The American Vice Presidency (45 page)

But Marshall’s standing in the White House was sometimes shaky. In the course of one general discussion with Wilson over party and political matters, his close adviser Colonel Edward House suddenly raised the question of whether Marshall should be dumped from the ticket in 1916 in favor of Newton Baker, the former mayor of Cleveland and Wilson’s secretary of war.

House reported later what Wilson said in a commentary on how the vice presidency was then perceived: “He felt that Baker was too good a man to be sacrificed. I disagreed with him. I did not think that any man was too
good to be considered for Vice President of the United States. I thought if the right man took it, a man who has his confidence as Baker has, a new office could be created out of it. He might become Vice President in fact as well as in name, and be a co-worker and co-helper of the President. He [Wilson] was interested in this argument but was unconvinced that Baker should be, as he termed it, sacrificed.”
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House recollected that his suggestion to Wilson reflected the thoughts of other party leaders, and he puzzled at the indifference of the intellectual Wilson to the notion. Wilson’s biographer John Milton Cooper Jr., of the University of Wisconsin, observed, “The idea of a vice president who might serve as a co-president should have appealed to Wilson. Having spent so much of life studying political systems and institutions, he was better equipped than anyone else to grasp the merits of this idea. Having an able and trusted vice president such as Baker at his side during his second term could have made a big difference in management and policy, particularly when it became a wartime presidency.”
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Apparently Wilson made no comment on a second term for Marshall at the time. As early as October 1915, however, with Marshall’s candor and witticisms drawing increasing comment and some criticism, Wilson had been reported as commenting, “It would be unlucky to run the same team twice.” Wilson denied having said it, but rumors continued, and one close Wilson friend, the former ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau, also began to boost Newton Baker. But Baker squelched the talk, saying he was not a candidate. Many years later he said he had been informed that Wilson really did want him as his 1916 running mate, but when the president himself said nothing to him about it, he figured it wasn’t so.
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Meanwhile, a group of professional politicians moved to squelch any anti-Marshall talk. When Governor H. R. Fielder of New Jersey asked Wilson for his view on the matter, the president quickly sent back a note saying it was not his place to state a preference but also that Marshall had been “loyal and generous to the extreme,” adding, “He has given me every reason to admire and trust him.”
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And when the Democratic senator Henry Ashurst of Arizona pointedly asked Wilson whether he wanted Marshall as his running mate again, the answer was: “I have a very high regard for Vice President Marshall and I wish you would tell him so.” Well, did he
support him for renomination? “Why, yes,” Wilson replied, and Marshall was routinely nominated by acclamation.
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In the fall campaign, Marshall continued speech making, focusing on the far western states, while Wilson only reluctantly got involved in the late stages. But only a few weeks before the 1916 election, Wilson and his closest political advisers now realized the election would be very close and that Hughes might edge him out.

The prospect led Colonel House to suggest a bizarre scheme whereby Wilson, before the results were in, would get his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, and Vice President Marshall to resign and then appoint Hughes to replace Lansing. Wilson himself presumably would then resign before the completion of his term in March. “The course I have in mind,” House wrote in his diary, published much later, “is dependent upon the consent and cooperation of the Vice President.”
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Under the presidential succession then in place, with the vice president resigned and then the president as well, Hughes would become president and thus avoid the awkward and perilous four-month interregnum that then existed between the election and the inauguration of the new president.

House approached Lansing and Wilson with the idea. Lansing was willing, but Wilson was noncommittal. Two days before the election, however, Wilson wrote a letter in shorthand, then typed it, and sealed it with wax in an envelope and had it hand-delivered to Lansing. In it, he advocated the idea, citing the wartime conditions and writing, “No such critical circumstances in regard to our foreign policy have ever before existed,” adding that he had “no right to risk the peace of the nation by remaining in office after I had lost my authority.”
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As for Marshall’s possible acquiescence in the plan, constitutionally he had been separately elected, and Wilson had no legal power simply to fire him, but it would have been hard for Marshall not to go along had Wilson pressed him.

Later some disputed whether Wilson had actually asked Marshall to step aside, although the vice president in a September 1916 campaign speech in Terre Haute did say, “If I believed the European war would last during the remainder of the present administration, and there was a likelihood of a calamity befalling President Wilson that would shift the burden of responsibilities to my shoulders, I would resign my office.”
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The observation drew a fierce condemnation from one of Marshall’s home-state newspapers, the
Fort Wayne Sentinel
, saying outsiders who didn’t know him would “wonder what sort of a wild and woolly fool he is … lacking in backbone, nerve and manhood.” The editorial concluded, “If he feels that way about his office he should never have accepted a renomination and … it is not yet too late for him to retire.”
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Much later, after Marshall’s ultimate retirement, he reportedly told a close friend, J. C. Sanders, that Wilson had indeed asked him to resign but that he had refused because he had been elected to serve a full four-year term, and he intended to serve it out.
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In any event, Wilson took no action on Colonel House’s idea, and the outcome of the election eradicated the cause for concern. In a night-long nail-biter, with Wilson going to bed believing he had lost the election, the Wilson-Marshall ticket narrowly prevailed over Hughes and Fairbanks when California went to the Democrats by fewer than four thousand votes, giving the Democrats 277 in the electoral college compared with 254 for the Republicans.

When Wilson took the country into the war in 1917, Marshall threw himself into making speeches to raise funds for Liberty Loan Bonds. But until then, he had adhered to the president’s neutrality proclamation while being outspoken about the drift to war. In 1915, he had said the United States had no right to tell any European country what kind of government it should have and that American businessmen should not make loans to England and France if true neutrality was to be observed.

When Wilson submitted war preparedness bills to Congress, Marshall guardedly told him the country would support “reasonable” steps and that the country “endorsed his efforts to maintain peace with honor.”
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After the United States became a combatant with the declaration of war on April 6, 1917, however, he apologized for his earlier mild position. He now questioned how “a God-fearing man in the twentieth century of civilization could have dreamed that any nation, any people or any man could be neutral when right was fighting wrong.”
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In advance of the 1918 congressional elections, Marshall somewhat naively proposed to Wilson that he, Marshall, make a speech “announcing that the only question before the American people was winning the war and standing behind the president.” He said he asked Wilson, “Should I
not propose that both Democrats and Republicans nominate men pledged to these two objects and let the people make a choice?… I also suggested proposing to the Republican party to close up all political headquarters and to expend money saved thereby in Red Cross and other war activities.”

Wilson rejected the notion, Marshall said, telling him he “expected to issue a call shortly before the election for a Democratic Congress, and had no doubt that the people would give it to him because they had refused him nothing so far.”
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So with misgivings Marshall followed the partisan course and instead inflamed rival party resentment of the sort that would later poison Wilson’s efforts to win Senate ratification of the peace treaty with Germany.

In those congressional elections, Marshall regretted their being held in wartime, but he threw himself behind Wilson’s push for election of a Democratic Congress. At Wilson’s specific request, Marshall, in a late campaign speech in Wisconsin, launched a sharply partisan attack uncommon to him on a Republican congressional nominee who actually supported Wilson on the war, asking him, “Do you doubt that Republican success will be hailed at home and abroad as repudiation? Do you want the election returns celebrated in London and Paris, where Wilson is honored, or in Berlin and Vienna where he is hated?”
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But Marshall’s uncharacteristically demagogic words backfired. On Election Night, the Democrats lost control of the Senate and the votes that might otherwise have sustained Wilson later in his fight for the Peace Treaty of Versailles.

A week after that election, the armistice ending the shooting was signed, and on December 4, 1918, for the first time in the nation’s history, an American president left the country for Europe, to negotiate the treaty between the Allied Powers and the defeated German Empire. Marshall, asked by a reporter what he thought of a notion that the duties of the president should be transferred to him in Wilson’s absence, said, “I have not the slightest desire nor intention of interfering with the President, unless I am forced to, and that will be of infinite regret to me.” He said he supported Wilson’s trip, then reassured, “Most certainly do not want his job while he is away.” He added, “That does not mean I am dodging responsibility.… I will meet it squarely and accept whatever responsibility was placed upon me.”
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Before departing, Wilson designated Marshall to preside over his cabinet meetings while he was away, but the president actually called the first
cabinet meeting in his absence by cable from sea. In taking over, Marshall pointedly told the attendees he was acting at Wilson’s request and also at their request, that he was there “informally and personally” and was “not undertaking to exercise any official duty or function.”
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He also made a point of observing that he did not accept the notion that a vice president needed to be kept better informed of his president’s policies in order to be able to carry them out in the event that anything happened to him. “A vice president might make a poor president,” he said, “but he would make a much poorer one if he attempted to subordinate his own mind and views to carry out the ideas of a dead man.”
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After sitting at the head of the table for only a few cabinet meetings, Marshall stopped attending. Upon completion of the negotiations for the peace treaty, Wilson returned to Washington and plunged into the struggle over Senate ratification against Republican senators led by Chairman Henry Cabot Lodge of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, none of them invited to the negotiations. When the treaty failed, Wilson embarked on a tour of the country to sell it to the American people, against the advice of his White House physician, Dr. Cary T. Grayson. For twenty-two days, Wilson traveled more than eight thousand miles by train, making about forty speeches and en route increasingly complaining to his wife about severe headaches.

On the night of September 26, 1919, after a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, Edith Wilson called Grayson to examine the restless president. The doctor concluded at this point only that he was “suffering from nervous exhaustion” but that “his condition [was] not alarming.”
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Under the doctor’s orders Wilson returned to the White House, and six days later, he suffered a massive stroke that partly paralyzed his left side. Edith Wilson found him lying unconscious on his bathroom floor and summoned Grayson, who issued a terse statement saying little more than “the President is a very sick man” and that “absolute rest is essential for some time.”
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Grayson, together with Wilson’s secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, and Mrs. Wilson, decided that the president have no visitors and that only the most pressing business be brought to him.

Through all this, Vice President Marshall was not informed of the seriousness of Wilson’s plight. At the time of the attack, he was in Hoboken, New Jersey, along with Secretary of State Robert Lansing, greeting
the arriving king and queen of Belgium and their son. Wilson’s condition clearly raised the question whether under the Constitution he should be declared unable to carry out his presidential duties and, at least temporarily, that they be bestowed on the vice president. In Edith Wilson’s later memoir, she wrote that her husband’s neurologist said it was imperative that she shield Wilson from anything that might upset him, explaining, “Every time you take him a new anxiety or problem to excite him, you are turning a knife in an open wound. His nerves are crying out for rest, any excitement is torture to him.”
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She wrote that she thereupon asked the doctor, “Then had he better not resign, let Mr. Marshall succeed to the presidency and he himself get that complete rest so vital to his life?” The doctor replied, she wrote, “No. Not if you feel equal to what I have suggested. For Mr. Wilson to resign would have a bad effect on the country, and a serious effect on our patient. He has staked his life and made his promise to the world to do all in his power to get the Treaty ratified and make the League of Nations complete. If he resigns, the greatest incentive to recover is gone; and as his mind is clear as crystal he can still do more with even a maimed body than anyone else.” Marshall’s wife, Lois, reported years later that Grayson said he had urged Wilson to resign but that he had refused.
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