Woodrow Wilson to Mary Allen Hulbert Peck

I hope that your silence does not mean that you have not been well or that you have not been in good spirits and did not wish to distress your friend by disclosing your depression to him. Please never hesitate on that ground. What is a friend for if not to receive confidences of that kind and help raise the siege? You know what happens when you write to me in the midst of depression. If you do not, I do. After a page or two the very consciousness that I understand and sympathize begins to soften the pain and release the spirits, and out there gleams, in the most delightful way, if only for a sentence or two at a time, the gayety and playfulness so characteristic of you when you speak with freedom and intimacy and know that you can let yourself go. And, look, if you please, madam, at the other side of the picture also. How is a man to get through days of unbroken anxiety and continuous responsibility of the heaviest kind if he does not have constant evidence that his loyal and loving friends are thinking about him, — thinking such thoughts as ought to make any man strong and confident and happy? What is to keep his spirits from sinking and the blue devils from getting him? Is he to be left helpless and defenceless from them? The President of the United States is not, at any rate in this year of grace, made of steel or whip cord or leather. He is more utterly dependent on his friends, on their sympathy and belief in him, than any man he has ever known or read about. Do you not see that there are great and infinitely difficult questions to be unravelled and settled! Does he not have to determine what is to done in Mexico, how that murderous Castro is to choked off and kept in cold storage, how California is to be restrained from embarrassing us with most of the nations of the world, how the currency is to be reformed and the nations of the world kept at peace with the United States? And how, do you suppose, he is going to do all these things, or any important part of them, if his friends do not stand close about him, do not keep in touch with him, do not constantly whisper in his ear the things that will cheer him and keep him in confidence and steadiness of heart? Will you not kindly join in the enterprise of governing the country we love? He cannot do it alone. Both his head and his heart need strengthening, — his heart even more than his head. He has many counsellors, but few loving friends. The fire of life burns in him only as his heart is kept warm. This is not a lecture: it is just an appeal!Do not believe what you read in the newspapers According to them everything is in a pretty coil and tangle here; but, as a matter of fact, there is no tangle that cannot easily be unravelled, if I am not mistaken. One has constantly to be on the job, it would appear. It is not safe to withdraw one’s attention even for an hour. No one but the President seems to be expected, or to expect himself, to look out for the general interests of the country. Everybody else is special counsel for some locality or some special group of persons or industries. Everybody, but he, is to look out for something in particular. He alone has the acknowledged duty of studying the pattern of affairs as a whole and of living all the while in his thoughts with the people of the whole country. It is a lonely business. He needs company. Where is he to find it in Washington? His friends are his constituents in that difficult and responsible matter. I am very well. I was born in the tropics, — begging dear Virginia’s pardon, and have been bred in them, — begging the pardon of her sister States to the south of her; so that the heat (which I must admit to be intense) does not get under my skin. I was never in a tropical cyclone (it was hardly less!) until the other day; but I even sat through that and talked currency with a doubting member of the committee of the House that has charge of the bill without turning a hair. So that you see I am tough and physically fit for the job. I play ten or eleven holes of golf almost every day, heat or no heat, and on as hilly and sporty a course as one could wish, for beauty or fun, and twice every week I go to the theatre, clad in white and looking, I would fain believe, as cool and care free as I often am on those occasions. Fortunately I have a special gift for relaxation and for being amused. But even then it is lonely, very lonely. And it is then that I have time to miss my friends and consciously wish for them. What fun it would be if I could summon them about me on some Aladin’s carpet, when public business relaxes its hold upon me for a brief space now and again. I would indeed be happy and ready and fit for anything!