ROUTE OF THE ONEIDA, JULY 1-5, 1893
July 1, A.M. Departs New York City
July 1, P.M. Operation performed, Long Island Sound
July 2, A.M. Dr. Hasbrouck disembarks, New London, Connecticut
July 4, P.M. Anchors off Sag Harbor, Long Island; Drs. Erdmann, Janeway, Keen, and O’Reilly disembark
July 5, P.M. Arrives at Gray Gables, President Cleveland’s summer home on Buzzards Bay, near Bourne, Massachusetts
The president has faithfully earned the brief rest which he hopes to have and he trusts that he will not be bothered by office-seekers while enjoying the comforts of his home. President Cleveland will have only about four weeks in which to rest and recuperate and he desires to do so without annoyance. He must have perfect quiet before he returns to the Capital City and enters upon his arduous duties.
No one knows how hard the president has worked for the last four months, and the rest which he seeks in this admirable climate he hopes will not be denied him.
But a letter Dr. Bryant sent from Gray Gables to Dr. Keen in Philadelphia that same day tells a different story:
We arrived at home in fine condition. At the present time, everything is as good as can be wished. I write to give you this information and also to thank you for your cooperation and support in the matter. I am convinced that my judgment regarding yourself was correctly made. Do not by word or intimation indicate the fact to anyone that you were with me, that is anyone other than your own family, and even they should not know whom you saw with me. The policy of the affair will be indicated by statements of friends to the public press.
That night, an intrepid reporter for United Press went to Gray Gables and managed to corner Dr. Bryant on the porch.
“Doctor,” the unidentified reporter said, “a number of conflicting stories are told concerning the illness of the president. Some of them make the matter very serious. You would confer a great favor by making some sort of official statement.”
“The president is all right,” Bryant answered emphatically.
“From what is he suffering?”
“He is suffering from rheumatism, just as it was reported this afternoon. Those reports were correct.”
“Then, doctor, the report that he is suffering from a malignant or cancerous growth in the mouth and that an operation was necessary and had been performed to relieve it is not correct?”
“He is suffering from the teeth, that is all.”
“Has an operation been performed?”
”That is all,” said Bryant, who ended the interview there.
On the morning of the next day, Friday, July 7, the interview was published verbatim in newspapers nationwide. Bryant’s refusal to categorically deny that an operation had been performed on Cleveland only intensified speculation as to the president’s health. The doctor summarily declared the interview a fake. Insisting he’d never even spoken with a United Press correspondent, Bryant issued a statement. “The president is absolutely free from cancer or malignant growth of any description,” he said. “No operation has been performed, except that a bad tooth was extracted.”
But it was too late. Sensing a stupendous story, newspapers large and small from Maine to Maryland immediately dispatched reporters to Gray Gables. Bryant was furious. He suspected the source of the cancer rumors was Ferdinand Hasbrouck, the dentist whose departure from the Oneida had been delayed. Bryant sent Hasbrouck his $250 fee by messenger. The two men never spoke again.
The indefatigable Dan Lamont was determined to stamp out the flames of speculation before they flared into a conflagration. He summoned the president’s private secretary, Robert O’Brien, to Gray Gables to assist him. In the coming days, weeks, and months, Grover Cleveland’s closest friends, advisers, doctors, and even his pregnant wife would all dissemble to perpetuate the myth that the president was well. With their help, Lamont would engineer a brazen and elaborate cover-up on behalf of a president whose reputation for honesty was unquestioned. It would be a spectacular example of what later generations would call damage control.
That same morning, July 7, Lamont invited Joseph Jefferson over to Gray Gables to call on the president. Jefferson, who was famous for his portrayal of Rip Van Winkle on stages around the world, afterward issued a statement in which he said he found the president “much improved in general health and very cheerful.” It’s doubtful the president was either. In fact, it’s doubtful Jefferson even saw him at all. The purpose of the visit was not social; it was to prepare the way for the bigger lies to come.
Throughout the day, reporters continued to descend on Walker’s, the small hotel down the road from Gray Gables. By the afternoon they numbered more than fifty. Lamont sent word that he would meet with them at seven o’clock that evening “with a full explanation of everything.” Until then, he requested that they report nothing.
At the appointed hour, the reporters made their way along the dirt road to Gray Gables. Lamont was waiting for them in an old barn about two hundred yards from the house. Lamont didn’t want prying eyes to see anything that might contradict the tale he was about to tell. As Robert O’Brien later wrote, “My personal impression at the time was that if ever one reporter got inside the house and detected the hospital odors and particularly if he caught sight of Mr. Cleveland who was beginning to sit up in a bathrobe the jig would be up—for he looked like a very sick man.” Years later, O’Brien recalled the scene inside the barn that night:
[Lamont] greeted the men cordially and with apparent frankness. He told them that it was really very foolish to make such a stir over a matter essentially trivial; that while the president suffered from an attack of rheumatism, to which he was occasionally subjected, the thing that had occasioned the prolonged journey on Mr. Benedict’s yacht was only a bad case of dentistry. The president, besides being very busy, never enjoyed having a dentist work over him. In consequence he had allowed his dental work to fall so badly into arrears that he had finally felt compelled to go on the yacht; here he could be cool and comfortable and let the dentist make a thorough job of it. This had been done.
Lamont blamed the “opposition”—the silverites—for spreading false rumors about the president’s health. Just that day, Lamont insisted, the president had played checkers with Mrs. Cleveland.
O’Brien said Lamont’s strategy was simple: “Nothing but dentistry was the slogan.” As Grant had done nine years earlier, Cleveland would dismiss his cancer as a toothache.
The reporters were skeptical, of course, and they peppered Lamont with questions. Who was the dentist? What was the exact nature of the dentistry? When, precisely, was the work performed? “These questions did not stump the resourceful Lamont,” O’Brien wrote, “who dismissed them with the remark that they were too trivial to talk about.” After deflecting a few more questions with a mix of charm and mock indignation, Lamont told the reporters he would not “dignify the subject by talking more about it” and ended the curious press conference.
As they trudged back to the hotel under the darkening summer sky, the reporters began debating heatedly among themselves. Half of them believed Lamont’s story. The other half did not. On one point, however, there was unanimous agreement: they must all stand united and report the same story. This, according to O’Brien, was an arrangement that reporters often made. It was better for everyone to be on the same page—even if it was the wrong page. Which of the stories they would report would be decided once they got back to the hotel, perhaps over drinks.
Later that evening, Lamont sent a telegram to the secretary of state, Walter Gresham, who had heard the rumors about the president’s health but knew nothing of his true condition. Lamont also made sure a copy was sent to the reporters at the hotel.
Buzzards Bay, July 7, 1893
To Walter Q. Gresham, Secretary of State:
The President is laid up with rheumatism in his knee and foot, but will be out in a day or two. No occasion for any uneasiness.
D. S. LAMONT
/> And something else happened that night that threatened to blow the president’s cover. At 7:20 that evening—the very moment Lamont was meeting with the reporters in the old barn at Gray Gables—Samuel Blatchford, a supreme court justice, passed away at his summer home in Newport, Rhode Island. Blatchford was seventy-three and had been in failing health for a year, so his death was hardly unexpected. For Cleveland, however, the timing couldn’t have been worse. The funeral would be held in four days in Newport, which was just fifty miles down the coast from Gray Gables. It would be impossible for the president to attend, of course. His absence would be most conspicuous, and it would certainly raise more troubling questions about his health.
Blatchford’s passing also presented the beleaguered president with another momentous task: he would have to nominate the late justice’s successor on the high court. It would take almost seven months for Cleveland to announce his choice: Louisiana senator Edward White. An ex-Confederate soldier, White would vote to uphold segregation in the notorious case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Fourteen years later, White was elevated to chief justice by President Taft.
What did Vice President Adlai Stevenson make of all the rumors about the president’s health? As previously noted, Cleveland hoped to hide everything from his would-be successor, whom he didn’t trust. Stevenson was a silverite and opposed the president’s efforts to repeal the Silver Purchase Act. Furthermore, Stevenson had surrounded himself with pro-silver advisers, whom Cleveland derisively dubbed the “Stevenson cabinet.” For his part, Stevenson said Cleveland was “courteous at all times,” but he admitted he was less an adviser to the president than “the neighbor to his counsels.” Stevenson saw some humor in his awkward union with Grover. He liked to compare himself to James Buchanan’s vice president, John Breckenridge, who told of being consulted by Buchanan just once—about the wording of a Thanksgiving proclamation.
Vice President Adlai Stevenson opposed Cleveland’s efforts to repeal the Silver Purchase Act. Before the 1940s, vice presidential nominees were usually chosen with little input from the candidate at the top of the ticket, often leading to uncomfortable arranged marriages. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Stevenson was attending the Fourth of July ceremonies at the World’s Fair in Chicago when he learned of Cleveland’s secretive and suspicious sojourn on the Oneida. It’s safe to assume the vice president was reasonably curious about the president’s health. In any event, he was determined to find out what was really going on. On July 6, he left Chicago, telling reporters he intended to go to Gray Gables to “consult with the president.” He never made it. When Cleveland got wind of Stevenson’s plan to visit him unbidden, the vice president was sent a telegram informing him that his counsel was neither necessary nor desired. Taking no chances, Cleveland ordered Stevenson to meet with Democratic Party leaders—on the West Coast. For the next month Stevenson would take a combination of trains, stagecoaches, and steamers from Washington to San Diego to Seattle and back to Washington.
At least Stevenson had fun. On the way home he rode the rails of the Great Northern, a brand-new line that ran from Seattle to St. Paul, and one of the few major railroads to avoid bankruptcy so far that year. “The marvelous switchback track in the Cascades and the grandeurs of Tumwater Canyon cannot be equaled in America,” he told a reporter in St. Paul. “We enjoyed every moment of the trip, and could tell enough to fill columns of the wonders of the mighty Northwest.”
After they returned from the barn at Gray Gables, the reporters convened at their hotel to decide which story they would file for the next day’s papers. It was an animated discussion. A reporter for one of the more sensational New York dailies proposed a compromise: report the “malignant growth” story the following morning and the “dentistry” story a day later. He saw no harm in “throw[ing] a scare” into the country for twenty-four hours. But the more experienced scribes, many of whom knew Lamont well, were inclined to accept his version of events, and ultimately their point of view prevailed. The reporters unanimously agreed to report that the president was well. Grover Cleveland was given the benefit of the doubt—a benefit that modern presidents rarely enjoy.
Were the reporters naïve, or were they complicit in the cover-up? Perhaps a little of both. Grover’s reputation for honesty made the whopper they were fed more palatable to the reporters. After all, hadn’t he proven himself to be honest when he issued his famous dictum to “tell the truth” after the story of his illegitimate child broke in 1884? This was certainly an argument that swayed some reporters at the hotel that night. Others may have been swayed by patriotism. Even if the president was seriously ill, what good would come of reporting the news when the nation was in peril?
Of course, it’s also possible that Dan Lamont pulled some strings to guarantee favorable coverage. Robert O’Brien believed “Lamont brought influence to bear upon the Associated Press to make it receptive to the conservative story which he [told] that night to the assembled journalists.”
By whatever means, Lamont achieved his objective. On Saturday, July 8, exactly one week after the operation, the reporters at Gray Gables, without exception, filed stories reassuring anxious Americans that their president was just fine. “Mr. Cleveland Is Better,” read the headline in the New York Tribune. “Likely to Recover in a Few Days.”
“The President Is All Right,” the New York Times chimed in. “Alarming Stories of His Illness Without Foundation.” “The assertion that President Cleveland is seriously afflicted with any malady is all nonsense,” the paper reported. His only affliction was “an ordinary, everyday sort of toothache,” and “surely nothing more will be heard of [a] ’cancerous growth.’” The Times concluded, “Those who look for ominous news from Gray Gables just now will not get it.”
In an editorial, the New York World chastised readers who had dared to question the paper’s coverage of the president’s alleged illness:
The persistent attempts to misrepresent and exaggerate President Cleveland’s ailment are something more than scandalous at this time. If these reports were believed by the public they might very easily, and probably would, precipitate a financial panic. The World has had direct and unquestioned information from the first and has given the exact facts. It is a pity if a president cannot have ‘a touch of rhoumatiz’ [sic] and a toothache without giving rise to a swarm of rumors and false reports—some of them far more malignant than his disease.
George Babbitt, the influential editor of the Boston Herald wrote, “The buzzards will please keep aloof from Buzzards Bay.”
On July 8, the same day many of these stories appeared, Attorney General Richard Olney went to Gray Gables to help the president prepare his message on the repeal of the Silver Purchase Act for the special session of Congress. Olney had been trying to get an appointment with Cleveland for two weeks without success. He knew nothing of the president’s condition, and when he finally met with him at Gray Gables, he was shocked by what he saw:
[The president] had changed a great deal in appearance, lost a great deal of flesh, and his mouth was so stuffed with antiseptic wads that he could hardly articulate. The first utterance that I understood was something like this: “My God, Olney, they nearly killed me.” He did not talk much, was very depressed, and at that time acted, and I believe he felt, as if he did not expect to recover.
Grover handed Olney what he had written so far. It amounted to just twenty or thirty lines. “He was very depressed about the progress he was making and complained that his mind would not work, and, upon my suggestion that I might perhaps be of assistance, was evidently much relieved.” For the next two or three days, Olney stayed at Gray Gables, drafting a message that, he later claimed, “was approved by Mr. Cleveland practically as drawn.”*
Olney found the visit very distressing. He was now the only member of the cabinet besides Lamont who really knew what was going on. He was, of course, sworn to secrecy, and required, like everybody else privy to that information, to prevaricate. After he met with t
he president, Olney told reporters that “Mr. Cleveland was doing finely, was in good spirits, and apparently enjoying excellent health, and that his illness was all confined to his knee and foot.”
It was all balderdash. As Robert O’Brien revealed, the president was still bedridden as late as July 7. And according to Olney’s account, Cleveland was not yet fitted with a prosthetic device on July 8, presumably because his wound was not sufficiently healed. The president could barely speak and most certainly couldn’t eat solid foods. Olney’s account also confirms that Cleveland, a notorious workaholic, was still virtually incapable of executing his official duties.
But Cleveland was blessed with a strong constitution and he recovered from the surgery with surprising swiftness. His kidney disease was not aggravated by the ether. He suffered no postoperative infections. Dr. Bryant was amazed by the rapidity with which his patient seemed to heal. On the afternoon of Monday, July 10, the president ventured out in public for the first time since the operation nine days earlier. Accompanied by Lamont and Bryant, he went fishing in his catboat, the Ruth. The party sailed about five miles down the bay and anchored off a small peninsula called Wings Neck. They spent several hours casting and were rewarded with a haul of scup, blackfish, and bass. As they were sailing for home, a boat filled with reporters caught up with them.
“What luck today?” one of the reporters shouted.
The President Is a Sick Man Page 11