EDITH AND WOODROW: A PRESIDENTIAL ROMANCE
Less than a year after President Woodrow Wilson’s first wife had died, he met Edith Bolling Galt, widowed, lovely, adventurous, independent in spite of a genteel Southern upbringing, and the proprietress of Washington’s best jewelry store. She instantly captivated the president, and with an instinctive grasp of politics became his trusted advisor. Following a brief, impassioned courtship — documented in a series of letters revealed to the public for the first time in this book – they married, Wilson braving public censure and private intrigue to do so.
This book is the story of the love that sustained a president through domestic turmoil, world war, triumph and tragedy, and that brought Edith Wilson so close to wielding power, when the president fell ill, that she became known as America’s first female president, a title she was at pains to deny.
“Shachtman’s analysis of the Wilson-Galt relationship is handled intelligently and unpretentiously. He does not canonize or romanticize his subjects — he draws them as they were, faulty lines and all. He knows his history and writes about it in colorful, compact prose.” Hartford Courant
“Shachtman’s handling of EDITH AND WOODROW is both elegant and revealing. Not least among the book’s virtues is its relative brevity and its succinct interweaving of just enough — but not too much — of the monumental political events of the Wilson era.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“The best personal history of Wilson.” Dr. Arthur A. Link, director of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Princeton University.
Buy the Book |