Edith Roosevelt's Marriage Was Much CRUELER What We Thought

America remembers the Roosevelts as its great love story — the calm wife who managed the loudest president in history, six children, a house full of noise. Theodore said she came nearer his ideal than he did himself. He also wrote, before marrying her, that second marriages proved weakness in a man's character, and that nobody could reproach him half as bitterly as he reproached himself. They married in a London church with no Roosevelt present. Of that entire secret engagement year, Edith kept one letter and burned the rest. She burned a great deal more later on. That was deliberate. So start with the wedding, because the wedding tells you almost everything.