Life and times of Alice Roosevelt Longworth

By James Prichard, Associated Press Writer - 10/28/2007

This photo released by Viking Books shows the jacket cover for “Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House princess to Washington Power Broker’’ by Stacy A. Cordery, about the life and times of Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

‘‘Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker’’ (Viking, 608 pages, $32.95), by Stacy A. Cordery: On Valentine’s Day in 1884, two days after the birth of his first child, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his beloved mother, to typhoid, and his beautiful wife, to an undiagnosed kidney ailment.

The grief-stricken New York assemblyman named the baby girl Alice after her mother and then left her to be raised by his older sister for three years, until he remarried.

Under her aunt’s care, Stacy A. Cordery writes, ‘‘Alice experienced warmth, love, and undivided attention for the only time in her life. For the rest of her days, Alice sought, unsuccessfully, to duplicate that unconditional love.’’

Cordery, a history professor at Monmouth College who earlier wrote a biography about Teddy Roosevelt, was given access to thousands of newly discovered letters and diaries to assemble her biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Indeed, the materials seemed to be referenced a few too many times in some places — such as the period leading up to Alice’s wedding to Ohio Congressman Nicholas Longworth — and occasionally bog down an otherwise fascinating book.

Alice was 17 when President William McKinley was assassinated and her father, the vice president, moved into the White House. Almost immediately, the attractive, intelligent and spirited young woman became a world-famous celebrity followed constantly by hordes of newspaper reporters. Her father took advantage of his daughter’s popularity, sending her on goodwill trips that took her around the world.

Following a much publicized courtship, she wed Longworth in 1906, five days after her 22nd birthday. There were early signs that the marriage would be anything but typical. When Teddy Roosevelt, who was a Republican while president, ran again for the White House in 1912 as a third-party candidate, Longworth supported the GOP’s incumbent candidate, President William Taft, a fellow Cincinnatian, instead of his father-in-law.

As Cordery writes, ‘‘Alice loved her husband, but she idolized her father,’’ and it was this political betrayal, rather than Nick’s dalliances with other women, that drove them apart. Although they remained married until his death from pneumonia in 1931, she became more independent of him and pursued her own happiness. Alice’s only child, daughter Paulina, was fathered by her lover, William Borah, a powerful U.S. senator from Idaho, Cordery writes.

For nearly 80 years, Alice was the doyen of Washington’s social scene, but the conservative Republican and isolationist also helped to shape American politics. She resisted Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations and criticized the New Deal program of her Democratic distant cousin, President Franklin Roosevelt. She boosted Richard Nixon’s career but crossed party lines in 1964 and voted for Democrat Lyndon Johnson, a kindred spirit, for president.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth died in 1980 at age 96 following a brief bout with pneumonia. By that time, she had long been known as ‘‘the other Washington monument.’’