The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  In those congressional elections, Marshall regretted their being held in wartime, but he threw himself behind Wilson’s push for election of a Democratic Congress. At Wilson’s specific request, Marshall, in a late campaign speech in Wisconsin, launched a sharply partisan attack uncommon to him on a Republican congressional nominee who actually supported Wilson on the war, asking him, “Do you doubt that Republican success will be hailed at home and abroad as repudiation? Do you want the election returns celebrated in London and Paris, where Wilson is honored, or in Berlin and Vienna where he is hated?”30 But Marshall’s uncharacteristically demagogic words backfired. On Election Night, the Democrats lost control of the Senate and the votes that might otherwise have sustained Wilson later in his fight for the Peace Treaty of Versailles.

  A week after that election, the armistice ending the shooting was signed, and on December 4, 1918, for the first time in the nation’s history, an American president left the country for Europe, to negotiate the treaty between the Allied Powers and the defeated German Empire. Marshall, asked by a reporter what he thought of a notion that the duties of the president should be transferred to him in Wilson’s absence, said, “I have not the slightest desire nor intention of interfering with the President, unless I am forced to, and that will be of infinite regret to me.” He said he supported Wilson’s trip, then reassured, “Most certainly do not want his job while he is away.” He added, “That does not mean I am dodging responsibility.… I will meet it squarely and accept whatever responsibility was placed upon me.”31

  Before departing, Wilson designated Marshall to preside over his cabinet meetings while he was away, but the president actually called the first cabinet meeting in his absence by cable from sea. In taking over, Marshall pointedly told the attendees he was acting at Wilson’s request and also at their request, that he was there “informally and personally” and was “not undertaking to exercise any official duty or function.”32 He also made a point of observing that he did not accept the notion that a vice president needed to be kept better informed of his president’s policies in order to be able to carry them out in the event that anything happened to him. “A vice president might make a poor president,” he said, “but he would make a much poorer one if he attempted to subordinate his own mind and views to carry out the ideas of a dead man.”33

  After sitting at the head of the table for only a few cabinet meetings, Marshall stopped attending. Upon completion of the negotiations for the peace treaty, Wilson returned to Washington and plunged into the struggle over Senate ratification against Republican senators led by Chairman Henry Cabot Lodge of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, none of them invited to the negotiations. When the treaty failed, Wilson embarked on a tour of the country to sell it to the American people, against the advice of his White House physician, Dr. Cary T. Grayson. For twenty-two days, Wilson traveled more than eight thousand miles by train, making about forty speeches and en route increasingly complaining to his wife about severe headaches.

  On the night of September 26, 1919, after a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, Edith Wilson called Grayson to examine the restless president. The doctor concluded at this point only that he was “suffering from nervous exhaustion” but that “his condition [was] not alarming.”34 Under the doctor’s orders Wilson returned to the White House, and six days later, he suffered a massive stroke that partly paralyzed his left side. Edith Wilson found him lying unconscious on his bathroom floor and summoned Grayson, who issued a terse statement saying little more than “the President is a very sick man” and that “absolute rest is essential for some time.”35 Grayson, together with Wilson’s secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, and Mrs. Wilson, decided that the president have no visitors and that only the most pressing business be brought to him.

  Through all this, Vice President Marshall was not informed of the seriousness of Wilson’s plight. At the time of the attack, he was in Hoboken, New Jersey, along with Secretary of State Robert Lansing, greeting the arriving king and queen of Belgium and their son. Wilson’s condition clearly raised the question whether under the Constitution he should be declared unable to carry out his presidential duties and, at least temporarily, that they be bestowed on the vice president. In Edith Wilson’s later memoir, she wrote that her husband’s neurologist said it was imperative that she shield Wilson from anything that might upset him, explaining, “Every time you take him a new anxiety or problem to excite him, you are turning a knife in an open wound. His nerves are crying out for rest, any excitement is torture to him.”36

  She wrote that she thereupon asked the doctor, “Then had he better not resign, let Mr. Marshall succeed to the presidency and he himself get that complete rest so vital to his life?” The doctor replied, she wrote, “No. Not if you feel equal to what I have suggested. For Mr. Wilson to resign would have a bad effect on the country, and a serious effect on our patient. He has staked his life and made his promise to the world to do all in his power to get the Treaty ratified and make the League of Nations complete. If he resigns, the greatest incentive to recover is gone; and as his mind is clear as crystal he can still do more with even a maimed body than anyone else.” Marshall’s wife, Lois, reported years later that Grayson said he had urged Wilson to resign but that he had refused.37

  Lansing, by the nature of his responsibilities in foreign policy, was brought into the small inner circle who knew Wilson’s true condition and was the first to raise the question of presidential disability and succession. Lansing handed Tumulty a copy of the Constitution, from which he read the pertinent language. Tumulty, shaken, was said to have replied, “Mr. Lansing, the Constitution is not a dead letter with the White House. I have read the Constitution and do not find myself in need of any tutoring at your hands of the provision that you have just read. You may rest assured that while Woodrow Wilson is lying in the White House on the broad of his back I will not be a party to ousting him.” At that, Grayson entered the room. Tumulty turned to him and added, “And I am sure that Dr. Grayson would never certify to his disability.”38 Grayson agreed. Tumulty wrote later, “It is unnecessary to say that no further attempt was made by Mr. Lansing to institute ouster proceedings against his chief.”39

  Lansing, as the ranking member of the cabinet, nevertheless called a meeting of the other members to discuss Wilson’s condition with Grayson, but after hearing the doctor they seemed satisfied that no action was necessary. When Wilson later learned that Lansing had done so without Wilson’s knowledge and authorization, he demanded and got the resignation of the secretary of state.40

  With the rumors of Wilson’s health intensifying in Washington, Tumulty decided that Vice President Marshall should be alerted in an unofficial manner of the president’s condition. Tumulty informed Secretary of Agriculture David Houston, who was to have lunch with Marshall the next day, to so advise him. Houston wrote later that Marshall “was evidently much disturbed and expressed regret that he was being kept in the dark about the president’s condition.… [He said] that it would be a tragedy for him to assume the duties of the President, at best … that he knew many men who knew more about the affairs of government than he did; and that it would be especially trying for him if he had to assume the duties without warning.”41

  Two weeks after the previous stroke, Wilson developed a serious prostate blockage that doctors said would require surgery, which could be fatal, but Mrs. Wilson rejected it. After a few hours the blockage resolved itself, but the crisis convinced Tumulty, Grayson, and Lansing that Marshall had to be told all. But would such notification constitute the triggering of the presidential disability language in the Constitution? It was decided, probably by Tumulty, that the best way would be to enlist a trusted and dependable White House reporter, J. Fred Essary, of the Baltimore Sun, to so advise the vice president. Essary reported later that when he did so, Marshall was stunned and speechless, staring at his folded hands on his desk.

  Marshall decided to go to the White House to discuss the situation direct
ly with Wilson, but the president’s wife refused to admit him to the sickroom. Marshall vowed that nothing would persuade him to take any action short of a resolution of Congress or a written direction from Mrs. Wilson. He firmly told his secretary, Mark Thistlethwaite, “I am not going to seize the place and then have Wilson, recovered, come around and say, ‘Get off, you usurper!’ ”42 And he told his wife, “I could throw this country into civil war, but I won’t.”43

  Meanwhile, official papers requiring Wilson’s attention or signature were shuttled to Edith Wilson for her own decision on whether they should be seen or signed by the president. Some signed documents bore a shaky handwriting that led to speculation and doubt as to whether it was Wilson’s hand that signed them. A Republican senator, Albert Fall, gushed, “We have a petticoat government! Mrs. Wilson is president!”44

  All this while, Marshall was presiding over the Senate debate on the peace treaty and ratification of Wilson’s dream of a league of nations, with the United States as a member. Senators of both parties approached him to assume the presidency or at least its duties; aware that Marshall supported Wilson on the treaty but believing he might accept some modifications that Wilson had rejected, they hoped he might be the vehicle for a breakthrough. But Marshall stood firm.

  Years later, he wrote, “Those were not pleasant months for me. The standing joke of the country is that the only business of the vice-president is to ring the White House bell every morning and ask what is the state of health of the president. If there were a soul so lost to humanity to have desired his death, I was not that soul. I hoped that he might acquire his wonted health. I was afraid to ask about it, for fear some censorious soul would accuse me to a longing for his place. I never have wanted his shoes. Peace, friendship and good will have ever been more to me than place or pomp or power.”45

  Beyond that, Marshall knew that the daunting Edith Wilson held a low opinion of this witty and unaffected man, and he had no intention of getting on cross purposes with her. He told columnist Arthur Krock of the New York Times, “No politician ever exposes himself to the hatred of a woman, particularly if she’s the wife of the President of the United States.”46 Mrs. Wilson’s own judgment of her husband’s ability to function as president during this time, dealing with matters of state, was severely questioned later. The chief usher in the White House, Irwin “Ike” Hoover, who saw Wilson immediately after Mrs. Wilson found him collapsed and in the days thereafter, wrote later that there “never was deception so universally practiced in the White House as it was in those statements given out from time to time.”47

  Eventually, Wilson’s health stabilized sufficiently for Marshall to undertake some speech engagements outside Washington. On November 23, 1919, he was addressing a convention in Atlanta when he was called to the telephone. Told that the vice president was in the middle of his speech, the caller replied, “Well, I guess he’ll come now. President Wilson has just died in Washington.” When the message was conveyed, Marshall passed it on to the audience, saying, with head bowed, “I cannot continue my speech. I must leave at once to take up my duties as Chief Executive of this great nation. I cannot bear the great burdens of our beloved chieftain unless I receive the assistance of everybody in this country.” As he and wife Lois left the stage and the auditorium organist started playing “Nearer My God to Thee,” Marshall phoned the White House and was told the call was a hoax; Wilson still lived.48

  In 1920, Marshall threw his hat into the ring, but beyond Indiana there was little support for him. When the rival Republicans nominated Governor Warren G. Harding of Ohio for president and Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts for vice president, Marshall sent Coolidge a telegram: “Please accept my sincere sympathy.”49 Wilson, to the surprise of many, finished out his term in 1921, and Marshall with him. Soon after, President Harding appointed Marshall to the Lincoln Memorial Commission. On June 1, 1825, Marshall died of a heart attack at the Willard Hotel in Washington, where, not well-off enough to buy a home in the area, he had spent some of his eight years as vice president.

  Along with being a small man in stature, Thomas Marshall of Indiana was perhaps also, as Woodrow Wilson once said, “a small caliber man” in terms of intellect and erudition. But in the restraint and grace he displayed in those dark days when Wilson seemed at death’s door and the presidency might well have passed to him, he demonstrated qualities that earned him distinction in the vice presidency that few other occupants, past or present, have ever achieved.

  CALVIN COOLIDGE

  OF MASSACHUSETTS

  Over the fireplace in the home of Calvin Coolidge in Northampton, Massachusetts, hung a placard that read, “A wise old owl lived in an oak; the more he saw the less he spoke. The less he spoke the more he heard; why can’t we be like that old bird?”1 Some years later, when he had become the leader of his country, a prominent society lady sitting next to Coolidge at a Washington dinner party said to him, “Oh, Mr. President, you are so silent. I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” He replied, “You lose.”2

  The man known as “Silent Cal” also attributed his political climb from his position in the state legislature, then as mayor of Northampton, lieutenant governor and governor of Massachusetts, and finally as vice president and president of the United States to his reticence. “I have never been hurt by what I have not said,” he declared.3

  Indeed, his elevation from local and state politics to the national stage as the nation’s twenty-ninth vice president did not come out of self-promotion by Coolidge. The genesis was the Republican governors’ irate reaction at their party’s 1920 national convention in Chicago to the smoke-filled cabal, where U.S. senators chose one of their own, the affable and moderate Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio, for the presidential nomination.

  When the “Senatorial Soviet,” as one critic later called it, sought also to anoint another colleague, Senator Irvine L. Lenroot of Wisconsin, as the vice presidential nominee, a rebellion broke out. As Senator Medill McCormick of Illinois was placing Lenroot’s name in nomination, a delegate from Oregon, the former state supreme court justice Wallace McCamant, interrupted with a cry of “Coolidge! Coolidge!” that rang through the hall.

  Earlier, with Coolidge’s acquiescence, the Massachusetts delegation had entered his name for president, even though, characteristically, as he wrote later in his autobiography, he “did not wish to use the office of governor in an attempt to prosecute a campaign for nomination for some other office.”4 He therefore did not permit his name to be entered in any state primaries, and the former newspaperman Harding was nominated.5 Prior to the nominations for vice president, Coolidge had informed the Massachusetts delegation that he did not want his name offered for that position either. The political boss of the state’s western portion, W. Murray Crane, had passed the word: “Don’t put the governor up. He’s been beaten once, and he doesn’t want a second defeat.”6

  The Oregon delegation meanwhile had come to Chicago instructed to vote for Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, but Lodge too had asked that his name not be put forward. Consequently, McCamant demanded the floor, saying, “But there is another son of Massachusetts who has been much in the public eye during the past year,” referring to Coolidge’s celebrated firmness in putting down a Boston police strike in 1919.7 When McCamant offered him as Harding’s running mate, the convention exploded in approval, and Coolidge was overwhelmingly nominated over Lenroot, the choice of the senatorial cabal.

  Calvin Coolidge’s typically terse remarks in snuffing out that police strike—“There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime”—had brought him instant national acclaim.8 At a time when the country had grown weary of conflict, including the labor unrest following the Great War, Coolidge’s words insisting on the maintenance of law and order at home resonated widely, as did his personal placid demeanor.

  The choice, however, was not quite the spontaneous action suggested by the popular
narrative. Crane and Frank W. Stearns, a Boston businessman who had attended Amherst College with Coolidge, had circulated a seventy-thousand-copy printing of Coolidge’s inspirational speeches called Have Faith in Massachusetts to all prospective convention delegates.9 So Coolidge’s name was on their minds well before the Oregonian’s call to his colors on the convention floor.

  Although Coolidge gained his first fame and political fortune as governor of Massachusetts, his roots and general outlook on life came more from neighboring Vermont, where he was born in Plymouth Notch on the Fourth of July, 1872, to the proprietor of the local post office and general store and his wife. They named him John after his father, but he always was called Calvin. A sister, Abby, was born three years later. Their father also ran the family farm and later opened a blacksmith shop. Their mother was a gentle woman of fair complexion who died from injuries suffered in a carriage accident caused by a runaway horse when Calvin was only twelve years old.10 His sister died a few years later. His grandfather left him forty acres of Vermont farmland, with the intent that he work it for the rest of his life.

  When Calvin was only two months old, his father was elected to the Vermont legislature. Calvin’s own frugality in mercenary matters and his temperate behavior were an inheritance from his Vermont beginnings. Of his neighbors, he wrote later, “Their speech was clean and their lives were above reproach. They had no mortgages on their farms. If any debts were contracted they were promptly paid. Credit was good and there was money in the savings bank.”11 The town of Plymouth Notch was grounded in democratic principles, and young Calvin followed its early political meetings and discussions with great interest. His father at times also served as a local constable, sheriff, justice of the peace, and tax collector and often took him to court hearings.