Presidential historian details White House weddings

Presidential historian, Doug Wead examines the bonds between presidential fathers and their offspring. Wead, the former special assistant to President George H.W. Bush, analyzes the stresses associated with being the son or daughter of one of the most powerful men in the world. An excerpt from Chapter 10 of "All the Presidents' Children," titled, "White House Weddings."

Twenty-one presidential children were married while their fathers served as the nation’s chief executive. Jenna Bush will be number twenty-two. Nine were actually married in White House ceremonies.

Many presidential children had spectacular weddings outside the White House.  After the death of her father, when Fanny Hayes was married in Ohio, the sitting president William McKinley was in attendance, as well his Cabinet. The wedding of Luci Baines Johnson was a national social event, even though it took place at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. And the small, private wedding of Julie Nixon, shortly after her own father had won the presidency, to Dwight David Eisenhower II, himself the grandson and namesake of a president, prompted widespread public interest and curiosity.

Finding the right husband or wife is not an easy task for a presidential child. Quite a few of the earlier presidential children from Maria Hester Monroe to Betsy Harrison married their own first cousins. It was a practice common to remote regions of the American frontier where cousins may have been the only choice. But it was also common among European royals. It is hard to trust newcomers into the power orbit. What are their motives? Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. was reportedly “suspicious about girls who showed interest in him.” Cousins were already inside the presidential family circle, and this may partly explain the phenomenon. In today’s United States there is approximately one marriage in a hundred between first cousins. 

Other sons and daughters of presidents have fallen in love with White House or congressional staffers and, in more recent times, military aides or secret service agents assigned to protect them.  Eleanor “Nellie” Wilson married Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, thus overnight becoming a Cabinet officer’s wife in her father’s own administration. Two presidential daughters fell in love on ocean cruises while their father served in office.  Both had spectacular weddings and both husbands turned out to be womanizers. Dorothy Bush, who is both a daughter and sister of a president, married a congressional aide of the opposing political party. When it comes to finding love, the children of presidents, as in the case of the rest of us, can only look nearby.

My favorite White House wedding was the perfect storm. One of the nations most popular presidents married off one of the most famous presidential daughters. In America it was a time of peace and prosperity and it has been called by history, “America’s wedding.”

Alice Lee Roosevelt and "America's wedding"
In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt was making a determined effort to end the Russo-Japanese War. He not only valued peace on the Pacific Rim, but also sought an ongoing, special relationship with the Japanese that would guarantee the security of America’s new territorial acquisition, the Philippines. If he could help negotiate the end of the war, he would have it. As in all important diplomatic efforts, its success depended greatly on discretion. He chose his closest ally and Secretary of War William Howard Taft for the mission to Tokyo. And he cloaked the mission in secrecy by announcing an important fact-finding mission to the Philippines. Tokyo would be only one of several national capitals that would be quickly visited on the side. The Philippines, America’s newly-won territory, was the focus.  And to offer one more diversionary factor, he decided to send along his famous daughter, Alice.  It would turn out to be a stroke of genius. 

During the first years of the Roosevelt Administration presidential daughter, Alice, mesmerized the American people. Conservative matrons were shocked by her public smoking, fast cars (which she herself drove), and open flirtations with the opposite sex, often in public, sans chaperone. And yet she was so popular that most preachers dared not rebuke her from their pulpits. Conventions and politicians clamored to have her in attendance. She was toasted at the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the Chicago Horse Show and the St. Louis World’s Fair. The head usher of the White House later wrote that she had a party every night of her stay in the executive mansion. A French journalist predicted that if she kept up the pace, she would collapse.

The president’s gambit worked. Alice Roosevelt was the number one story on the Taft diplomatic junket to the Far East. Alice stole the show so completely that even history has been fooled.  Even if the true purpose of the mission had leaked it is doubtful that it would have moved the president’s daughter off the front pages. She jumped fully clothed into the ship’s swimming pool, talked Hawaiian hula dancers into doing their real, more erotic, version of the dance, and smoked quaint pipes of Japanese tobacco. When she became bored at Philippine banquets she furtively created paths of food, luring the insidious ants to the leg of the banquet table which was soon swarming with the invaders.  Her encounter with the Empress Dowager of China was as frightening and colorful as a scene out of an Indiana Jones movie. Apparently growing jealous of her own interpreter’s ability to talk freely to her famous guest and perhaps sensing in Alice another strong woman, the Empress ordered her interpreter to prostrate himself on the pain of death and to keep his forehead touching the ground throughout the audience. Alice was duly impressed and amused.

Before the trip was over, Alice Roosevelt had successfully exported her brand to the world. So pressing were the crowds and so elaborate the growing entourage trailing her that falling behind Alice could mean getting shut out of the party altogether. Mrs. Taft, wife of the Secretary of War and a future First Lady had to talk her way back into a hotel by saying her husband was traveling with Miss Roosevelt! It had long ceased being a diplomatic mission led by an American cabinet member. It was now the Alice Lee Roosevelt road show. A touring German prince gave her a bracelet, a South Pacific native king proposed that she join his harem and everywhere she went she was feted and presented with beautiful gifts. Teasing relatives and friends back home referred to her as “Alice in plunderland.”

There was another reason the president wanted his daughter onboard the ship to the Philippines. He wanted to give her a “breathing spell,” a chance to get away from the young men besieging the White House. It was an idea reminiscent of President and Mrs. Grant who thirty years before had sent daughter Nellie to Europe lest she fall for one of her Washington suitors and marry too young. And it would have the same result.

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