Side by side, he and she walked the beaches and country lanes of Bermuda. They discussed literature and politics; Hulbert was well read and well spoken, unsparing in her opinions, and Wilson appreciated strong, intelligent women. He counseled her on her marriage, advising her to seek a separation. He shared with her his professional frustrations, and she offered her advice. For the next eight years, through much of his presidency, the two would exchange letters nearly weekly.
All of this was known. Wilson never denied their correspondence or the depth of their friendship. When he was president, his letters to Hulbert arrived on White House stationery. Her servants saw them. Rumors were inevitable, but they were steadfastly denied. In a fact frequently cited by early Wilson historians as proof of the innocence of the relationship, Wilson himself had introduced Mary to Ellen Wilson. The two women were friends. They had shopped together.
Hulbert was descended on more than once by men with agendas, politicians wishing to prove a romance. She always denied it.
The story of the alleged hotel room bribe appeared in a 1925 series of memoirs Hulbert wrote for Liberty magazine, a year after Wilson’s death. When it was published, there was a one-day furor in Congress.
Representative Frank Reid, an Illinois Democrat, introduced a resolution demanding an investigation. If Hulbert was right, he said, there had been a heinous effort to smear an innocent man and subvert the Constitution for political gain. On January 4, 1925, this story was reported on page 1 of the Washington Post.
Congress at the time was heavily Republican. No one was about to investigate ten-year-old allegations of an attempted bribe engineered by the GOP. House records show the resolution was referred to committee, where it unceremoniously died.
As did Mary Hulbert, in 1939. The story of her alleged love affair, more or less, died with her. The Wilson Papers brought it back.
“Dearest friend” is how the married Woodrow Wilson addresses his most ardent letters to Hulbert. “With infinite tenderness” is how he signs them. He was smitten.
In one sequence of letters, Wilson is in Bermuda and Hulbert is not. He tells her he misses her, and says, “God was very good to me to send me such a friend, so perfectly satisfying and delightful, so delectable.”
She responds: “Does the bougainvillea fling itself over the cottage as of old? Why, why can I not be there—to fling myself where I would!”
Once, Wilson writes her that he cannot walk the streets of the island without thinking of her. “Why have you taken such complete possession of Bermuda?” He was lonely without her, he said: “You really must come down to relieve me.”
And then there is this, perhaps as close to a smoking gun as these elliptical and circumspect letters get. Among the letters of February 1, 1908, was a petition that Wilson had drafted and Mark Twain had signed, protesting a plan to bring automobiles to Bermuda. On the back was a scribble. Arthur Link recognized it as professional shorthand. Link knew Wilson better than any scholar alive. He knew Wilson knew shorthand. Link hunted up an expert.
The scribble was apparently the beginning of a draft of a letter. This is what it said: “My precious one, my beloved Mary…” Years later, Wilson would use “my precious one” as a salutation to another woman—Edith Bolling Galt, with whom he was in love, and would soon marry.
The most intriguing correspondence of all is a series of letters from September 1915 between Wilson and Galt. At the time, the two were secretly engaged, and they were planning to announce it to the public. Wilson’s advisers were horrified. They thought it was too soon after Ellen Wilson’s death from kidney disease in 1914.
So William G. McAdoo, Wilson’s adviser and son-in-law, concocted a plan. He told the president he had heard that Mary Hulbert, incensed at rumors of the impending marriage, feeling jealous and misused, was showing his letters around. This was a wild stab in the dark, and a lie. Mary Hulbert was not, indeed, “that kind of a woman.” But McAdoo hoped the threat alone would make Wilson reconsider his marriage plans.
Wilson, however, was no coward. When presented with a problem, he faced it down.
In the files is a letter from Wilson to Galt, dated September 18. It was dashed off hurriedly. It lacks Wilson’s customary flourishes of both prose and penmanship. The letter cancels the couple’s dinner at the White House that day, and begs Galt to accept a visit from him at her home to discuss “something personal about myself that I feel I must tell you about at once.”
They spoke privately that night. No one alive knows what was said.
But in a subsequent letter, Galt tells Wilson that she was deeply troubled by his revelation but forgives him and trusts in his love. What follows is an embarrassing hemorrhage of correspondence from Wilson to Galt—wretched, writhing, abject letters declaring himself undeserving of her sweet and merciful forgiveness.
In one of these, dated September 21, he says of his confession: “I knew that it would give a tragically false impression of what I really have been and am, because it might make the contemptible error and madness of a few months seem a stain upon a whole life.” In another letter, he cited “a folly long ago loathed and repented of,” leaving him “stained and unworthy.”
Clearly, Wilson had confessed something profound that day in September 1915. What was it? What was the “madness of a few months”?
Is it possible that Wilson was so stiff and proper, so straitlaced, that he might have been confessing no greater sin than lust in his heart—an unconsummated love affair that moved him to write intemperate letters? “It’s entirely possible,” says Hirst, the historian.
Is it possible that Wilson actually confessed to a torrid physical affair? “It’s entirely possible,” says Hirst.
The papers also reveal that Ellen Wilson herself knew of or deeply suspected a betrayal. Shortly before she died, she told White House physician Cary Grayson that Wilson’s relationship with Mary Hulbert had been the only episode in their marriage in which Wilson had caused her pain. What she meant by that was never explained. (Whatever his relationship with Hulbert, Wilson deeply loved his wife, and was devastated by her death. At the time, he confided to an aide that he hoped to be assassinated.)
About Wilson and Hulbert, in short, there is ample room for suspicion. The rest is surmise and conjecture. “You can draw your own conclusions as to whether they were just dancing around the bougainvillea or not,” Hirst laughs.
Actually, he suspects that’s all it was: an infatuation that never resulted in a physical union. The late political historian August Heckscher looked at the same documents and reached a different conclusion. In his excellent 1991 biography of Wilson, he flatly declares it a love affair, and speculates that the “madness of a few months” took place between November 1909 and February 1910, when Hulbert was living in a New York apartment with her mother. Shortly before and during this period, Wilson’s letters betray maximum ardor. And Wilson is known to have visited New York several times around then. Sometimes Ellen was with him. Sometimes she was not.
This is a fascinating time in Wilson’s life, coinciding with a period of almost reckless political experimentation. During this time he would abandon his lifelong caution, initiating a series of moves that would lead to his resignation from Princeton. It was a major gamble: Wilson lost stature as an academic administrator but gained a national reputation as a fighter for intellectual freedom and an enemy of the monied elite. It launched a political career that would lead him first to the governorship of New Jersey and soon thereafter to one of the great presidencies in American history.
Is it possible that a romantic liaison had emboldened him? Consider this: In his June 1908 baccalaureate address, Wilson dourly told the young Princeton men: “I am not sure that it is of the first importance that you should be happy. Many an unhappy man has been of deep service to the world and to himself.”
A year later, speaking before the next graduating class at a time when his letters indicate a growing passion for the company of Hulbert, Wilson chang
ed his tone. He told the graduates that there are things one does for duty and things one does for joy “with the free spirit of the adventurer.” These, he said, “are the inviting by-paths of life into which you go for discovery, to get off the dusty road of mere duty into cool meadows and shadowed glades where the scene is changed and the air seems full of the tonic of freedom.”
Hulbert’s correspondence at the time makes it clear that Wilson sought her opinion on his switch from academia to politics, and that she offered unambiguous advice: Go for it.
Did she also provide him a more explosive boost to his self-confidence?
PERHAPS IT IS appropriate that the final words on this matter belong to Mary Hulbert herself.
After 1915, she stopped writing to Wilson, and he to her. Her fortunes had taken a downturn because of bad investments and the illness of her son. She remained indebted to the president; he purchased the mortgage on some of her real estate, and once lent her $600.
In her 1925 Liberty magazine articles, written “to silence whispering tongues,” Hulbert is protective of Wilson’s legacy and reticent about their relationship. She pronounces Wilson one of the giants of American history. Defiantly, she decries any efforts to sully his name: “Woodrow Wilson is dead; he will not be impeached in the court wherein God presides.”
Yet this was not quite her final word. Years later, Hulbert would write of Wilson once again. In 1933, she authored The Story of Mrs. Peck, a book that was billed as a tell-all account. It did not make much of an impact. Americans scarcely remembered the story of Mrs. Peck, and those who did no longer much cared. It was 1933; the country had bigger things to worry about.
Even some Wilson historians don’t know of, or fail to recall, this book. Frank Aucella, curator of the Woodrow Wilson House in Washington, hadn’t heard of it.
There are perhaps a half-dozen copies of The Story of Mrs. Peck in existence. The Library of Congress has one. The pages are the color of buttermilk. They smell sturdy with age.
Perhaps, at last, we will get the lowdown on the sex.
Here, on p. 143, Woodrow Wilson makes his appearance.
He is called “Mr. Wilson.”
He remains “Mr. Wilson” throughout the book.
Here he is, boyishly taking shorthand notes on his cuffs.
Here Mary gently rebukes him for leaving his teaspoon in the teacup. And another time for absentmindedly wearing his muffler in the house.
He cannot dance.
He has an excellent tenor.
He has sensitive digestion.
He doesn’t much like dogs.
All his suits are made of the same gray cloth.
He is partial to chicken and rice, with corn and spinach.
Of romance, there is nothing. Mary does not deny it. She does not admit it. She simply does not address the question at all.
And that’s all she wrote.
As the most tawdry presidential sex scandal in history unfolds in Congress, we are left to contemplate the lessons of the scandal that never was, the impeachment that never happened.
The fact is, we will never know the precise nature of the relationship between Woodrow Wilson and Mary Hulbert. Our curiosity will never be satiated.
In a sense, of course, it does not matter. A man and a woman loved and respected each other. They did not permit whatever passion they shared to destroy a marriage. What happened, happened. They took it to their graves.
Whatever degree of intimacy they enjoyed, the details shall remain—as one might argue these matters should remain—completely, eternally, gloriously private.
My Father’s Vision,
Part II
At my father’s funeral, I’d planned to tell the story of his final words. At the last moment I lost my nerve, because I knew I’d break down. Instead, I held it for nearly three years, until the perfect day.
May 24, 2009
NO ONE ACCEPTED physical deterioration with greater grace and humor than my father. Over the last two decades of his life, his eyesight clouded into a soup—at first, a nice consommé, but eventually minestrone, and a hearty one.
He was effectively blind but remarkably cheerful about it. He read the Washington Post front to back every day, all day, on a device that magnified each letter to the size of a fist; polysyllabic words required three screens’ worth of letters and a nimble short-term memory. My father understood the absurdity of it. He said that using this machine to read was like putting on mittens to tie your shoes.
At his assisted-living facility, my father dined with the same man every day for years. They became good friends, sharing observations and the genteel sort of intimacies consistent with two gentlemen who addressed each other as “Mr. Williams” and “Mr. Weingarten.”
One day my father told me that Mr. Williams had died. He was sad, but smiling. “I read his obituary in the paper today, and I learned something about him I never knew. Everyone else here knew it absolutely, but I didn’t.” He wanted me to guess.
“He was rich?”
“Nope!”
“He was famous?”
“Nope!”
“I give up, Pop.”
“He was black!”
A widower for ten years, at eighty-five my father found a girlfriend. Jeanette was another resident at his complex; her age and the thermostat setting in her apartment were both in the mid-90s. I liked her, but could hardly bear to spend five minutes in her place. My father never seemed to mind at all.
Then one day, after a visit to Jeanette, he laughed and said, “It’s like the woman lives on the surface of Mercury.”
My father remained mentally sharp until two years before his death, when he fell under the thrall of a particularly insidious form of dementia.
His gaps in cognition were unpredictable; the fog came and went. Analytical as always, my father liked me to test his mind from time to time with questions for which he ought to know the answers. Sometimes, he was perfect, sometimes less so. Nothing was worse than the day I asked him the first name of my mother’s only sister. He couldn’t remember it.
We both knew I had to ask one more question. It was followed by a long, painful silence.
“Oboyoboy,” was all he said. No, he could not remember my mother’s first name, either.
The look on his face was as hopeless as I’d ever seen. Scouring the room for anything to change the subject, my eyes fell on the sports section. “Hey,” I blurted, “the Yankees have picked up Al Leiter!”
My father brightened. “Oh, he’s really good! Lefty, used to be with the Mets!”
He started laughing even before I did.
For the final few months of his life, as he sank into rambling incoherence, my father needed round-the-clock nursing. My visits became a little less frequent. My father was gone, and the babbling person in that bed did not know who I was, or even that I was there.
Not everything that happens in a writer’s life is appropriate to publish, and you would not be reading this column except for one fact. When I came to visit my father one day in the summer of 2006, a few weeks before his death, the nurse had unexpected news: “He said something.”
She meant he had said something that made sense. One sentence had fought its way through the swirling, toxic churn and came out intact.
My father was an uncomplicated man; in a way, that was his genius. He taught me that there are only a few things that are important in life, and that those things are the only things that matter at all. I never really got a chance to thank him for that.
My father’s last coherent words were: “My granddaughter is going to be an animal doctor.”
She graduates from veterinary school today, Pop.
The Fiddler in
the Subway
As I came up the Metro escalator one morning on the way to work, I heard music. At the top of the stairs was a man of middle age in a grimy trench coat, playing Beethoven skillfully on an electric keyboard.
Beside him was an open instrument case that hel
d two singles and some change. People were scurrying past him as though he was some sort of annoyance. When I dropped in a buck, his look of gratitude was heartbreaking.
As I walked to my office, I thought: I bet if Yo-Yo Ma himself had been out there with his cello, dressed in rags, no one would have paid him any mind.
As soon as I got to my desk, I called Ma’s agent. He was intrigued by the idea of carrying out a special stunt. We traded e-mails for a few months, but it never worked out.
The notion stayed with me, though. And when, a few years later, a colleague mentioned this young, talented, mischievous fellow named Joshua Bell…
April 8, 2007
HE EMERGED FROM the Metro at the L’Enfant Plaza station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.
It was 7:51 A.M. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next forty-three minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.
Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What is the moral mathematics of the moment?
The Fiddler in the Subway Page 32