

  Eleanor Roosevelt counted Louis Howe (seated to the right of FDR) among the seven most important people in her life. When Howe died in 1936, President Roosevelt organized a state funeral for him in the East Room of the White House. Before Howe, such honors were reserved only for presidents and members of his family. (Franklin Roosevelt Library, US National Archives and Records Administration)

  It was Louis Howe, more than anyone else, who forced father to fight back.1

  —James Roosevelt, son of President Franklin Roosevelt

  Heaven
help you if you were poor or unemployed in 1930s America. Remember those flickering black-and-white celluloid images of desperate, shrunken men weaving sheepishly in and out of the shadows as they waited anxiously for a free bowl of soup? The official unemployment rate in the US at the time was around 25 percent, but the unofficial rate—that which captured those who had simply given up any hope of finding work—was perhaps twice that. If the ’20s was the decade of excess and unbounded optimism in America, the ’30s was the decade of despair.

  This all began to change when Franklin Roosevelt was elected president. One of his first acts was to establish the Civil Conservation Corps (CCC), a government program designed to put young men to work restoring an American landscape stripped bare and bled white by a decade of self-delusion and mindless consumption. The CCC rekindled the enthusiasm of America’s young men and channeled their newfound energy into infrastructure and environmental projects across the nation. They built bridges, put out fires and carved out of the American wilderness scores of national parks and trails. Overnight, men went from sleeping rough and picking through rubbish bins to waking up in warm beds to the smell of freshly baked bread and coffee.

  Historians are fond of saying that this or that president might never have obtained the office had it not been for the unique contribution of this or that person. They cite Alexander Hamilton’s help in manipulating the vote tallies in George Washington’s first election and mention Clark Clifford’s drafting of the plan that led to Truman’s improbable 1948 victory. For Franklin Roosevelt, Louis Howe was such a person. After Roosevelt was stricken with polio, everyone, including Roosevelt himself, thought he would never again be a viable candidate for the presidency. Howe never gave up hope, and he continued working diligently behind the scenes to ensure Roosevelt’s success.

  Roosevelt thought, as so many others did, that without the use of his legs, no one would take him seriously as a candidate. Today, FDR is remembered as a supremely optimistic man, but he had never experienced anything as emotionally debilitating as polio. It almost broke him. During the early months of his illness, the man whose pyrotechnic smile would lead a nation through the Great Depression was so consumed by his own hopelessness that he had to move away from his family in order to manage his recovery. Howe, perhaps more than any other person, helped convince Roosevelt that his dreams need not be quashed by polio.

  In the pantheon of America’s greatest presidents, Washington is credited with founding the nation, Lincoln is praised for preserving it, and FDR is revered for coming to its rescue when destructive forces assailed it from within and without. In some ways, Louis Howe was as responsible for that legacy as FDR himself. Without Howe’s contribution, Americans may very well have had a President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he would not have been the larger-than-life FDR we remember today. That FDR was largely the creation of Louis Howe.

  I

  The Feather Duster and the Gnome

  For years Louis Howe feared that his wife, Grace, had a lover. He did not know for sure, but there were rumors. Howe’s work as a struggling upstate New York newspaper man often kept him on the road. To save money, which was always scarce in the Howe household, Grace insisted on taking their daughter on long visits to the home of her wealthy mother hundreds of miles away in Massachusetts. Howe’s inability to provide a stable financial environment for his family was a constant source of embarrassment for him. He always suspected that Grace was deeply disappointed2 in her choice of a husband.

  By the time he reached the age of forty, Louis Howe had convinced himself that his life was a failure. It is not difficult to understand his disappointment. No matter how hard he worked, he could never seem to dig himself out of the financial and professional holes he repeatedly found himself in. He was at a point where even the things that once gave him solace pulled him deeper into despair. As he entered middle age, all the grand expectations he had set for himself had come to naught. Grace found ever more numerous reasons to take their daughter to visit her family in Fall River, and Howe could hardly blame her. The life she lived with Howe was not what she had imagined for herself.

  When Grace first met Louis Howe, he was a financially secure and dynamic young man—someone who was going places. He was running the family newspaper, and his father was postmaster general of the city of Saratoga. They lived in a large home on a fashionable street and enjoyed the respect of the community. Grace was well-off too. Though she was a woman of means, she knew she would need to make a good match in life and thought she had found one in Howe. He had a great foundation on which they could build—he had intelligence, drive, ambition and talent. She thought it was only a matter of time before he came into his own. As they walked down the aisle together, all signs pointed to a happy and secure future. But Grace soon discovered she had married an unlucky man.

  Born in Indianapolis in 1871, Louis Howe was a sickly child and the last delivery of an aging mother. Lide, as she was called, was almost forty years old, a widow and the mother of two daughters of marriage age when she met and married Louis’s father, Edward, a dashing Civil War veteran. He was young (almost ten years Lide’s junior), strong and ambitious. Lide came from a solidly middle-class family, and she hoped her enterprising, energetic new husband would help raise her standing still higher.

  Louis was a thin, pale, weak infant. As a boy, he was plagued by asthma and bronchitis, and he developed a heart condition that would persist for the rest of his life. By his teenage years, it was clear he had inherited his father’s frenetic and industrious nature. Time would tell whether he had also inherited his bad luck.

  Louis’s father, Edward, lived a life plagued by professional and financial disappointments. First, he lost the family’s money—not just his own and Lide’s, but also thousands of dollars he borrowed from the insurance company where he worked and the church he attended—to speculation. Embarrassed and ruined, he picked up the family and moved in with Lide’s half-sister in Saratoga.

  After five years of small jobs, Edward was finally able to scrape together enough money to buy a local newspaper, which he fashioned into the community mouthpiece of the Democratic Party. As their finances improved, he and Lide could once again hold up their heads in public. The paper struggled at first, but Edward made a success of it. He threw himself into local politics, and when the Democrats won the White House, he was appointed postmaster general of Saratoga. His ample salary enabled the family to move into a larger home on the best side of town. When Louis turned seventeen, his father turned over to him responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the paper while he attended to his postmaster duties. It was during this brief oasis of financial security that Louis met Grace. She was impressed by his optimism and energy and allowed herself to be swept up.

  But Howe’s luck was about to take a turn, and the descent would be rapid. Within a year of Howe’s marriage, his paper failed. He was able to mortgage the small home he and Grace had received as a wedding gift from Grace’s mother, but they soon lost the paper to creditors. Edward and Lide also lost their home and had to move in with Louis and Grace. The pressure of so many people living under the same roof put a strain on Louis’s marriage. Much of that first year, Grace spent away from Louis in Fall River. After their first child, Mary, was born, whenever Grace needed a break and a taste of the luxury she had left behind, she would retreat to Fall River. Taken all together, Grace would spend years of her life away from Louis while he struggled alone in Saratoga or Albany, trying to cobble together enough work to support the family.

  He took writing jobs wherever he could find them—first, at the paper that he and his family had lost to creditors; then, when they fired him, at the paper of a competitor. He wrote for New York City papers, did some freelance writing, tried his hand at writing short stories, even worked as a secretary for an association. Howe did anything and everything he thought might put food on the table. Despite his best efforts, he remained on a downward spiral. He would hold a job for a while and then get
fired—find another, and get fired from that one. Grace could not bear to see him grovel for work. “I married you for better, for worse,”3 she once wrote him, hoping the words would be consoling.

  During their long separations, he would sit up nights worrying about his marriage and wondering what Grace was doing with her time. He had heard about someone named “Willie” who had been seen visiting her in Fall River. When he raised Willie’s name to Grace, they fought. He apologized in a letter4 that reveals at once his deep love for his wife and his blinding insecurities about not being able to provide for her.

  Despite the hardship, Howe never gave up. He had a mind for political strategy, and people were willing to pay for his advice. Howe attached himself to a wealthy patron named Tom Osborn, who was a devoted supporter of the Democratic Party and who needed someone to help him come up with ways to outflank Republican efforts in upstate New York. He was a mercurial employer, firing Howe repeatedly only to rehire him days later. In 1911, the year Howe turned forty, he and Grace welcomed into the world their second child, a boy. As he rolled his son around the neighborhood in his stroller, passersby might have mistaken the prematurely aged and shrunken Howe for the boy’s grandfather.

  Five foot two, rail-thin from chain-smoking and perpetually covered in cigarette ashes, Howe looked like a character from a Tolkien novel. He had long, bony fingers that dangled from his wrinkled hands, a nose that was too big for his face, great bushy eyebrows and dark, sunken pools for eyes. His leathery skin hung from his face in sheets and folds, and a few brave strands of dark hair held on for dear life to his balding, oversized head. The old-style high collars he favored must have helped fortify his short, skinny neck, and he dressed like a mortician. You might have smelled him before you saw him, as he walked around enveloped in a warm plume of body odor and sweet-smelling cigarettes. To his family, Howe was gentle, vulnerable and loving. To others, he was profane, impatient and uncompromising. No one was spared his temper, not even Franklin Roosevelt.