President Wilson’s warm friendship with Mrs. Mary Hulbert (the former Mrs. Peck), shared by his first wife Ellen, eventually produced numerous stories, all of them false, about his efforts to suppress supposedly incriminating letters he had written her. One was that Louis Brandeis received his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court as a reward for stealing or buying the letters and destroying them. Other stories named other associates of Wilson as involved in the enterprise.
One day, Cleveland H. Dodge called on Colonel Edward M. House and said: “I’ve just learned that I paid Mrs. Peck one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for her letters.”
”When were you informed that?” asked House.
”This morning,” replied Dodge.
”I beat you,” laughed House. “I learned the day before yesterday that I paid her one hundred and fifty thousand dollars!”
Source:
Boller, Paul F. "The Wilson Wives." Presidential Wives: An Anecdotal History. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 234. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Harry M. Daugherty, The Inside Story of the Harding Tragedy (New York, 1932), 237.
Further Reading:
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