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A new Mrs. Wilson









Seeking redemption









And then, disaster









Shadow presidency





The good old days?





Once upon a time, the United States of America had a woman president.It's true. You won't find her name on the presidents' list. She never won a single election, and she never collected a president's paycheck.In fact, she never even claimed to be president. Instead, she worked overtime to give the impression someone else was on the job.After all, what would happen if people found out a woman was president, when women couldn't even vote? Certainly there'd have been a storm. People would have been ridden out of Washington on a rail.So it was of necessity a secret presidency, the most secretive in history, an elaborate ruse on the American people and a helpless press corps.This is in vivid contrast to the noise that will erupt if, in two years, Hillary Rodham Clinton is preparing to move Bill back into the White House. If that happens, everyone will be shouting about how historic it will be. And they'll be right. A woman elected president - that would be a big deal.But Hillary Clinton would hardly be the first woman to run the show. For that, she is about nine decades behind the times.The fascinating old story surfaces for two reasons.First, there's Clinton, poised to make the strongest run any woman has ever made for the Oval Office.Second, this month marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the first woman president's husband. His name was Woodrow Wilson.Of course, it was Mr. Wilson, not Mrs., who actually was elected to the job. It happened twice, in 1912 and again in 1916.Between those dates, a couple of important things happened.In the summer of 1914, Europe plunged into a vast, suicidal war, the biggest war of all human history up to that point. It was a war that Woodrow Wilson and most of his countrymen earnestly sought to avoid. And for quite awhile, they did.Then, Wilson's first wife, Ellen, died in the White House on Aug. 6, 1914. On that very day, Serbia declared war on Germany and Austria declared war on Russia. But to Wilson that must have been about as important as tidings from the far side of Mars. His wife was dead, his three daughters motherless, and it was that, not Europe's self-immolation, that seemed like the end of his world.The lonely president rattled around the White House for months thereafter, but a new light came into his life in March 1915. Her name was Edith Bolling Galt, then 42, the tall and stately widow of a Washington, D.C., jeweler.Wilson was a world-renowned scholar, whereas Mrs. Galt had but limited education. Yet Wilson was smitten. She came often to the White House or dinner or for spins around town in the presidential car. Within two months, he proposed marriage. She declined.All through the stifling summer Wilson endured the agony of watching Europe destroy itself and the agony of uncertain love. In the end, love prevailed. Wilson and Mrs. Galt wed at her house on Dec. 18, 1915, and the president was happy again.Eleven months later, running on the slogan "He kept us out of war," Wilson won a squeaker of an election over Republican Charles E. Hughes. But war could not be avoided. On April 6, 1917, he appeared before Congress to seek a formal declaration of hostilities against Germany, and Congress agreed, and the president's tears mingled with the raindrops of cherry blossom time.The ghastly slaughter in Europe ended with so many millions of casualties the true toll can only be guessed at. Nine million men in uniform on all sides were dead, and that is to say nothing of those wounded and taken captive. It is to say nothing of the civilians who perished, also by the millions. It is to say nothing of the great flu epidemic that sprang from the misery of the battlefields and army camps and felled scores of millions around the world.Of all the major combatants, the United States suffered least. The numbers vary according to source, but by Armistice Day in November 1918, at least 116,000 American soldiers were dead of wounds or disease.It was inconceivable to Woodrow Wilson that such horror could occur without humanity finding in the rubble some greater good than the mere triumph of one set of armies over another. Not only must the world be made safe for democracy, it must be made safe for peace.He sailed to Europe that fall - the USS Arizona was among his naval escorts, and Edith was at his side - with nothing less than that in mind. There, he was greeted by adoring throngs wherever he went, by banners that said, "Hail the crusader for humanity," and, "Welcome to the god of peace."Here in Paris, day after exhausting day, Wilson assumed the task of crafting the treaty to formally end the Great War and to establish a new, pacific world order. The work stretched on for months, and in early April 1919, he fell deathly ill with what his doctor called the flu.He hovered for three days, woke up and went back to work. But the illness had changed him. His aides saw a new secretiveness, dark suspicions that bordered on paranoia, a fiercer brand of stubbornness.Back in America by early summer, he presented his masterwork to the U.S. Senate for ratification, pleading that his country join the League of Nations, the world body wherein nations could argue out their differences without resorting to mass exsanguination.But the Senate balked. Wilson, very much an old man by now and still weakened from his springtime illness, decided to take his case to the people. A train tour was arranged, nearly 10,000 miles through all but four of the states in the Union (Arizona was among those left out). At every stop he pleaded for the treaty and the League, and he was convinced the unassailable rightness of his cause would impel the people to force their senators into compliance.But Wilson was a sick man, fighting through blinding headaches and utter exhaustion. On Oct. 2, he suffered a stroke as the train, returning from the West Coast, approached Wichita, Kan. His left side was paralyzed. The rest of the trip was canceled, and the president was hustled back to the White House as his staff issued vague medical bulletins designed to conceal the gravity of his condition.The Constitution, as it was constituted back then, specified that in case a president became unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, "the same shall devolve upon the vice president."But before adoption of the 25th Amendment in 1967,the Constitution was silent as to how such a transfer of power would occur. And Wilson's vice president was one Thomas R. Marshall, an affable Indiana politician of modest ability who was comfortable enough presiding over the Senate, making money on the lecture tour and delivering wisecracks such as, "What this country needs is a really good 5-cent cigar."Marshall was terrified of becoming president, and he didn't want to establish a bad precedent by appearing eager to shove Wilson aside. Even had that not been the case, Edith was not about to see her beloved Woodrow relinquish his position as the most important man in the world.So she took over.While Woodrow languished in his White House bedroom, while his doctor and aides stonewalled the press and the Cabinet and even the vice president about his illness, while the nation lurched from one postwar crisis to another, Edith steadfastly refused to consider letting anyone else act in the president's name.Still, enough leaked out to stir suspicions. Albert B. Fall, a New Mexico senator whose name later became synonymous with scandal, thundered one day during a committee meeting: "We have petticoat government! Mrs. Wilson is president!"It was true, though she saw to only the most important letters and documents that made their way to the presidential sanctum. In childish handwriting, she would scrawl across the top and in the margins her instructions on a particular matter, beginning with "The President says" or "The President wants," and then returning the document to whichever official had to then make sense of her instructions.In the words of historian Gene Smith, "There was no one in the world to say what the president from his sickroom in the southwest portion of the second floor didsay or didwant."Eventually, Edith began receiving Cabinet members in her sitting room adjacent to her husband's quarters, not permitting them access but giving them instructions in her husband's name. She even presumed to make two de facto Cabinet appointments to replace secretaries who had departed.As 1919 melted into 1920, the president regained enough strength to present a semblance of functionality. There was even talk of him accepting the Democratic nomination to seek a third term in that year's election, but the delegates in San Francisco got a grip on themselves and turned instead to James Cox of Ohio. It mattered little because the Republicans were swept into office that fall on the coattails of Warren G. Harding.And in the meantime, the thing for which Wilson had sacrificed his health and peace of mind had died: On March 19, 1920, the Senate spurned his cherished League of Nations. He died less than four years later. His widow lived long enough to participate in John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.It is popular to see the past through rose-hued glasses, to think we would be so much better off if we could return there.But here is one case where that was hardly so.A crisis of one man's health exposed a serious crack in the Constitution, a crack wide enough that one strong-willed, unelected individual could take it upon herself for months on end to determine what the government of the United States would or would not do on any given day.It exposed the folly, continued until recent times, of selecting vice presidents for reasons other than their intellect or their ability to take office should the presidential heartbeat be stilled.It proved that a vigorous and cantankerous and contrarian press is essential to the people knowing what is done in their name and who is doing it. Criticize the modern media all you want, and often rightly so.But it is inconceivable now that, under the prying gaze of CNN and the blogosphere and of the nation's assertive newspapers, a first lady would be able for five minutes to do what Edith Wilson did for almost half a presidential term.That, it can be argued, is a major step in the direction of better governance.Thus, the next time - if there is a next time - America has a woman president, it will be because that's what they asked for.