Later Years
In 1921, Edith Wilson retired with the former president to their home on S Street NW in Washington, D.C., nursing him until his death three years later. She later served as director of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Her memoir appeared in 1939.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt went to Congress on December 8, 1941, he took pains to draw a symbolic link with the April 1917 declaration of war. To do so, he was accompanied by Mrs. Wilson.
In 1961, she attended the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.
She died of congestive heart failure at the age of 89, on December 28, 1961, on what would have been Woodrow Wilson's 105th birthday. On the day of her death, she was to have been the guest of honor at the dedication ceremony for the Woodrow Wilson Bridge across the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia. She was buried next to the president at the Washington Cathedral.
Mrs. Wilson left her home to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to be made into a museum honoring her husband. The Woodrow Wilson House opened as a museum in 1964.
Read more about this topic: Edith Bolling Galt Wilson
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Courage, then, for the end draws near! A few more years of persistent, faithful work and the women of the United States will be recognized as the legal equals of men.”
—Mary A. Livermore (1821–1905)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)