When the Cheering Stopped (16 page)

She made the decision. He would continue to function as President of the United States. No one was seeing him, not Tumulty, not Daniels, not Lansing, no Cabinet officer, no Senator, but he was still the President. In the Executive Offices of the White House, Tumulty bravely stalled off inquiries about the state of things by giving vague replies, but the staff saw him day after day looking more worried as he wandered from office to office, picking up papers and putting them down. At first documents and requests continued to go up to the second-floor family quarters for Presidential action, but when no answers were forthcoming and urgent letters simply vanished, the flow began to slow down. Things were put off and put off, but the officials began to wonder where all this was leading.

One day the chief mail clerk, a horse-race fan who often went to the track with Grayson, met the doctor in the hall and tried to buttonhole him with the mail situation. Unanswered letters were piling up, the mail clerk said; what was to be done? Grayson gave a vague reply and tried to get away. The clerk desperately said an important personal letter for the President had arrived. “I don't think anyone else can handle it.” Grayson thought a moment and said, “I'll talk to Mrs. Wilson and see what we can do.” Gratefully the clerk sent the letter up to the family quarters, bypassing Joe Tumulty completely. This
was one way of getting things done and Tumulty never said anything about it.

Not long afterward there came a letter from Judge Learned Hand enclosing a letter signed by the head of the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice—the later FBI—and containing very serious charges of graft against a high Administration official. The letter was for the President's personal attention. When the other staff people had gone home for the night, the chief mail clerk showed the letters to Charles Swem, the President's stenographer, and asked his opinion about what should be done. As Swem read the letters, Tumulty came in and looked over his shoulder. He took in the gist of the material at once and reached out his hand. “Let me have those.” Swem snatched at the papers and said, “No, I'm handling this.” Tumulty, bigger and stronger, got a good grip and pulled the letters out of Swem's hands. The chief mail clerk stayed back during the short struggle and said nothing as Tumulty went off with the letters. (Again, it was a way of getting things done and at least the thing was off
his
shoulders.) The clerk never did find out what, if anything, was done. Things in the office had almost come to a standstill.

Meanwhile, in the living quarters, a prostatic obstruction began to develop in the patient, blocking elimination from the bladder. Dr. Hugh Young, a specialist, was called in from Johns Hopkins and he made repeated attempts to dilate the muscles forming the contraction in hope that the bladder could thus be drained. He failed, and on October 17 all elimination ceased. The five consulting doctors and Grayson held a tense meeting. If the condition was not remedied there would be a progressive poisoning of the body, followed by irreversible and fatal uremia. The doctors talked in one room; in another room, the President's, the First Lady sat by as nurses applied hot packs to the distended bladder. The President's pulse slowed, then speeded up dangerously. His temperature rose.

After a time Grayson opened the door and beckoned the First Lady. She went out of the room to stand with him by a window looking over the south lawn toward the Washington Monument. He said to her that the other doctors felt there must be immediate surgery but that he
himself felt an operation would be more than the President could stand, that it would mean his death. Grayson had walked around the block to get himself together in order to present the matter to the First Lady. “There is nothing else but for you to decide.”

She thought to herself that it was like a chasm opening under her feet. But she said, “We will not operate. You know more than anyone else of the real chances of recovery. So go down and tell them I feel that Nature will finally take care of things, and we will wait.” Grayson went out but was back in a minute with Dr. Young, who took a pencil and paper from his pocket and drew diagrams to try to convince her that there must be an operation at once. She walked blindly into her dressing room, Young following. Dr. Sterling Ruffin came in and backed up Young, and so did Dr. Francis Dercum. But she kept saying no, no, she was afraid of an operation.

As they tensely went over the situation one of the nurses came in and said the President was asking for the First Lady. She went toward his room; as she walked out Young called, “You understand, Mrs. Wilson, the whole body will become poisoned if this condition lasts an hour, or at the most two hours longer!” She went in and the President smiled as he always did and always would whenever she appeared. He reached out his thin white hand for her to grip. She stayed there holding him as the doctors and nurses bent over the bed and the hands of the clock seemed to fly. Every few minutes his temperature was taken, the reading each time higher. He tossed restlessly as the hot packs were applied, and for two hours they were this way until the muscles relaxed and normal flow took place. Exhausted, the President slept.

But the crisis weakened him. For some days prior to it the First Lady devoted ten minutes a day to keeping him up on the news, but now he had not the energy to concentrate for even that long. It was the worst possible time for him to be in this condition, for his attention was desperately needed by a country undergoing the violent stresses the war engendered. All over America it was said the radicals were rising in revolution, and groups of ex-soldiers banded together to attack street-corner speakers they identified with Lenin and Trotsky—in New York
civilians joined three hundred policemen, half on horseback, to charge five thousand radical sympathizers gathered on Fifth Avenue and yelling “Down with the capitalists!”—but nothing was heard from the White House about the strife. (Instead, the Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, began to think along the lines that would soon see him arresting hundreds of people without warrant and deporting them without hearings.) A series of terrifying race riots broke out all over the country—in Washington, Chicago, Omaha, Mobile, Gary—but the President could not speak out. (Secretary of War Baker tried to step into the breach and sent Army troops to various towns to quiet the rioters.) The conference called to try to adjust the widespread labor troubles met, but without the President's guidance it accomplished nothing, and the stock market reacted by plunging downward. A coal strike involving half a million miners began brewing, and although a Presidential statement was made saying the strike would be “unjustifiable” and “unlawful” no one believed the President wrote it. (He did not. Tumulty did.) Government injunctions against the strike were gotten and laboring people raged. A specially appointed arbitrator, the Secretaries of the Treasury and of Agriculture, as well as A. Mitchell Palmer and the now out-of-office William McAdoo, all worked to settle the acrimonious coal dispute, but their efforts appeared to be failing. Secretary Daniels mourned the bitterness that necessitated the dispatch of troops to the mining towns and said that if he were not ill the President would have nipped the whole thing in the bud. The rise in the price of mere existence was alarming—the letters “HCL” referring to the high cost of living were constantly in the headlines—and shops were boycotted by belligerent women attacking anyone trying to buy from the “profiteers”—a term become as familiar as “HCL.” There were shortages in many basic foodstuffs and it was figured the price of food was up 88 per cent since 1913. Nothing was done by the White House. In the wake of the demobilization of the great Army and Navy enormous problems arose, with hundreds of thousands of ex-servicemen unable to get jobs—nothing was done.

If the Executive Branch of the government was
motionless, the Congress likewise offered no leadership. One question obsessed it: Should the United States go into the League of Nations on exactly the President's terms or should the reservations and amendments worked out by Senator Lodge be attached to any entry? In the White House that was also the only thing that mattered. Most of the hours of the day the President lay dozing, too weak to attend to even his natural functions without aid, too weak to eat. Even to speak a word was tiring to him. But when he could muster his strength at all, it was to whisper hoarsely to the First Lady that she must allow no compromise with Senator Lodge.

Meanwhile the bland bulletins were assuring the country that the President was slowly getting back to normal. Secretary Daniels, a newspaperman before his government service, thought it a terrible thing to lie to the public this way. “If you would tell the people exactly what is the matter with the President,” Daniels told Grayson, “a wave of sympathy would pour into the White House, whereas now there is nothing but uncertainty and criticism.” “I think you are right,” Grayson replied. “I wish I could do so. But I am forbidden. The President and Mrs. Wilson have made me promise to that effect.” The stated rationale of this was the thought that the true news of the President's condition would encourage the League's enemies to new efforts. So Grayson, silent or vague to questioners, went about trying to help his patient.

That patient was the most disciplined and the bravest that a doctor could know. He was uncomplaining as he lay in his bed. There was never, ever, not then, not after, a word of complaint. He even preserved his sense of humor: a week after the bathroom fall, too weak even to swallow, he held up a finger to halt the First Lady's attempt to hold a spoon to his lips and gestured that Grayson should come close. The doctor bent over and the patient whispered, “A wonderful bird is the pelican; his bill will hold more than his bellican. He can take in his beak enough food for a week. I wonder how in the hell-he-can.”
*

Upon another occasion Grayson and Dr. Young stood by the bed and discussed shaving the President's face, which had not been touched by a razor since the morning of the fall in the bathroom. Young said that one of the doctors could do it: “You know, in the olden days the doctors were barbers. Doctors were really barbers in those days.” There was a whisper from the man on the bed: “They are barbarous yet.”

After perhaps two weeks had passed since the thrombosis, it was decided that the President could be lifted out of bed for a few minutes every day and placed in a chair by the window. On October 22, twenty days after the First Lady found him unconscious in the bathroom, he put his signature to four bills sent up by the Congress, and a few days later he vetoed the Volstead Act.
*
The First Lady placed a pen in his trembling hand and steadied and pointed it as he signed his name where she indicated. The effort completely exhausted him. But the signature was a parody of his usual firm stroke. The
o
's of his first name were left open at the top and the slanting of the letters was completely foreign to his former fashion. As soon as the signatures were seen by Senators familiar with his writing, debates in the cloakroom centered upon the question of who had forged the President's name. Most Senators said it was Tumulty's work; others thought the First Lady did it. A microscope was obtained to study the writing; a handwriting expert was hired and urged to express an opinion.

No resolution of sympathy was offered in Congress for him, but one Senator wanted to introduce a bill ousting the President “whenever for any reason whatsoever” he became “unable for a period of six weeks to perform the duties devolved upon him.” Another wanted to give power to determine Presidential inability to the Supreme Court, that body to make an investigation when authorized by concurrent Congressional resolution. Senator Moses, who had written the widely publicized letter about the illness, took the lead in diagnosing the President's condition and soon his fellow legislators universally addressed him as “Doc.” Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico
violently declared in meetings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the elected President was not in office. He pounded his fist on the table and shouted, “We have petticoat Government! Mrs. Wilson is President!” (He also said the Democrats ought to ask Congress to adjourn until there was a legitimate President in office.) Other people were talking about the First Lady and it began to be said that she was the “Presidentess” who had fulfilled the dreams of the suffragettes by changing her title from First Lady to Acting First Man.

Perhaps to counter the stories about him, the White House people wanted the President to receive the King and Queen of the Belgians, who, after touring the country incognito in respect for the President's illness, were now coming to Washington. When the royal couple and their son first planned the American visit, it was planned to have them as White House guests for several days, but now instead they stayed at the home of Breckinridge Long, Third Assistant Secretary of State, with Vice President Marshall (who was very resentful of the cost to him) acting as official host. (During the period of his term as official host, Marshall declined to preside over the Senate, explaining he could not perform the President's work as entertainer of royalty one minute and the Vice President's duties as head of the Senate the next. “Too much Jekyll and Hyde for him,” Breckinridge Long wrote in his diary.)

The Belgians came on the afternoon of October 30, the first outsiders, save for the medical people, to see the President. The First Lady served them tea in the Red Room and then they went up to the President, bearing with them a gift for him, a set of eighteen beautiful plates showing Belgian scenes. They also had a fan, decorated with diamonds and sapphires, for the First Lady.

The President received them in bed. He wore a dressing gown. The King and Queen must have been surprised to see the President's white beard—the doctors had decided not to shave him—but the visit went off pleasantly. After a few minutes the First Lady took them out and showed them through the White House. When the tour was over the Queen asked if she could not introduce to the President her son, the seventeen-year-old heir to the throne, who had waited below. So they went up again,
to find the President's dressing gown, clumsy in bed, had been changed for an old gray sweater purchased many years before on a visit to Scotland. The Queen was delighted to find him studying the scenes on the plates through a magnifying glass, and the President in turn greeted the young future King, apologizing for the old sweater.