On February 17, 1906, more than a thousand guests packed the East Room of the White House to watch the most famous young woman in America cut her wedding cake with a borrowed sword. The bride was twenty-one years old, dressed in cream white satin with an eighteen-foot train, and the photograph of that moment circled the planet. Her father had just walked her down the aisle. He had never once spoken her name.
Not in twenty-two years. The house at 6 West 57th Street in New York City stood quietly on February 12, 1884, when a young Boston heiress named Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt gave birth to a daughter. Her husband was Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-five, a rising star in the New York State Assembly, a man so full of motion that friends said he seemed to be everywhere at once. The first telegram reached him in Albany.
A girl. Mother and child doing well. He passed out cigars. Then a second telegram came, and Theodore Roosevelt ran for the train.
His wife was dying of Bright’s disease, a failure of the kidneys that no doctor of that era could treat and none had even diagnosed. The pregnancy had hidden it. And one floor below her, in the same house, his mother Mittie was dying of typhoid fever. He reached the house near midnight and went from bedroom to bedroom, holding one dying woman and then the other.
His mother died first, in the small hours of February 14, Valentine’s Day. Eleven hours later, in the afternoon, his wife died in his arms. She was twenty-two years old. Her daughter was two days old.
That night, Theodore Roosevelt opened his diary, drew a single large X across the page, and wrote one sentence: The light has gone out of my life. He buried both women in one funeral, handed the newborn to his sister Anna, whom everyone called Bamie, and fled west to the Dakota Territory to punish his grief with cattle and dust and winter. And he erased his wife. He almost never spoke her name again.
He forbade it in his presence. When he wrote his autobiography decades later, a book that found room for every horse he ever rode, the woman he had married did not appear in it at all. There was a problem with the erasure. The problem had his wife’s exact name.
The baby had been christened Alice Lee Roosevelt. Her father could not call her that. So she became baby Lee, and then sister, and the name on her birth certificate went unspoken in her own home. Before she could talk, Alice Roosevelt learned that her existence was a wound, that her name was a door her father kept locked, and that love, once given, could be revoked so completely that even a word became unbearable.
For her first three years, she lived with her aunt Bamie, a brilliant, warm, formidable woman with a curved spine and a mind that politicians sought out for advice. Alice adored her all her life. She said later that if Auntie Bye had been a man, she would have been president, and Alice meant it as plain analysis. Then, in December 1886, Theodore remarried.
His new wife was a childhood friend named Edith Kermit Carow, a disciplined, private, sharp-eyed woman. The new household reclaimed the little girl, and the warmth ended. Edith bore five children of her own—Ted, Kermit, Ethel, Archie, and Quentin—and Alice grew up the odd one in the nursery, the child of the unmentionable first wife. Once, in anger, Edith told her stepdaughter that if her mother had lived, she would have bored Theodore to death.
The girl absorbed the lesson of that sentence and never forgot it. Even the dead could be demoted. When Alice was a teenager and her father was governor of New York, he and Edith proposed sending her to a conservative girls’ school in Manhattan to be polished into a proper young lady. Alice answered with a letter that deserves to be read aloud more than a century later.
If you send me, I will humiliate you. I will do something that will shame you. I tell you I will. They backed down.
A fifteen-year-old girl had stared down the most forceful man in American public life by threatening scandal, and it had worked. She filed that result away. On September 6, 1901, an anarchist shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Eight days later, McKinley was dead, and Theodore Roosevelt, at forty-two, became the youngest president in the nation’s history.
His daughter greeted the news, by her own later admission, with sheer rapture. Other family members wept at the weight of it. Alice did the arithmetic. The girl with the unspeakable name was moving into the most visible house on earth.
By 1901, cheap newspapers, photographs, and wire services had built a machine that could make a private person famous in a week, and the machine was hungry. Into it walked a tall, blue-eyed, completely unafraid seventeen-year-old, and the machine fell in love. Her formal debut came in the East Room in January 1902. She wore a gown of pale gray-blue, and within months that exact shade was hanging in shop windows across America under a new name: Alice Blue.
Songs were written about her. Babies were named for her. The papers crowned her Princess Alice, and the title stuck because it was true in everything but law. Then she went to work earning it.
She smoked cigarettes in public at a time when respectable women simply did not. When her father banned smoking under his roof, she climbed out onto the White House roof and smoked on top of it. She kept a pet garter snake she named Emily Spinach—Emily for a spinster aunt, spinach for the color—and produced it at parties to watch dignified people flinch. She rode unchaperoned in automobiles with men.
She placed bets with a bookmaker at the Benning racetrack. She interrupted her father’s meetings to offer political advice until the exasperated president told his friend, the writer Owen Wister, I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice. But I cannot possibly do both. Measure the scale of the spectacle, because the numbers survive.
A Paris newspaper, the Journal des Débats, counted her social calendar and reported that in fifteen months, Alice Roosevelt attended 407 dinners, 350 balls, and 300 parties. She was eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old. The arithmetic comes out to nearly one dinner per evening for over a year. One journalist wrote that she had probably shocked more sensibilities in her time than any other young woman who ever crossed the screen of public life.
The coverage got so feverish that a false story spread of her stripping to her lingerie and dancing on a table at a Newport party. It never happened. It did not matter. The public saw an untouchable princess drunk on her own freedom.
The private truth was a girl who had discovered that outrage was the one currency her father always paid attention to. He had given his name, his time, and his tenderness to a new wife and five new children. He had locked her dead mother out of the family vocabulary. But let his eldest daughter light a cigarette on his roof, and suddenly the most powerful man in the world was talking about her.
Misbehavior was not rebellion against his attention. It was a bid for it. In the summer of 1905, the deployment came. The president needed a friendly face on a delicate diplomatic mission across the Pacific, and he chose the one member of his family the cameras could not resist.
On paper, it was Secretary of War William Howard Taft’s diplomatic tour of Japan, Hawaii, China, the Philippines, and Korea—the largest American delegation ever sent abroad to that point, with twenty-three congressmen, seven senators, diplomats, officials, and businessmen. In practice, the papers covered it as the Alice show. Crowds in Tokyo and Manila turned out for her, not for the senators. Midway across the Pacific, she jumped into the ship’s canvas swimming pool fully clothed, then coaxed a congressman, William Bourke Cockran, to jump in after her.
The wire stories, wanting romance, claimed the man in the pool was Nicholas Longworth. Sixty years later, Robert Kennedy teased her that the stunt must have been outrageous for its time, and the octogenarian Alice corrected him. It would only have been outrageous, she said, if she had taken her clothes off. But the romance the newspapers invented was in fact happening elsewhere on the ship.
Nicholas Longworth III was fourteen years older than Alice, heir to one of Cincinnati’s great fortunes, a Harvard man, a genuinely gifted violinist, and a congressman whose ambitions ran toward the speaker’s chair. He was also, and all of political Washington knew it, a drinker and a chronic pursuer of women. He was witty, worldly, and entirely at ease in the only world Alice had ever known. By the end of the cruise, there was an understanding.
In December 1905, the engagement was announced, and the country lost its mind. The wedding took place on February 17, 1906, in the East Room of the White House, and it was less a family ceremony than a state production. More than a thousand guests filled the room. Thousands more stood outside the gates hoping to see the bride for a second.
When the cake proved equal to the moment and the knife did not, she borrowed a sword from a military aide and cut it with that. Foreign governments sent tribute as if to an actual princess. The government of Cuba sent a string of pearls valued at $25,000 at a time when an American workman earned perhaps $500 a year. The honeymoon that followed included dinner with King Edward VII of England, dinner with Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and a meeting with the French statesman Georges Clemenceau.
A congressman’s bride does not dine with two emperors. Princess Alice did. There is a detail from that day that biographers would dwell on for a century. The new first lady of the Longworth household reportedly heard from her own stepmother in the hour of departure words to the effect that she was glad to see her go.
Whatever the exact phrasing, no one in the family pretended the parting was sad. The system of political womanhood had processed its most rebellious daughter exactly on schedule: debut at seventeen, celebrity at twenty, strategic marriage at twenty-two. The public saw none of what was coming. The public saw the couple photographed on the Capitol steps, the princess and her congressman, the dynasty extending itself.
Alice, for her part, had not married for love and did not pretend otherwise in later life. Nicholas Longworth was charming at dinner and absent after it. The drinking that Washington had politely cataloged for years did not pause for matrimony, and neither did the women. The bargain, unspoken but understood, was that he would rise and she would shine, and neither would look too closely at the other’s evenings.
The collision came in 1912. Theodore Roosevelt, convinced that Taft had betrayed his legacy, challenged him for the Republican nomination, lost the convention amid cries of theft, and bolted to form the Progressive Party, the Bull Moose ticket. For Nicholas Longworth, the choice was professional life or death. His district was Taft’s home turf.
He stayed Republican, stayed loyal to Taft, and asked his wife to stand quietly beside him. She did not even pretend to consider it. Alice went to war for the Bull Moose, publicly, loudly, and in the one place that could hurt Nick most: his own district. When Hiram Johnson, her father’s Bull Moose running mate, swung his campaign through Cincinnati, through Ohio’s first district, the district Nicholas Longworth represented, Alice Roosevelt Longworth appeared on the platform with him.
The congressman’s wife campaigning in the congressman’s district for the party trying to destroy the congressman’s ticket. In November, Woodrow Wilson won the White House. Taft carried two states. Theodore Roosevelt outpolled the sitting president, the only third-party candidate ever to do so.
In Ohio’s first district, Nicholas Longworth lost his seat to a Democrat by 101 votes out of tens of thousands cast. Alice did the arithmetic for the amusement of her friends. She reckoned she had been worth at least 100 votes, she said—meaning, of course, 100 votes against her own husband. The marriage never recovered.
Divorce was discussed in the way such things were discussed in that world, obliquely and with horror. Her father reportedly opposed it flatly. Understand what divorce meant in 1912 for a political family. It was not a private sorrow.
It was a public unmaking, social death for the woman, ammunition for every enemy, scandal that attached to fathers and brothers and tickets. So the Longworths did what the rules required. They stayed married, kept separate emotional addresses, and converted the partnership into pure politics. Nick won his seat back in 1914 and held it for the rest of his life.
The war years brought grief. America entered the World War in 1917, and all four of her brothers went. In July 1918, her youngest brother Quentin, twenty years old, the family’s darling, was shot down and killed flying over France. Their father, aged a decade in a season, the old lion’s heart failing, died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill on January 6, 1919, at sixty.
The Vice President of the United States said that death had to take him sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight. Alice was thirty-four. The man whose attention she had spent her whole life trying to win was gone. She did not retreat.
She picked a fight worthy of the dead. Her father had despised Woodrow Wilson, and Wilson now proposed to crown his presidency with the League of Nations, a grand international body to prevent future wars, enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles. Alice had already been banned from the Wilson White House in 1916 for telling a bawdy joke at the president’s expense. Now she went after his treaty with everything she had.
It must be said clearly, because it is the hinge of her whole story. Alice Roosevelt Longworth could not vote when the fight began. The Nineteenth Amendment had not yet been ratified. She held no office and could hold none.
And she became, anyway, one of the most effective political operators in the capital, because she had built, dinner by dinner, the one institution Washington could not function without: a neutral ground with excellent food where powerful men said true things out loud. The men who shared her cause called themselves the Irreconcilables—the senators who would not accept the League on any terms—and the press called them the Battalion of Death. Alice sat in the Senate gallery day after day, visible to every man on the floor, keeping score. At night, the Irreconcilables gathered where everyone in this story always gathers, at her table.
Among them was a thunderous, leonine senator from Idaho, a self-made orator named William Borah, the finest public speaker of his generation, a man so identified with his state and his stubbornness that the papers called him the Lion of Idaho. The treaty fight ended in victory for the Irreconcilables. The Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles. The United States never joined the League of Nations.
It made Alice Longworth a genuine political force at last—not a princess, but a power. And it placed her evening after evening in close alliance with the Lion of Idaho. A newspaper profile from the era judged her one of the powerful influences affecting national affairs and described her in the capital galleries daily while Congress sat, hat off, watching the floor. There is a bitter footnote to the victory, and it belongs to her alone.
In August 1920, while the treaty fight was still echoing, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, and American women finally won the vote. Alice Roosevelt Longworth cast her first ballot at thirty-six years old. She had already helped sink the signature foreign policy of a sitting president before the Constitution considered her qualified to mark a ballot. The law spent decades catching up to what she had already done.
In 1920, Warren Harding of Ohio, a Longworth family friend, won the presidency in a landslide, and the capital became overnight a Republican company town in which Alice held stock everywhere. Prohibition was the law of the land. Upstairs at Harding’s White House, by Alice’s firsthand account, the air was heavy with tobacco smoke, the trays carried bottles of every imaginable brand of whiskey, and the President of the United States dealt cards to his cronies while the country he governed was forbidden a glass of beer. Her final verdict on Harding became one of the most quoted sentences in American political history.
Harding was not a bad man, she said. He was just a slob. When Harding died and silent Calvin Coolidge succeeded him, Washington’s favorite description of the new president—that he looked as though he had been weaned on a pickle—ran through the city by way of Alice, who repeated it with such delight that history handed her the copyright. Through these same years, the alliance with William Borah was quietly becoming something else.
He was married. She was married. He was a sitting senator, soon to be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one of the most powerful men in the country. She was the wife of the man about to become speaker of the house.
A political wife caught in adultery faced annihilation. Exposure meant exile, the cutting of every invitation, the conversion of her name into a cautionary tale told to debutantes. Alice Longworth read the price list carefully, understood every line of it, and proceeded anyway. By the middle of the 1920s, the affair between the speaker’s wife and the Lion of Idaho was the open secret of political Washington.
On February 14, 1925—Valentine’s Day, forty-one years to the day after her mother and grandmother died eleven hours apart in the house on Fifty-seventh Street—Alice Roosevelt Longworth, after nineteen years of childless marriage, became a mother. She named the baby Paulina. Washington counted on its fingers and smiled behind its hands. Alice, with a nerve that still astonishes, joined the joke herself.
She told intimates she had considered naming the child Deborah. A family friend recalled that everybody called the baby Aurora Borah Alice. She handed Washington the punchline herself because she had learned at seventeen that you cannot be exposed if you refuse to hide. For fifty years, that was where the matter rested, in the territory of rumor, deniable and unproven.
Then Alice died, and her diaries were opened to historians, and the rumor became record. Paulina Longworth was the daughter of William Borah. Here the story produces the man it has been unfair to, and owes a debt of honesty. Nicholas Longworth knew.
Everyone knew. And the playboy speaker, the drinker, the husband from the arranged fairy tale, looked at another man’s daughter and simply decided to be her father. By every surviving account, Nick was tender with Paulina in a way neither of her actual parents managed. He carried her around the capital.
He showed her off on the speaker’s dais. Borah, for his part, gave her nothing. The Lion of Idaho never acknowledged his only child—not privately, not in his papers, not once in his life. In 1925, Nicholas Longworth became Speaker of the House of Representatives, second in succession to the presidency, and by general agreement one of the most effective speakers of the century.
The Longworths moved into the tall, narrow, limestone-fronted house at 2009 Massachusetts Avenue, just off Dupont Circle—the address that would be Alice’s fortress for the next fifty-five years. Run the numbers on that household at its peak. The Speaker of the House at the head of the table, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the actual father of the baby upstairs among the guests, the Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, one of the three richest men in America, in the dining room. Poker games so serious that Alice, by her own claim, cleared $10,000 in winnings in a single winter, at a time when the average American family earned perhaps $1,500 a year—and she had first paid off all of Nick’s gambling debts before banking her own.
And in the nursery above it all, a shy baby with a famous name and a forbidden face grew toward girlhood in the most dangerous classroom in America. Paulina stuttered. The historians do not say when it began, only that it never left her. Alice, who had survived her own childhood by growing armor, seems never to have grasped that her daughter had been born without any.
She corrected her. She displayed her. She compared her, sometimes aloud, to what a daughter of hers ought to be. Friends watched it and winced for fifty years.
In the autumn of 1929, the stock market collapsed, and the Republican Washington that sustained the whole pageant began to die. Within eighteen months, so did Nick. Nicholas Longworth died on April 9, 1931, of pneumonia at sixty-one. He did not die at home.
He died in Aiken, South Carolina, at the winter home of family friends, the Curtises, on a holiday his wife had not joined. The newspapers of 1931, which knew exactly how to handle such things, handled it: the speaker had died among friends. Then came the accounting, and the accounting was a shock. The New York Times had estimated the speaker’s fortune at $16 million, the great Longworth inheritance of Cincinnati real estate and old money legend.
When the estate was actually settled, after debts and taxes, Alice received just under $700,000—less than one-twentieth of the headline number, arriving at the exact bottom of the Great Depression, attached to a four-story house on Massachusetts Avenue, a staff, a six-year-old daughter, and a position in the world that cost a fortune to maintain. She was forty-seven years old. She had never earned a salary in her life, because the system had never permitted her one. What the system expected from a political widow in 1931 was genteel contraction: sell the house, reduce the staff, accept the kindness of relatives, fade gracefully into the wallpaper of the capital.
Alice looked at that arithmetic and did something that scandalized her class far more than any affair. She went to work. She accepted money from tobacco companies to appear in cigarette advertisements. The president’s daughter endorsing smokes in the magazines.
Society gasped. Alice cashed the checks. In 1933 she published her memoir, Crowded Hours, and it became a best-seller, praised in the press for its insouciant vitality. She took up a syndicated newspaper column.
Together, the endorsements, the book, and the column paid the estate taxes and kept the house. And the column put her, for the first time, in direct professional combat with the cousin she had been sharpening herself against for fifty years. Eleanor Roosevelt was eight months younger than Alice, the daughter of Theodore’s tragic brother, raised an orphan, awkward where Alice was dazzling, earnest where Alice was lethal. The two women had grown into perfect opposites, the reformer and the wit, and their rivalry was lifelong, documented, and mutual.
During the First World War, when Franklin carried on an affair with Eleanor’s own social secretary, Lucy Mercer, Alice had encouraged it, invited the couple to her dinners, given the romance cover. Asked why, she answered with one of the coldest sentences she ever produced: Franklin deserved a good time. He was married to Eleanor. Alice’s party trick, performed for decades in the drawing rooms of Washington, was a merciless imitation of Eleanor: the teeth, the earnestness, the wavering voice.
She was still performing it on national television in 1974, twelve years after Eleanor was dead. By 1940, with Franklin seeking an unprecedented third term, her opposition had curdled into something that history has not forgiven. She declared that she would rather vote for Hitler than vote for Franklin for a third term. It was meant as a Washington witticism.
Printed and repeated as Europe burned, it followed her forever—the one famous line that wounded its author more than its target. On January 19, 1940, William Borah died of a brain hemorrhage in Washington. The Lion of Idaho was given a state funeral and a thousand eulogies. He left behind a wife, a legend, and a fourteen-year-old daughter he had never once acknowledged, who now lost her real father without ever having been allowed to know she had him.
Washington never let Paulina forget what her mother was. She was shy where her mother was electric. She stuttered where her mother was the most quoted woman in America. At parties, people watched her with the particular cruelty of an audience waiting for a famous name to perform.
Her mother, who might have shielded her, instead corrected her in company. The girl knew, or came to know, the other thing too. Washington’s whispers do not spare children. The joke names—Aurora Bora Alice—traveled.
The face in her mirror answered questions she had never asked aloud. The man the whispers named had an office in the Senate, and never sent for her. Then, for a moment, the story turned kind. In 1944, Paulina met Alexander McCormick Sturm, a Yale-educated writer and artist from a prominent family—clever, confident, and crucially unafraid of her mother.
People who knew them said Alex stood up to Alice and stood in front of Paulina. They married on August 26, 1944. Paulina was nineteen. Two years later, on July 9, 1946, their daughter Joanna was born.
In 1949, Alex put up $50,000 to co-found a firearms company with a designer named William Ruger. Sturm, Ruger and Company would grow into one of the great American gunmakers. Alex never saw it. In November 1951, he contracted viral hepatitis, and on November 13, he died.
He was twenty-eight years old. Paulina was twenty-six, a widow with a five-year-old, and the one person who had ever made the world safe for her was gone. She sank into depression. She drank.
She leaned, as that decade taught its sad women to lean, on the sleeping pills the doctors kept providing. She also reached for meaning with both hands: converting to Roman Catholicism, throwing herself into charity work among Washington’s poor, giving gently and anonymously the kind of care she had rarely received. Those who knew her in those years describe a sweet, wounded woman trying against the gravity of her whole biography to build a small life that was actually hers. On January 27, 1957, Paulina Longworth Sturm was found unconscious in her Georgetown home.
Beside her was an empty pill bottle. She was rushed to Georgetown University Hospital and died within the hour. She was thirty-one years old. Her daughter Joanna was ten—the same age, give or take a season, at which every generation of this family seemed to lose somebody it could not afford to lose.
The record of what happened next must be handled exactly, because Alice handled it ferociously. The autopsy ruled the death accidental, an unintended overdose. The Washington Post reported it as suicide. Alice, seventy-two years old and burying her only child, went after the paper and obtained a retraction.
The official record says accident. The first report said otherwise and was withdrawn. Honesty requires leaving it there, in the gray, where the people who loved her had to leave it, too. At the funeral, among the pallbearers, walked the Vice President of the United States, Richard Nixon, a friend from Alice’s dinner table, carrying the coffin of a thirty-one-year-old woman whom official Washington had never once carried while she lived.
For fifty years, the system of political womanhood had tried to collect from Alice Roosevelt Longworth. It tried shame, and she laughed. It tried exile, and the town followed her home. It tried poverty, and she sold her own legend at a profit.
Every weapon bounced off the armor her terrible childhood had welded on. But the system never waives the bill. It transfers it. The charge for the affair, for the open secret, for the household built around an unspeakable truth, for the mothering of a woman who had never been mothered, was presented in full to the one member of the family born without armor.
Paulina paid all of it. A week after burying her daughter, Alice Longworth went to court to win the one role she had failed at completely. Shortly before Paulina’s death, there had been a conversation between mother and daughter about Joanna, about what should happen if anything ever happened. Whether it was premonition or coincidence, no one can say.
What is documented is this: Alice fought for legal custody of her ten-year-old granddaughter against the doubts of relatives and the raised eyebrows of a town that had watched Paulina for thirty years. And she won. Joanna Sturm moved into the tall house at 2009 Massachusetts Avenue, into a fourth-floor room her grandmother called an aerie. At seventy-three, the most famously failed mother in Washington was going to try again.
By every account that survives—every friend, every interviewer, every historian—the experiment worked. The woman who had corrected and displayed and belittled her daughter doted on her granddaughter. The house that had been an arena became, for its last and smallest resident, a refuge. Alice and Joanna read together, traveled together, argued happily about books and politics, and lived, in Alice’s own description, as free spirits.
A magazine profile in 1969 described the two of them as bound by twin cables of devotion and a healthy respect for each other’s tongue, and quoted a family friend saying Mrs. L had been a wonderful father and mother to Joanna. Mostly father. Every ounce of patience Alice found for Joanna was an ounce that had existed somewhere all along while Paulina stuttered through that dining room unprotected.
A ten-year-old who had lost her father at five and her mother at ten was caught, held, and raised to a steady adulthood by a woman who never let her fall again. Old age now began collecting from Alice the only currency she had ever really owed, her body, and she paid with theatrical contempt. In 1955, she broke a hip. In 1956, the year before Paulina died, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy.
In 1970, the cancer returned in the other breast, and at eighty-six she underwent a second mastectomy. Most women of her generation would not say the word cancer aloud. Alice came home from the hospital and announced to Washington that she was now the only topless octogenarian in town. She remained through it all the capital’s most dangerous dinner guest.
The pillow on her settee said what six decades of guests had learned by heart: If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me. When a well-known and aging Washington senator was discovered keeping a mistress less than half his age, Alice’s verdict crossed the city by nightfall: You can’t make a soufflé rise twice. And Senator Joseph McCarthy, at the height of his power, when destroying reputations was his daily trade and half of official Washington was afraid to share an elevator with him, made the mistake of jovially announcing at a party that he was going to call her Alice. The reply has outlived everything else the evening contained: The truckman, the trashman, and the policeman on my block may call me Alice.
You may not. Somewhere in the 1950s and sixties, the wind reversed. The woman three White Houses had banned ended her life as the guest of honor in the fourth, fifth, and sixth. The Kennedys got there first, and the irony delighted everyone, including her.
The old Republican lioness, who had not even supported John Kennedy in 1960, fell for the family completely once they reached the White House, and they fell for her. She traded barbs with Robert Kennedy, who was bold enough to tease her about the 1905 swimming pool jump, and got the deathless answer about her clothes staying on. In 1964, the lifelong Republican quietly voted for Lyndon Johnson, explaining that Barry Goldwater was simply too mean. Johnson, receiving her at the White House, complained that her famous wide-brimmed hats made it impossible to kiss her.
That, Mr. President, she replied, is why I wear them. In 1968, she was supporting Robert Kennedy for president. Then came Los Angeles and the bullet, and another funeral for another man she had let inside the armor.
After that, she went home, politically, to the friend who had carried her daughter’s coffin. Richard Nixon had been a guest at Massachusetts Avenue since his vice presidency, in the lean exile years when most of Washington would not return his calls, and Alice conspicuously did. She told him his career was not over when nearly everyone else said it was. He never forgot it.
As president, Nixon invited her to his first formal White House dinner, to his daughter Tricia’s wedding in 1971, and threw her an eighty-seventh birthday party in the house she had grown up in. He called her the most interesting conversationalist of the age and said no one, however famous, could outshine her. The girl banned from the White House in 1909 was being feted in it by its occupant in 1971. The city around the fortress, meanwhile, turned upside down.
Dupont Circle, her neighborhood of ambassadors and top hats, filled with hippies and tear gas as the Vietnam protests rolled through the capital. When the gas drifted through the windows of 2009 Massachusetts Avenue, the eighty-year-old inside reported that it cleared her sinuses. She let poison ivy grow wild in her front yard because she found it funny. She let a local public school, the school without walls, hold literature classes in her house, teenagers reading novels under the mounted animal heads her father had shot in Africa.
In 1974, at ninety, she sat for a long interview with a journalist and cheerfully declared that she was a hedonist. She was still doing her wicked imitation of Eleanor, twelve years dead. Journalists and historians climbed the stairs in a steady procession in those final years, because there was nothing else like her on earth. She had personally known seventeen presidents, from Benjamin Harrison, in whose administration her father had served when she was a child, to Gerald Ford.
Her memory ran from gaslight to the moon landing, from the cavalry to the hydrogen bomb, all of it observed from inside the rooms where it was decided. Only one piece of the record stayed locked. Upstairs, in her papers, sat the diaries. And in the diaries sat the truth about a Valentine child, waiting for their owner to die before they would say her name.
She died eight days past ninety-six, in the same house on the same avenue, on February 20, 1980, from emphysema and pneumonia layered over the long accumulation of a very long life. She had lived in that house for fifty-five years, through eighteen presidencies, and had known seventeen presidents face to face. She had declined to meet the eighteenth, Jimmy Carter, reportedly finding him short on social graces. Carter answered her final snub with a graceful official statement anyway, praising a woman of style and wit who had kept generations of Washington newcomers wondering which fate was worse: to be skewered by her tongue or ignored by it.
She was buried beside her daughter at Rock Creek Cemetery, the last surviving child of Theodore Roosevelt, the longest-lived child of any American president. Then the diaries opened, and the truth she had buried walked out into the daylight. Her granddaughter Joanna, keeper of the papers, allowed historians in, and the open secret of 1925 became documented history. Paulina’s father was William Borah.
The wits of the twenties had been right all along, and the woman who handed them the Deborah joke had been telling the truth the only way she ever told it: as a dare. Today her house belongs to a legal foundation. Her husband’s name is carved over a House office building. Her shade of blue is still in the fashion books.
Her one-liners are still in the anthologies. And somewhere in nearly every account of twentieth-century Washington, she is standing at the edge of the photograph in a wide-brimmed hat, saying the thing no one else would say. Every line was armor. And armor is what they issue to people who have been wounded and expect to be wounded again.
She was a two-day-old girl whose mother died bringing her into the world and whose father buried her name. She was a seventeen-year-old who learned that scandal was the only language her family answered. She was a bride sold a fairy tale, a wife sealed inside a bargain, a lover who could not be acknowledged, a mother who did not know how, a widow who paid her debts by selling her own legend, and a grandmother who got it right exactly one generation too late. She stood on her avenue for ninety-six years, magnificent and unmovable, and only the diaries, opened after the funeral, finally told us what the monument was made of.
Grief first, then armor, then wit, which is armor that has learned to dance. And underneath it all, from the very first hour, a name that no one in the house was allowed to say. Say it now. Alice.
It cost nothing. It always cost nothing.
