When the Cheering Stopped (19 page)

“Dear Mrs. Wilson: Please don't think I am trying to crowd you or to urge immediate action by the President, but I thought it would help you if you could have before you a list of matters that at intervals the President might wish to have presented to him for discussion and settlement. I might submit such a list, as follows.” He went on to mention that the railways taken over during the war still awaited return to their owners, that the Costa Rican recognition matter was still up in the air, that a commission to deal with the mining strike situation should be appointed, that the Secretaries of the Treasury and the Interior and the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture needed replacements as the present holders of the jobs would shortly be leaving their posts, that there were vacancies in the Civil Service Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Interstate Commerce Commission, Shipping Board, Tariff Committee, War Finance Corporation, Waterways Commission (seven vacancies), Rent Commission (three), that diplomatic appointments were needed for, in alphabetical order, Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica (if recognized), Italy, the Netherlands, Salvador, Siam, Switzerland. He added, “When you get a chance to talk with the President, will you please tell him that Senator Hitchcock sent for me yesterday and wanted to know whether the President would look with favor upon any effort on
his part to make an adjustment with the Mild Reservationists by which to soften the Lodge Reservations and thus avoid splitting the Democratic Party.”

The diplomatic vacancies were causing trouble at home and abroad. Secretary Lansing simply accepted resignations—
someone
had to open the envelopes—but appointments could be made only by the President.
*
The Netherlands appointment, for instance, was sought by the capable William Phillips. Lansing recommended him for the job, but the First Lady sent word the President would await full recovery before naming the Netherlands man. This placed Phillips in a difficult situation. His wife's mother was ill in London and Phillips and his wife were sailing to be with her. Before leaving he wanted to know that the Netherlands appointment was his so that while in Europe he might make all arrangements about getting a home and finding schools for his children. Phillips asked Breckinridge Long, the Third Assistant Secretary of State at whose home the Belgians had stayed, if Long would not talk to Tumulty about getting the appointment made. Long did, and Tumulty said he would try to have an answer within twenty-four hours. When the period had passed, Tumulty said he had no answer and was sorry, but he had done all that he could. Phillips then wrote directly to the President to beg for quick action. There was no reply. Phillips shifted back to Breckinridge Long and asked him to talk to Grayson. Long did so. Nothing happened.

In later years it was said that the First Lady was the first woman President of the United States and that, ruling with an iron hand, she disposed of House and Tumulty because they stood in the way of her power, but it was not so. She did not try to change anything and amend the ways business was done in the past; she made no startling changes beyond the change that faced those who dealt with the White House. It was rather that the White House staggered along as best it could while she ignored
all minor things and many large ones. Phillips was a tiny thing to the First Lady. What did it matter who went to the Netherlands? Did it really matter much? Hardly. What mattered was that the President be protected from irritation, from the people asking of him what he could no longer give, from Joe Tumulty saying we must compromise, Governor; from Daniels with his midshipmen and their immoral diseases; from Burleson and his fifteen-hundred-a-year Post Office appointments; from everybody; from the world. As it turned out, Edith Bolling Wilson's operation was a success. The patient lived.

Vice President Marshall went lecturing. He paid a call at the White House with some vague idea of meeting with the President (of which there was no more chance than of his flying to the moon) and was granted a few minutes' talk with the First Lady, who sent him off after saying if there was anything she could think of for him to do she would send for him. Senator “Doc” Moses, speaking in the name of the Senate Republican majority (or so Moses said), was after Marshall to declare himself the President, but Marshall refused to do anything of the sort. However, Marshall's secretary, Mark Thistlethwaite, thought that some consideration must be given to what would be done if one day the Secret Service men or the reporters came and told Marshall he was now the President. Thistlethwaite insisted some plans should be made, but Marshall told him he even hated to think about it.

Finally, before leaving on tour, Marshall reluctantly consented to go over the ground. The first thing, Thistlethwaite said, was that Marshall ought to keep handy a prepared statement on the President's death which would embody the idea that he would carry on the President's policies. Marshall said he would never say any such thing because he would as President have new policies.
*
“All right,” said Thistlethwaite, “change later, but first announce a continuation of the previous policies.” Marshall said he wouldn't do it. Thistlethwaite went on to another subject: would Marshall take office if the Congress declared the President incapable of holding office?
“No,” said Marshall. Such a move would be illegal unless the President assented to it or until it had a two-thirds vote, “and a two-thirds vote is impossible.” Would Marshall assume office if the Supreme Court declared the President incapacitated? Well, there was no need to discuss the matter because the Court would never do it. Thistlethwaite finally asked just what Marshall would need to take over. Marshall's answer was, A Congressional resolution approved in writing by Cary Grayson and the First Lady. “I could throw this country into civil war,” Marshall summed up, “but I won't.” Thistlethwaite wanted something more concrete from his chief, but Marshall refused even to listen to any more talk. “I am not going to seize the place,” he said, “and then have Wilson, recovered, come around and say, ‘Get off, you usurper!'” Marshall then went off on his tour. (His expenses in giving a posh dinner for the Belgians had never been refunded to him out of the President's government funds for such purposes, and good lecture dates were available.)

On November 23, Marshall spoke under the auspices of the Moose of Atlanta in the civic auditorium. He was engaged in paying tribute to the memories of Washington and Lincoln when an Atlanta policeman came running up the aisle. The policeman talked with a prominent Atlantan sitting on the platform and told him that word had just been received over the telephone that the President was dead. The Atlantan stepped up to Marshall, asked him to halt his speech, and whispered what the policeman had said. Marshall staggered a few steps and held up his hands. After a moment he steadied himself and said to the audience, “I cannot continue my speech. I must leave at once to take up my duties as Chief Executive of this great nation.” He asked the people to pray for him and then, as the organist played “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” he went to his hotel surrounded by a hastily materialized police escort. At the hotel, calls to the Associated Press and the White House brought about the realization that the telephoned report was a practical joke. “A most cruel hoax,” said Marshall. It was the most awful hour of his life, he later told people. The Governor of Georgia put up a one-hundred-dollar reward for apprehension of the person who made the telephone call, but
the jokester was never found. Marshall went on his way, minus the police escort and the fanfare attending it. He was never, save for a brief moment just prior to the inaugural ceremonies of the President's successor, to see the President again.

On December 2, Congress would again convene. Always before, the President had appeared in person to read a message to the legislators, but now it would be impossible for him to do so. It would also be impossible for him to write the message.
*
Instead, Joe Tumulty asked each of the Cabinet men to submit a report and some recommendations, gathered the papers together, and tossed them on the desk of Charles Swem. “You know how the Chief writes,” Tumulty said to the stenographer, “you can put them together.” Swem did so and the finished product was sent up to the First Lady, who penciled in some corrections which she said the President wished made.

The message, concerning itself with the need for a simplified tax program, a budget system, the problems of unemployment among ex-servicemen, Federal aid for the road-building program and forest conservation, protection for the chemical and dyestuff industries, and a readjusted tariff, made no mention of the League of Nations. The most pressing problem was left out, perhaps to answer critics who said the President had since 1917 concerned himself too much with foreign policy and too little with domestic problems, perhaps because the First Lady forbade any mention of a subject which, put upon the table for discussion, would excite the President and destroy the quiet atmosphere she was so desperately maintaining. In any event, the Congress received the message with scorn and indifference, many Senators allowing themselves to be quoted as saying the President did not write, knew nothing of, had no connection with, the whole business.

One such Senator was Albert B. Fall of New Mexico. A long drooping mustache adorned Senator Fall's face, his frame was clothed in Western-type rancher's apparel
complete with ten-gallon hat, and in time, after serving as Secretary of the Interior, he was going to become the only United States Cabinet officer ever to go to jail, the penalty being one of the results of the sorry Teapot Dome oil scandals. “I wonder when he wrote it,” Fall sarcastically said of the message, and intensified his already active efforts to get the President proved either insane, mindless, unconscious, paralyzed, or a prisoner.

The device Fall presently hit upon to achieve this end found its origins in the country's perennial troubles with Mexico, which at the time was a whipping boy for, among other things, the radicals, the high cost of living, the wave of strikes, racial tension and—most important of all to a Senator who even then was so involved with oil investments that his colleagues addressed him as “Petroleum” Fall—the difficulties of American oil concessionaires south of the border. There was a good deal of agitation for a war against Mexico which would, as Secretary Lansing said, “settle our difficulties here,” and the agitation speeded up when a United States consular agent, William Jenkins, was kidnaped at Puebla, Mexico.

As soon as word of the kidnaping was received, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee met to consider what to do about Mexico. Secretary Lansing came before the group and said that he had sent down a very strong protest. (In actual fact his protest was practically a threat to go to war.) Had the Secretary consulted with the President about the protest? the committee inquired. No. Had he consulted with the President on
anything
in recent months? No. At this the Republicans on the committee passed a resolution appointing a representative of the committee to call upon the President in order to get his views on Mexico. It is certain that Senator Fall, who introduced the resolution calling for a visit to the President and offered himself as a visitor, never expected that the President would receive the delegation. If the President wasn't even consulting with his Secretary of State, Fall reasoned, he would hardly receive one of Senator Lodge's outstanding supporters. That refusal could be the lever by which the President would be pried out of the White House.

The chairman of the committee, Senator Lodge, after
solemnly naming Fall and a reluctant Senator Hitchcock (to represent the Democrats) as a two-man delegation, called Joe Tumulty and asked for the men to be received. Lodge, the lending of whose name to the enterprise would make it even less palatable to the White House, was astonished when Tumulty, after consulting with the First Lady, said the two visitors might come that very day—December 4.

The meeting was set for two-thirty in the afternoon. Before lunch Robert Woolley, head of the Democratic Party publicity organization, went to the White House in response to an urgent call from Tumulty. Tumulty said Fall would have to be received—otherwise impeachment proceedings might be begun—and asked Woolley's help in staging a “dress rehearsal” that would prepare the President for the visit. The two decided to place a copy of a Senate report on the Mexican situation on a table to the right of the President's bed so that it could be dramatically picked up by the President's one good hand. Apart from the right arm, the President would be covered with blankets up to his chin so that the paralyzed left hand would not show. As for the President's ability to concentrate on what Fall would say, and parry his thrusts, they would have to trust to luck and the presence of Grayson, the First Lady and Hitchcock as allies.

Promptly on time, the two Senators appeared in the afternoon. By then the impending visit had been headlined in the newspapers, which correctly labeled it as having nothing at all to do with Mexico. The “actual purpose,” said the New York
World,
was to force a “disclosure of the President's condition.” Reporters anticipating a post-visit interview with Fall swarmed to the White House. There were more than one hundred of them to see the arriving Fall preen himself in the spotlight while Hitchcock, frightened of what might be about to happen, kept in the background. The two men were shown up to the President's bedroom. Grayson stood outside the door. Fall asked if there would be a time limit and Grayson said, “No, not within reason, Senator.”

They went in and the President shocked Fall by marshaling all his strength for a firm handshake and a wave to the nearby chair selected for the Senator in the dress
rehearsal. “Well, Senator, how are your Mexican investments getting along?” breezily asked the President. Fall, certain the warped Presidential signatures sent from the White House were the work of a forger, and certain the President was not in his right mind, blanched at this use of hand and tongue. “If agreeable, I wish Mrs. Wilson to remain,” said the President, and Fall said that would be all right. At once the First Lady began to write down every word Fall said. (She had previously provided herself with a pencil and pad, which, occupying her as they did, allowed her to avoid shaking hands with the Senator.)