When the Cheering Stopped

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When the Cheering Stopped Page 12

by Smith, Gene;


  Upon the occasions when he was in the capital Marshall spent most of his time working at getting jobs for his cronies, telephoning people from his office, which, however, did not please him. He wanted one where he could put his feet up on the desk, and instead had to do with one that was too easily accessible and did not differ much “from a monkey cage, except that the visitors do not offer me any peanuts.” A cigar was never absent from his face or hand, and of course he will always be remembered for the remark he made during a Senate debate: “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.”

  After the first two or three terrifying days of the President’s illness, the bland bulletins seemed to put Marshall’s mind at ease, for his humorous inclinations did not desert him. On October 6, as Senator Borah bitterly argued about the League of Nations with the Democratic Minority Leader, Senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, Marshall from his seat as presiding officer interrupted to put before the Senate a letter he had received. He had it read out by the Secretary of the Senate. It was from a brand-new father who wanted the Senate to help him choose a name for his baby boy. He sought, the man wrote Marshall, to name the boy after a Senator, any Senator. “The man who will give the baby the biggest prize can have the name … Mr. Marshall, see what you can do for me.” (Sometimes the Vice President’s levity shocked people.)

  A few days earlier, when a delegation went by train to New York to welcome the King and Queen of the Belgians to America, the usual Washington attitude toward Marshall was demonstrated when the Secretary of State was given a private compartment on the train and Marshall and his wife were given two seats in a coach. (After the King and Queen and their son, the Duke of Brabant, later King Leopold III, learned of the President’s illness, they announced they were abandoning their ceremonial tour of the country and would travel in a quiet way, incognito.)

  Marshall had, it was true, sat in on a few Cabinet meetings at the President’s suggestion in late 1918 when the President was in Europe for the Peace Conference. But soon he gave up his attendance, saying if he couldn’t have the President’s $75,000 a year he was not going to do any of the President’s work. He added that he preferred his own job, anyway—“No responsibilities.” But in October of 1919, Marshall was in the position, whether he liked it or not, of being liable to have to take over the President’s duties at any moment. The Cabinet had not formally discussed the possible devolution of the President’s duties upon the Vice President, but the thought was in everybody’s mind. And yet for days nothing was said by anybody to the Vice President about the possibility.

  Finally Tumulty decided Marshall should be told something of the situation he was in. Thinking that it would be unwise for anyone formally connected with the President to speak with Marshall—any direct statement might be used as proof of Presidential disability—it was decided to send a completely unofficial person to tell Marshall clearly that at any moment he might find himself President of the United States. The man chosen was J. Fred Essary, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. Essary went to Marshall’s office and sat by the Vice President’s desk. As the reporter began to speak, Marshall lowered his head and put his hands on the desk. His teeth gripped his cigar. Essary said what he had to say, giving no details beyond what he himself had been told: the President could die at any moment. When Essary finished, he waited for Marshall to speak. But the Vice President, head bowed, was silent. Essary uncertainly stood up and waited. Marshall did not say a word. Essary went to the door, opened it, looked back. Marshall’s head was still down. The cigar had gone out. He was looking at his hands. Essary went out and closed the door behind him.

  * Telling the story may have been a way of impressing the reporters with the fact that saluting a cow—or, more to the point, empty sidewalks—is not necessarily a sign of insanity. This is, however, only the author’s speculation.

  * Although the rumor has lasted into the present day, there is irrefutable medical proof that the President never suffered from a venereal disease. The window bars were almost twenty years old and had been put in place to protect the glass from Theodore Roosevelt’s ball-playing children.

  * At about this time a worried official of the United Press asked the manager of the Washington bureau, “Suppose Wilson was running around nekkid on the second floor of the White House, and nobody could ketch him—how would you find out about it?” The bureau manager had to reply that for all he knew the President was in fact doing just what the UP official described.

  7

  The word “thrombosis” refers to a clotting of blood in a blood vessel. Such a condition can block the blood’s normal movement in a part of the body. It is caused by a multiplicity of reasons and can be brought on by overwork and hypertension. It is not the same thing as a “stroke,” in which the blood vessel ruptures, but the symptoms are very similar.

  Some of the symptoms of a thrombosis in the human brain are violent stomach upsets—which are at first often diagnosed as resulting from indigestion or influenza—and hitherto unexperienced insomnia, twitching of the face, difficulty in using a pen, headaches, great weakness, and paralysis of one side of the body (which may come and then temporarily go).

  These are the physical distresses, obvious to anyone who comes in contact with the patient. There are also more subtle mental changes. The victim often becomes unreasonable, apprehensive, irritable. He may become violently emotional—the most common characteristic is frequent crying spells—and lose a great deal of his judgment. One thrombosis in the brain may well be shaken off, but eventually there will be another, although the second may not come for months or even years. The process by which repeated clottings end the patient’s life may, in some cases, take up to twenty or even thirty years. In effect, little bites, one with each thrombosis, are being taken of the brain. The brain is slowly dying. When there is one bite too many, the brain dies.

  The great Louis Pasteur suffered a thrombosis and lived to do some of his finest work with two thirds of a brain. However, most doctors advise the family of a man who has suffered a serious thrombosis to retire him from business immediately and to guard him against temptations which formerly would not have interested him. Important businessmen, shorn of their judgment by the condition, have lost their fortunes in months. Clergymen have taken up with prostitutes.

  In April of 1919, in Paris, the President of the United States suffered, according to all evidence available after the fact, a thrombosis in his brain. His illness was diagnosed as influenza by his doctor—a logical diagnosis at a time when influenza outbreaks were sweeping the world. When the President got up from his sickbed, certain strange things in him were seen—his sudden decision, later rescinded, that he go home; his worry about the furniture in the house he occupied; his suspicion of the French servants; his rapid banishment of Colonel House from his confidence; his insistence that official cars not be used for formerly permitted pleasure trips—but not too much attention was paid to these changes.

  There were two reasons working to prohibit much inquiry. One was that he was under enormous strain during the peace negotiations and could logically have been expected to develop eccentricities; the second was that he was the President, a strong President and a strong personality, and there was not a person who could say him no. In any event, none of his actions were in themselves terribly objectionable—House, for instance, was disliked and distrusted by many people, including Cary Grayson and the First Lady, and perhaps the servants were spies and the cars overused.

  So the Peace Conference ended and the President came home to fight for the League of Nations. But when on his tour he collapsed, one half of his face fallen and his arm and leg temporarily paralyzed, Dr. Grayson knew at once that serious brain damage had been sustained. Once back in Washington, there was reason to hope that with rest he might well throw off the effects of the thrombosis and get back to something approaching normal health. Then came the morning when he fell in his bathroom. After that he lay between life and death for several days
. Only a tiny group of people, half a dozen, had access to his sickroom. The doctors called in as consultants could, of course, not dictate what the President should do in non-medical matters. Cary Grayson, in addition to being a doctor, was a naval officer on active duty, sworn to obey the orders of his Commander in Chief and therefore voiceless in policy matters. The President himself was desperately ill and unable to decide anything. There was only one person who could speak in his name and make use of, and make felt, his powers as President. Only one person could decide that he would continue in his job as though nothing had happened.

  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 aros
e, 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.”*

 

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