The President Is a Sick Man

by Matthew Algeo

  Keen would also come to know Taft and Wilson quite well. Taft, whom he’d met in Manila, sent his daughter to Keen for treatment when she was a student at Bryn Mawr. And when Wilson was governor of New Jersey, Keen operated on Wilson’s wife and two of their daughters. The operation on one of the children was very dangerous, Keen recalled, as there was a “furious hemorrhage.” “Such an emergency brings the surgeon and the family very closely together.” His close relations with both men posed a dilemma for Keen in 1912, when Taft and Wilson ran against each other (and Teddy Roosevelt). Before the election, Keen said he would probably vote for Taft “because he has been a very careful and conservative, and yet progressive, president.” We cannot know if Keen ever discussed the Cleveland operation with any of the succeeding presidents with whom he became acquainted. But we do know that Wilson, at least, subscribed to Grover’s theory that the less the public knew about his health, the better.

  In 1907 Keen resigned his chair at Jefferson Medical College. He had taught medicine for forty-one years, and his students numbered more than ten thousand. But he hardly retired. He advocated tirelessly for evolution and vivisection (experimentation on live animals). He continued to write prolifically, authoring papers for professional journals, as well as medical articles for popular magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. (An example of the latter: “Do Warts and Moles Result in Cancer?” Keen thought they might.) He also wrote several books, including one called Everlasting Life: A Creed and a Speculation.

  As he aged, Keen said his religious views “liberalized,” but he clung tenaciously to his Baptist faith. While he may not have eaten cold roast beef every Sunday, Keen wrote that he did not follow the “modern trend of the almost total secularization of the Sabbath, in fact the total neglect of its religious duties and pleasures.” “I do not believe that God is so illogical,” he wrote late in life. “There must be another and a better world. Otherwise, God (or Nature, if one prefers it) would be a monumental bungler.”

  Apart from a bad case of diverticulitis, and occasional accidents like that broken clavicle, Keen enjoyed remarkably good health. But in January 1916, when he was seventy-nine, he contracted influenza. It was a serious illness. The ensuing pandemic would claim at least fifty million lives worldwide. Keen went to Florida to recuperate, and while he was there he decided to publish an account of the secret operation on Grover Cleveland.

  His health failing but his sense of history acute, Keen realized that the story would soon be lost forever if it wasn’t published. Nearly all the other players in the drama were now dead. It had been eight years since Grover’s passing. Dr. Joseph Bryant, who had always intended to write about the operation, never got around to it before exiting the stage in 1914. Ferdinand Hasbrouck, the much maligned dentist, had died way back in 1904, Dan Lamont in 1905, Edward Janeway in 1911, Robert O’Reilly in 1912. By 1916, just three witnesses to the events on the Oneida in July 1893 remained: Keen, Elias Benedict, and John Erdmann, who had been Bryant’s young assistant and was now himself an acclaimed surgeon in New York. As Keen later wrote, “I felt it a duty to make the facts a matter of public record before all of us had passed away.”

  Keen also felt a duty to E. J. Edwards. Keen always regretted how the newspaperman had been so viciously maligned by the Philadelphia Times. “His veracity was violently assailed,” Keen wrote. “‘Fakir’ and ‘calamity liar’ were among the obnoxious epithets applied to him.” The entire episode had struck Keen as fundamentally unjust, not to mention unchristian, and it gnawed at his conscience. In 1893, Keen could say nothing—but now he could. By publishing the facts, he said, he would “vindicate Mr. Edwards’ character as a truthful correspondent.”

  Keen was also motivated by a pinch of vanity. The operation and the patient’s long postoperative survival stood as signal achievements in his storied career. Yet the full story of those achievements had never been told. Credit should be given, Keen believed, where credit was due. And he, along with the other doctors involved, deserved credit, not just for the successful operation, but also for the small part they played in saving the gold standard.

  Before he could write anything, however, Keen deemed it “not only courteous but imperative to ask Mrs. Cleveland’s permission.” By then, Frances was no longer Mrs. Cleveland; she was Mrs. Preston. In 1913, five years after Grover’s death, Frances married a Wells College professor named Thomas J. Preston. She was forty-eight, he was fifty. They had met when he was teaching at Princeton. Frances was the first widow of a president to remarry. (Jacqueline Kennedy is the only other.) One of Frances’s biographers has described the marriage as one of “companionship,” but it would prove enduring, and Frances would be married to Thomas Preston much longer than she was married to Grover Cleveland.

  Keen’s health improved, and on February 23 he wrote to Frances. Averring that “as this was a most critical period in the life of the Nation some authoritative record of it ought to be made,” he asked for her permission to publish “the facts in the case as a contribution to the political, financial, and surgical history of the country.” Five weeks later, on March 30, Frances replied. “I think you are right,” she wrote, though she asked to see the manuscript before Keen submitted it for publication. Keen readily agreed and set about finding a suitable outlet for the story. His first choice was the most popular periodical in the country.

  Although it claims to be descended from Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, the Saturday Evening Post was actually founded in 1821 as a four-page weekly newspaper published every Saturday in Philadelphia. The paper came to be renowned for its political coverage, and developed a national readership. By 1855 it had mutated into a magazine with an impressive weekly circulation of ninety thousand. By 1897, however, circulation had dropped to two thousand, and the Post was in danger of folding. In swooped Cyrus Curtis, who bought the magazine for a mere $1,000. Curtis was a robber baron with a philanthropic streak. His fortune was estimated to be as great as J. P. Morgan’s, but Curtis gave much of his away to institutions in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia, including the Franklin Institute, Drexel University, and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1899, Curtis hired a thirty-two-year-old Kentuckian named George Horace Lorimer to run the Post. The first thing Lorimer did was start putting color illustrations on the cover (one of the illustrators he would hire was a young Norman Rockwell). Then he started filling the magazine with fiction by popular writers like Jack London—The Call of the Wild was serialized in the Post in 1903. Finally, he added a mix of human interest stories and features on current events. Editorially the Post was conservative. Muckrakers found no refuge on its pages. No boats were rocked.

  Lorimer’s formula proved to be wildly successful. By 1916 the magazine’s circulation had exceeded two million, and by the time Lorimer retired in 1936 it would top three million. If W. W. Keen wanted his story to reach the largest audience possible, it would have been impossible to do better than the Post. Keen pitched the story to Lorimer, who accepted it immediately. It wasn’t every day that the country’s most famous surgeon offered to write about a secret operation he had performed on a president of the United States.

  It’s rather peculiar that Keen chose to publish the story in a mass-market magazine like the Saturday Evening Post instead of a medical journal. After all, if the doctors had successfully removed a cancerous tumor with no recurrence of the disease for fifteen years, it was a signal achievement in oncology. And why had the operation been kept under wraps for so long, anyway? Cleveland had been dead for eight years. Why the continuing secrecy? The presidential historian Robert H. Ferrell suspects the doctors had started to have second thoughts about their original diagnosis. In Ill-Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust, Ferrell writes,

  If [Cleveland] had had, as Keen and the others believed, a fast-growing cancer of the mouth, it must have seemed to them that even with their wide-ranging operative procedure . . . the chances of survival for fifteen years would not
have been great; most cancers of the mouth, they knew, were likely to recur, if not in the same place, then through metastasis.

  Perhaps Keen wanted to avoid the peer review that would attend the publication of the story in a medical journal. Perhaps publication in a medical journal simply would not have satisfied his stated and lofty desire to contribute to the “political, financial, and surgical history of the country.” Whatever his motives, Keen plunged into the project with his customary thoroughness. He researched the story for a year. Besides his own notes, he also reviewed the notes of Bryant, Hasbrouck, and O’Reilly. He pored through reams of old newspaper clippings and read several Cleveland biographies. He interviewed Benedict and Erdmann, as well as Kasson Gibson, the dentist who’d fashioned Grover’s oral prosthesis. And he began corresponding with E. J. Edwards.

  The letters Keen and Edwards exchanged were warm, even friendly. In September 1916 Edwards apologized for a delay in replying to Keen’s last letter to him, explaining that he was suffering from “tired nerves.” When Keen responded with concern for Edwards’s health, the reporter responded, “I appreciate your kindly interest in my health but I am sorry to say that I have been advised to take a spell of complete rest until I am in normal condition.” In these exchanges, Edwards told Keen for the first time exactly how he had learned of the operation: Hasbrouck’s missed appointment with Carlos MacDonald, Hasbrouck telling MacDonald about the surgery, MacDonald telling Leander Jones, Jones telling Edwards. “It was by pure chance that it was given to me,” Edwards explained. “I will say that there was no financial or political motive behind it. Had there been I should not have written the story.”

  By March 1917, Keen had finished the first draft of his manuscript. He sent a copy to Frances, who complimented him on his effort. “How vividly it brings back to me all the details of that anxious summer,” she wrote in a letter to Keen.

  The story was published in the September 22, 1917, edition of the Saturday Evening Post. On the cover was an illustration of a befuddled doughboy trying to talk to a shy French peasant girl.* Keen’s story began on page twenty-four of the 120-page issue. Entitled “The Surgical Operations on President Cleveland in 1893,” the article was credited to “W. W. Keen, M.D., LL.D., Emeritus Professor of Surgery, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia.” It filled three full pages of the oversized periodical and was accompanied by two photographs of Grover taken at his home in Princeton in 1906.

  In sixty-five hundred words, Keen adeptly summarizes the turbulent political, financial, and social circumstances surrounding the operation, though he describes the procedure itself only briefly. The article begins with an homage to E. J. Edwards, noting that his report in the Philadelphia Press on August 29, 1893, was “substantially correct, even in most of the details.” Keen’s version of events is not unbiased, however. He is unapologetic about the secrecy surrounding the operation. “Now, after the lapse of nearly a quarter century,” he writes, “it is even more evident than it was at the time that the instant decision of Mr. Cleveland ...to keep the operation a profound secret was wise, and one may say imperative. What the consequences would have been had it become known at once we can only surmise, and shudder!”

  Keen ends the article with a paean to Grover:

  My political principles and convictions differed from his own, but I never questioned his sincerity. He had long had my profound respect, but he gained my affection in the very first hour I passed with him on the deck of the Oneida. May this nation be ever blessed with many such noble, fearless citizens!

  Despite its name, the Saturday Evening Post was usually delivered in the mail on Wednesdays, so E. J. Edwards must have been very impatient for the postman to arrive at his home in Greenwich on Wednesday, September 19. One can imagine him, now nearly seventy and in fragile health, shuffling into his parlor with the magazine in his hand, settling into a comfortable chair, and paging through the advertisements for Cream of Wheat, Campbell’s soup, and Firestone tires until he found Keen’s article. As he read it, a smile must have come to his face. At long last, he was vindicated.

  It also must have occurred to Edwards—and to many other readers—just how profoundly the world had changed since the secret operation on Grover Cleveland. The pages of the Post were filled with advertisements for automobiles (a five-passenger Mitchell Junior with a forty-horsepower motor started at $1,250), as well as articles from France, where the American Expeditionary Forces were preparing to join the British and the French on the western front. The Great War was being fought with nimble airplanes that could reach speeds of 130 miles an hour and efficient new machine guns that could mow down the enemy with ghastly efficiency. These advances—if they can be called that—were scarcely imaginable in 1893, when Henry Ford was still tinkering with his first gasoline-powered buggy.

  W. W. Keen’s Saturday Evening Post article caused a sensation among journalists. Not only did it finally solve the mystery of what really took place on the Oneida all those years ago; it also vindicated one of their own. A headline in the Washington Herald read, “Journalist Who Scooped the World Is Vindicated After Being Branded a ‘Faker’ for Twenty-five [sic] Years.”

  Edwards was inundated with congratulatory letters and telegrams.

  “My congratulations sincere and heartfelt, for the splendid vindication of you contained in the remarkable article by Dr. W. W. Keen,” wrote one old colleague. “This article will make up the record that will become traditional of an outstanding newspaper feat.”

  “I am delighted to have your treatment and report of the Cleveland operation so thoroughly vindicated by such eminent authority as Dr. Keen,” wrote Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, which had started a journalism program just five years earlier.

  Edwards’s old boss, Philadelphia Press publisher Charles Emory Smith, had died in 1908, but his successor, Alden March, sent his congratulations on the paper’s behalf: “Of course we were all greatly pleased over your vindication by Dr. Keen.”

  But E. J. would receive no congratulations—and no apologies— from Alexander McClure, the Philadelphia Times publisher who had called him a “disgrace to journalism.” In 1901, McClure sold the Times to Adolph Ochs, the owner of the New York Times. McClure retired to his farm outside Philadelphia but lost his fortune just two years later due to “unfortunate investments.” Practically penniless, McClure found an unlikely savior: his old nemesis, Charles Emory Smith, the Philadelphia Press publisher and prominent Republican. Smith quietly arranged for McClure to be appointed prothonotary, or clerk, of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, a cushy job that paid a handsome $12,000 a year. On June 6, 1909, McClure was talking with his family on his front porch when he dropped dead. He was eighty-one.

  In 1902, a year after he bought the Times from McClure, Adolph Ochs bought another Philadelphia paper, the Public Ledger, and merged it with the Times, though the new paper was still called the Public Ledger. In 1913, Ochs sold the Public Ledger to Cyrus Curtis, the publisher of the Saturday Evening Post. As a result, technically at least, Curtis owned both the paper that had vilified E. J. Edwards in 1893 and the magazine that vindicated him twenty-four years later. (Another coincidence: in 1920, Curtis would buy Edwards’s old paper, the Philadelphia Press, and fold it into the Public Ledger.)

  E. J. Edwards was moved by the outpouring of congratulations that followed the Post article. “I cannot tell you how much I appreciate what you wrote of my relation to the operation,” Edwards wrote Keen the week after the article was published. “The article must have been widely read as I have received by mail congratulations for the vindication you embodied in the article. When I come to Philadelphia I hope to call upon you and make by hand grasp and face to face greeting the personal acquaintance that will supplement that which has been established by our correspondence.”

  Keen was gratified. “After suffering in silence for twenty-four years,” he wrote of Edwards, “his vindication was now complete.”

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  * The illustrator was J. C. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell’s mentor and, in his time, the most famous illustrator in the country.

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  POSTMORTEM

  IF E. J. EDWARDS ever made W. W. Keen’s acquaintance “by hand grasp and face to face greeting,” the event was unrecorded. Edwards was frail in his final years and rarely traveled, though he continued to write columns for the Wall Street Journal. In 1918, a year after his vindication, Edwards was paid tribute by the Washington Herald, another paper that published his columns over the years: “Under the penname of ‘Holland,’ this truly remarkable man has presented for more than a quarter of a century an unbiased review of current financial, industrial, commercial, and transportation conditions which has challenged the admiration of the critics and the captains of these various spheres of activity.”

  In 1920, Edwards attended the Yale Class of 1870’s fiftieth reunion. “The years pass on and we go on upon the path our career has already made,” he wrote the reunion committee in a rare moment of self-reflection.

  I presume the accumulation of words, words, words which identify my various articles . . . would be represented in figures by several million. But it is gratifying to know that much that I have written has been of good influence, for of this I have both the spoken and written proof of many of the leaders in thought and action. My work has not brought many dollars to me, but it has secured for me regard and some influence, such as dollars and cents cannot buy. That is as far as my modesty will permit me to go.”