When the Cheering Stopped (17 page)

At the front door a corps of reporters waited to fall upon the royal couple with questions about the President's condition. The answers blandly indicated he was fine, and the Queen remarked he had on a worn sweater. The reporters misunderstood and printed the information that the President received in torn clothing. The next day mail poured in from people eager to tell the First Lady she ought to be ashamed of herself for letting the President wear ripped things. Old ladies sent wool, saying she could use it for darning her husband's clothes.

One week later, Senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, the Democratic Minority Leader, was received. Hitchcock, a newspaper owner, was the not particularly brilliant nor strong leader of a party entirely dominated in the past by its very strong President. Understandably Hitchcock felt timid about his mission, which was to say clearly to the President that the Democrats could not raise even a majority of Senate votes for ratification without reservations, let alone the necessary two-thirds count. He was shown into the bedroom where the President lay propped up in bed, with the First Lady and Grayson standing by. Hitchcock's first reaction was shock at the long white beard. He falteringly got out his opinion that the Lodge amendments must be accepted. Otherwise, it would be impossible to get the United States into the League, utterly impossible.

“It
is
possible! It
is
possible!” the President gasped out.

“Mr. President, it might be wise to compromise—” Hitchcock started to say.

“Let Lodge compromise!”

“Well, of course, he must compromise also. But we might well hold out the olive branch.”

“Let Lodge hold out the olive branch!”

Hitchcock was shown out.

On November 13 there was another visitor: the Prince of Wales, later King Edward and Duke of Windsor, who was touring Canada and America. The Prince arrived ten minutes late for his appointment and apologized to the First Lady by explaining he had just come from visiting Mount Vernon, where he was detained by a “very charming young lady” who gave him flowers and engaged him in conversation. Actually the Prince was being gallant in describing the lady as “young,” for she was a woman who insisted on telling him of his grandfather's tour of America half a century before, at which time, she said, the grandfather gave her a kiss. The attractive young Prince made the First Lady laugh with his explanation and after tea in the Blue Room they went up to see the President.

Prince Edward, little more than a boy, and boyish in his ways, came bouncing into the room. “I am very glad to see you again, Mr. President,” he began, referring to their meeting in London during the President's visit there. There was silence. The Prince sat down by the bed and tried to find something to say. “My, what a magnificent bed this is, Mr. President,” he got out. The President smiled with the right side of his face. But he was having great trouble with his speech that day. “This—is—the—bed—that—Abraham—Lincoln—” he said slowly, word by word, and talked about the bed while the Prince nervously pleated his trousers. The President mentioned the visit of the Prince's grandfather, the later Edward VII, and said the grandfather had slept in the Lincoln bed and one night slipped out the window for a social event not on his official program. This gave Prince Edward a chance to jump up and look out the window. “Do you think it was this window, sir?” The President said he unfortunately did not know.

The visit had important implications. They stemmed from the fact that the Prince, and only the Prince, was invited to call. For the British Ambassador had been desperately trying to see the President. The Ambassador was Viscount Grey of Falloden, who as British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey had written the President a touching letter when Ellen Wilson died. Now old, sick, half blind, Lord Grey had come out of retirement to travel to America and lend his efforts toward getting the
United States into the League of Nations under any conditions necessary. He arrived just as the President fell ill and, undergoing treatment for his eyes at Johns Hopkins in the interim, waited for the President to meet with him. He had no reason to think he was in personal disfavor with the President—or the President's wife—and of course before his appointment the British Government had asked if he was acceptable to the President and had been told he was “entirely” so.

But when Lord Grey arrived in America it was discovered that he had brought with him a British Army officer, Major Charles Kennedy Craufurd-Stuart, who had been secretary to the preceding British Ambassador, Lord Reading. Craufurd-Stuart was a musically gifted man of the world who composed songs (“At Gloaming Tide,” “Make-Believe Land”) and played the piano. He was very much up on gossip and he did not care much for Americans. During the last days of Lord Reading's reign as Ambassador, in late 1918, just before the President went to Europe, Craufurd-Stuart at a party, between piano renditions, combined love of gossip and distaste for at least one American and spoke very recklessly about the First Lady. The extremely knowledgeable Washington hostess Mrs. J. Borden (Daisy) Harriman marked him off as a crazy man, and so did other people, but word of his remarks about the First Lady—with all ramifications of the stories about her buying off Mrs. Peck—quickly reached the White House.

Lord Reading was asked to send Craufurd-Stuart home. When Craufurd-Stuart heard his chief had been asked to send him back to England, he at once went to the home of Secretary of State Lansing and begged that the Americans not insist on his banishment—it would destroy his career. Lansing told him he should be more discreet in his talk, and the pressure for his recall relaxed. Then the President went to Europe and Lord Reading gave up the ambassadorship and went home, accompanied by Craufurd-Stuart. That seemed to be the end of any American service for Craufurd-Stuart. It was a surprise when Lord Grey brought him back to Washington.

As soon as Craufurd-Stuart arrived with Lord Grey, the White House sent word through the State Department
that the man was not wanted in America. Lord Grey asked why and got no reply. He insisted on an explanation and was told that Craufurd-Stuart had slandered the First Lady. Lord Grey did not believe the demand for the dismissal came from the President, and he did not send Craufurd-Stuart packing. State Department men from the Secretary down went to see Lord Grey, asking Craufurd-Stuart's dispatch home, and Cary Grayson appeared to say he should go on “an early steamship.” Lord Grey refused, and the State Department, under heavy pressure from Grayson, threatened to declare the man persona non grata. Lord Grey countered by notifying the State Department that he was changing Craufurd-Stuart's status from British attaché accredited to the American Government to mere member of the Ambassador's household—a position not subject to dismissal proceedings brought by the Americans. Grayson gave up, but he noted in the First Lady's attitude something which indicated she did not think Lansing had tried hard enough to get rid of her alleged slanderer. Craufurd-Stuart stayed, but when Prince Edward went by invitation to the White House, he went alone. Lord Grey began to meet for talks about the League with Senators—including Senator Lodge.

Colonel House from his New York home viewed all this with apprehension. He wrote in his diary that the agitation against Craufurd-Stuart was the work of the First Lady, not the President. The President's illness of course made House very uneasy, and his discomfiture was increased when in response to his offers to be of any aid whatsoever the First Lady coldly wrote she could think of nothing for him to do. (His was one of the few letters to the White House that got an answer, and it was an answer the First Lady must have grimly enjoyed writing. She had not forgotten who it was that tried to stop her marriage to the President.) House was not entirely discouraged and, without any inside information, seemed to assume the cheering bulletins were accurate. He wrote again to the President and then sent his views about the League to the President, care of the First Lady: “Of course the arguments are all with the position you have taken and against that of the Senate, but, unfortunately,
no amount of logic can alter the situation … Let Senator Hitchcock know that you expect it to be ratified in some form … Its practical workings in the future will not be seriously hampered … and time will give us a workable machine.

“To the ordinary man the distance between the treaty and the reservations is slight.”

To these letters House received no reply, and the fact shook his faith in the bulletins indicating everything was quite in order at the White House. He had been accustomed to being called “dearest friend” by the President, and this new and sudden silence made him wonder who was in charge of his friend's household. Uneasily saying that it was possible a “bedroom circle” was keeping him from the President, he wondered if the First Lady even let the President see the letters. Actually he might have saved himself the trouble of writing at all, for some of his letters were never opened at all until the President's correspondence was deposited in the Library of Congress. That was in 1952, more than three decades later.

Early in the Senate battle over the League, the Republican Senator James Watson of Indiana said to Senator Lodge, “I don't see how we are ever going to defeat this proposition. I don't see how it is possible to defeat it.” Lodge replied, “Ah, my dear James, I do not propose to try to beat it by direct frontal attack, but by the indirect method of reservations.” In mid-November, visiting Lodge at his home, Watson said, “Suppose the President accepts the treaty with your reservations. Then we are in the League.” Lodge smiled—a very confident smile, Watson thought. Lodge spoke of the hatred the President felt for him personally. “Never,” Lodge said, “under any set of circumstances in this world could he be induced to accept a treaty with Lodge reservations appended to it.” Watson was doubtful. “That seems to me to be a rather slender thread on which to hang so great a cause,” he said. “A slender thread!” Lodge exclaimed. “Why, it is as strong as any cable with its strands wired and twisted together.”

In the Senate there were those who came to agree with Lodge in this estimate of the President's likely reaction,
but there were those who also said that if the President's scholastic career had not been more distinguished than the Senator's everything would turn out all right. But still there was a chance something could be worked out. Colonel House tried one last time. He asked Stephen Bonsai, an aide of his during the Peace Conference, to talk to Lodge and get some sort of private promise on what Lodge would accept as final amendments. It was in House's nature to pacify—“The Yes, Yes, Man” was what the First Lady called him—and he thought that if the President would agree to accept terms privately given by Lodge, Lodge would accept this sop and let the League be passed. Bonsai got Lodge to write down what he would want in less than one hundred words of signed statement. Bonsai took it to the White House. It was never heard of again. Colonel House said the First Lady either destroyed it or did not bring it to the President's attention. Lodge, of course, took the White House silence as the final slap in the face.

As the time for a vote approached, Senator Hitchcock found there was utterly no possibility of carrying out the task the President had assigned him. The Senate simply did not contain enough men willing to follow blindly the dictates of the President. There were the “Irreconcilables,” who would not vote for the League under any circumstances, and it was of no use to talk to them. But there were also the “Mild Reservationists,” who wanted the United States in the League just so long as certain safeguards were taken, safeguards generally described as aimed at preventing too free use of American troops in policing the world. If these men could have their reservations, the United States would be in the League. But denied their reservations, they would vote nay. Other men outside the Senate knew this, and each day letters and telegrams poured into the White House begging the President to swallow the reservations and get the country into the League. Few if any of these pleas reached the man they were intended for. Joe Tumulty constantly sent up notes begging for compromise but got no reply beyond the First Lady's statement that no compromise could be permitted. Finally admitted to the sickroom to present
his case for acceptance of the reservations, but warned not to excite the President, Tumulty was kept by the First Lady's glare from getting too emphatic.

On November 17, Hitchcock came again. All the men who had been at Paris were for acceptance of reservations; Bernard Baruch was for them, Herbert Hoover, almost every man in the Cabinet. It fell to Hitchcock to try to convince the President. “You haven't come to talk compromise, have you?” the First Lady said to him outside the sickroom. Hitchcock began to plead with her. Defeat would bitterly shake the President, the Senator pointed out. Wasn't it best to get at least half a loaf? She told him to wait and went into her husband's room. “For my sake,” she said, “won't you accept these reservations and get this awful thing settled?”

He turned his head on the pillow. He took her hand. “Little girl, don't you desert me; that I cannot stand. Can't you see I have no moral right to accept any change in a paper I have already signed? It is not
I
who will not accept; it is the Nation's honor that is at stake.” His eyes were gleaming. “Better a thousand times to go down fighting than to dip your colors to dishonorable compromise.”

Hitchcock came in. He asked the President what was to be done. The reply was there could be no amendments, no reservations. Anything but a complete acceptance would constitute a nullification. The President dictated a letter to Hitchcock which the First Lady wrote down and handed the Senator: “I hope that all true friends of the treaty will refuse to support the Lodge reservations.”

Thinking to himself that the President still heard in his mind the roaring cheers of the Western crowds, that in his ears rang the sounds of the last thing he heard from the American people, the shouts of the throng yelling for him in Pueblo before the quiet walk by the train standing still on the prairie, Hitchcock went to the Senate and delivered to the others the message the President had for them.