“Oh, Dr. Keen, those office-seekers. Those office-seekers. They haunt me even in my dreams.”
Cleveland slept well that evening, having declined the offer of a sedative. The next morning, Keen examined the president. Cleveland said he was positive that the rough spot inside his mouth was of recent origin and had not been present when he took the oath of office on March 4. Probing the ulcerous growth, Keen said it was “unquestionably malignant.” Surprisingly, though Cleveland weighed almost three hundred pounds, Keen found little evidence of arteriosclerosis. His pulse was ninety, within normal range. But Keen was worried—not necessarily about the operation itself, but the administration of anesthesia. The president’s corpulence aside, there was the age factor—he was fifty-six—and physically drained. The team was seriously concerned that Cleveland might suffer a heart attack and die on the operating table.
Throughout the morning, with the yacht proceeding up the East River at half speed, Cleveland’s mouth was repeatedly cleansed and disinfected. As the Oneida sailed past Bellevue Hospital on 26th Street, all the physicians abruptly went below deck lest their colleagues at Bellevue, who might be gazing out at the passing vessel, recognize them and suspect that something was up.
With the yacht continuing its progress up river, the operation commenced. Imagine the steady hands of the physicians involved. No one wanted to think about the consequences if something terrible happened. All their reputations were on the line. “If you hit a rock, hit it good and hard,” Dr. Bryant informed the ship’s captain. That way, at least, “we’ll all go to the bottom.” It was dark humor at its most macabre.
The cabin had been cleared of furnishings except for the organ, which was fastened down. Cleveland was placed on a chair that was propped up against the mast. A dose of nitrous oxide put the president under, and Hasbrouck, the dentist, went at it, extracting the two left upper bicuspids. They were having trouble rendering the president fully unconscious and an additional dose of ether was ordered. Ether was more potent than nitrous oxide but also riskier. The problem with ether was that while it knocked a patient out, sometimes the patient never woke up. They monitored Cleveland’s vital signs as an incision was made and the entire left upper jaw was excised with a cheek retractor, a “most useful” instrument that Keen had discovered while attending a medical convention in Paris in 1866. The physicians peered into the exposed hollow cavity of the upper jaw and found that it was filled with a gelatinous mass, evidently a sarcoma. A small section of the soft palate was also removed. Thank goodness the cancer had not spread into the orbit of the eye socket, which meant that Cleveland’s left eye would remain in place, and the president would be spared any external disfigurement. The physicians worked at a fast pace, and the entire procedure lasted only thirty-one minutes. Cleveland hemorrhaged a mere six ounces of blood—just enough to fill a tumbler. The large cavity inside the president’s mouth was packed with gauze and cotton, and while he was still out, he was injected with a hypodermic needle of morphine to manage the pain. The patient was lifted onto a bed.
“What a sigh of intense relief, we surgeons breathed,” Keen said many years later as he recounted the experience. They all shared a toast of whiskey in celebration of a successful operation.
When Cleveland opened his eyes, he saw a physician standing over him who he did not recognize. It was Bryant’s assistant, Dr. John Erdmann, taking first turn on the watch. With his mouth packed with dressing, the ill-tempered president grumbled, “Who the hell are you?”
Erdmann identified himself. Cleveland asked where he came from.
“Chillicothe,” Erdmann answered, in Ohio.
“Oh, do you know Mr. Nigbe there?”
“Yes, he’s the druggist.”
A woozy Cleveland, his mind not really functioning, wondered whether the druggist was interested in a government job. When Erdmann assured Cleveland that the druggist was doing just fine, Cleveland snapped, “Then he won’t get one!”
Keen and the other doctors took turns sitting by the president’s bedside. To pass the time when he was awake, they read to him. The next day, Cleveland wobbled out of bed. By the third day, he was socializing with his old friend Commodore Benedict and Secretary Lamont. Dr. Hasbrouck was anxious to leave—he had another operation scheduled—and was dropped off at New London, Connecticut. Then the yacht crossed Long Island Sound bound for Sag Harbor, where Keen got off and made his way home to Philadelphia. The next day, the Oneida reached Buzzards Bay. Somehow, Cleveland found the strength to walk from the launch to his summer house, Gray Gables.
Newspaper reporters smelled something was up, but during an impromptu news conference held inside the barn at Gray Gables, Lamont deflected suspicions with out-and-out falsehoods and the usual scorn for anyone who questioned the official White House line. All he conceded was that the president had been stricken with a tooth infection and had to have two teeth pulled on his way to Buzzards Bay. But that was all. Specifically asked about a malignancy, Lamont snapped that it was a “preposterous” question.
For the next several days, Cleveland was kept out of sight while he recuperated. A New York orthodontist, Dr. Kasson Gibson, was brought in to fit the president with an artificial jaw made of vulcanized rubber. When the appliance was mounted into the hole inside his mouth, it had the effect of reinforcing the underpinning of Cleveland’s cheek and thus averted the appearance of a sunken jaw. Cleveland tried it out. His speech was labored, but no one would have suspected that much of his jawbone had been surgically removed. Later, when the rubber plate gave him some trouble, Cleveland was fitted with a more comfortable appliance.
Even the greatest healers can sometimes slip up. Cleveland was still recuperating at Gray Gables when Dr. Bryant found something disturbing. It was now evident that not all the diseased tissue had been cut out. Because the mouth had been bathed in blood during the operation, the surgeons had apparently overlooked a small mass of it. Word went out to the team of surgeons, and once again, everybody assembled on the Oneida for another round of clandestine surgery. Keen took the train to Greenwich, Connecticut, where Commodore Benedict lived. The Oneida was waiting for him at dockside and crossed the sound to Buzzards Bay. Cleveland boarded the yacht on July 17 and, just to be safe, a second operation was performed, and the suspicious tissue excised.
As the president convalesced, it was crucial that he attend to the national economic crisis. Cleveland called for a special session of Congress to be held on August 7 to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which required the United States to purchase a set quantity of silver every month with a special treasury note that could be redeemed in gold. The misguided law, which had been passed in 1890 during the Harrison administration, was now threatening to deplete the nation’s gold reserve. Charles Hamlin, the assistant secretary of the treasury, went to Gray Gables on July 23 with an important statistical analysis prepared by the treasury department to update the president on the status of the gold supply. Confiding to his diary, Hamlin wrote, “Cleveland appeared not well at all. Had his mouth packed with some kind of bandage. Could not speak distinctly . . . looked thoroughly tired out.” When Attorney General Richard Olney called on Cleveland, he was shocked to see at how much weight the president had lost. His mouth was still stuffed with antiseptic wads, and he could barely speak.
“My god, Olney, they nearly killed me!” Like the rest of the country, Olney had no idea that the president had cancer. He found Cleveland depressed, resigned to imminent death. Olney wondered how the removal of two molars could have caused him to be in this state.
As Cleveland’s mouth healed, he found a peach in the kitchen and ate it—much to his wife’s annoyance, since he was supposed to take only liquids during his convalescence. But his physical endurance was nil, and his hair had thinned out and turned white. He seemed to have become an old man overnight.
E. J. Edwards, a reporter who wrote under the pseudonym Holland for the Philadelphia Press, got a whiff of the president’s true condition. I
n a roundabout way, the leak had come from Dr. Hasbrouck, the dentist who had administered the anesthesia. Hasbrouck explained to another doctor that he had been unavoidably delayed because he had to operate on a very important patient, none other than President Cleveland. That was quite a name to drop. The doctor who heard the story happened to be a friend of E. J. Edwards. The reporter went to see Hasbrouck and, bluffing his way through the interview, claimed that he only wanted to double-check some of the facts he already knew. Hasbrouck ended up telling him everything. He even gave him the names of all the physicians who were on the president’s surgical team. Even with this solid foundation for a story, Edwards held back. To accuse the Cleveland administration of lying to the American people in this time of national crisis could have historic repercussions, and it could jeopardize the congressional vote to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Keen, Erdmann, Bryant, and O’Reilly were approached by Edwards, but they all stuck to the story that the president had had routine dental work and nothing more. Erdmann later said he “did more lying” than he had done in his entire life put together.
The White House denials were so vehement that Edwards’s editors had second thoughts and spiked the story for the time being. On August 28, the House of Representatives voted in favor of repealing the silver act, handing Cleveland a major victory. The next day, the Philadelphia Press finally “summoned the nerve” to run with Edwards’s scoop—that the president had a malignancy and part of his jaw had been surgically removed. Once again, Cleveland’s people assailed the messenger. Edwards and the Philadelphia Press were attacked with all the gusto that had been aimed at the long-departed Buffalo Evening Telegraph. The rival Philadelphia Times accused Edwards of writing fiction.
“Mr. Cleveland had suffered so much at the hands of untruthful newspaper correspondents . . . that he felt compelled to seek a quiet spot even to have his teeth looked after,” spewed the Philadelphia Times. Cleveland’s neighbor in Buzzards Bay was quoted as saying, “I have never seen him in better health.”
It took a quarter of a century for the truth to come out. In 1917, at the age of eighty, Dr. Keen decided it was time for the American people to be told the real story. He wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post and later published a monograph, The Surgical Operations on President Cleveland in 1893.
On Cleveland’s last day as president, he suffered an attack of gout and walked with a limp as he escorted President-elect McKinley up the steps of the Capitol building to his inauguration. In one hand, Cleveland carried a tightly rolled umbrella, which he held at the ready in the event that he required something to lean on. He left office a pariah in his own party, his policies held in low esteem for having brought economic malaise to America. Nevertheless, there was grudging admiration for his steadfastness and rigid honesty. With the passage of time, Cleveland has come to be regarded as a well-thought-of if not a great president. His administration restored good feelings between North and South. He successfully opposed adoption of the silver standard, and many credit him with rescuing the nation from bankruptcy. He also stood firm against British imperialist designs in South America by embracing the broadest possible definition of the Monroe Doctrine. His was one of the most eventful peacetime presidencies in American history. In reviewing the hapless line of presidents who followed the martyred Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Lamont offered an interesting summary. For Andrew Johnson there was sorrow, for Grant scandal, for Hayes humiliation, for Garfield death, and for Arthur unpopularity. As for Cleveland, Lamont had this uncomplicated observation: “Herculean toil.”
Cleveland lived out the final years of his life in the charming village of Princeton, New Jersey, where he bought a Georgian-style estate surrounded by lovely lawns. He became a trustee of Princeton University and wrote letters, hunted rabbits and quail, and sometimes went fishing for bass. Now and then he spoke out on national issues. In 1905, he wrote an article for the Ladies Home Journal, still stubbornly denouncing the women’s suffrage movement. Sensible and responsible women “do not want to vote,” he maintained. The status of women in civilization was “assigned long ago by a higher intelligence.”
Frances Folsom Cleveland gave birth to five children during their marriage. Their first child, Ruth—Baby Ruth as she came to be called—was born in 1891, at the Cleveland townhouse on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Esther came next, in 1893, the only child in history ever to be born in the White House. Marion was delivered at Buzzards Bay in 1899. A son, Richard, came in 1897, followed by the last born, a boy, Francis, in 1903, when Grover Cleveland was sixty-six years old. Fatherhood agreed with Cleveland. He was no longer scowling and harrumphing all the time. “I sit on the piazza a good deal and herd the children,” he said about his days in comfortable retirement.
The Clevelands suffered a terrible loss when Baby Ruth was stricken with what seemed like a mild case of tonsillitis the day after New Year’s 1904. Five days later the twelve-year-old was diagnosed with diphtheria. On January 7, she was dead. Her death came as a staggering loss for the former president and his wife.
President Cleveland died of a heart attack on the morning of June 24, 1908, in a large room on the second floor of his home in Princeton. At his side were Frances and three physicians. His death came six years after Maria Halpin’s passing. His last words were, “I have tried so hard to do right.”
Emma Folsom died of pneumonia at the age of seventy-six, in 1915, also in Princeton, where she had gone to live in 1901 after the death of her second husband, Henry Perrine.
Rose Cleveland lived to the age of seventy-two. Her greatest days were her last. She was living in Tuscany when the influenza epidemic of 1918 swept through the village of Bagni di Lucca on its way to killing fifty million people worldwide. Rose organized the village’s medical response. Working at her side was the great love of her life, Evangeline Simpson Whipple, their romance having been rekindled following the death of Evangeline’s husband, Bishop Henry Whipple, in 1901. The two women acted heroically. As villagers began to “die like sheep,” Rose sent urgent telegrams to the regional capital of Florence, appealing for nurses. She also cabled her friends in America to send money and medicine. The air, Rose ominously reported, was “heavy with germs” with a virulent pestilence out of the Dark Ages. Rose and Evangeline rented an empty house in Bagni di Lucca as a dwelling for the youngsters in the village whose parents were infected with the flu. They scoured the shops, securing every bit of available clothing to make into bed linen for the sick. It was said that Rose exhausted every lira she had.
Rose was stricken with fever in late November. Six days later, the former First Lady was dead. Evangeline gave a moving account of these final days, calling Rose “one of the noblest, truest, and really greatest characters I have ever known.” Her coffin was draped in the American flag, and by edict of the mayor of Bagni di Lucca, all shops and places of business were closed and flags were flown at half-mast. Evangeline rode in a carriage behind the hearse followed by a silent procession of Italian villagers. Rose was buried in a cemetery on the banks of the Lima River, and when Evangeline died in 1930, she was laid down in a grave next to Rose. Eve’s will stated that her personal letters remain sealed for fifty years. Only then was her forbidden romance with the former First Lady made known.
Frances Folsom Cleveland was raising her four surviving children when, four years after Grover Cleveland’s death, she made the surprising announcement that she was remarrying. Her fiancé was Thomas Jex Preston, a fifty-year-old professor of archeology and art history at Wells College. Preston had had an unusual career path. He had studied at Columbia and the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and gone to work for the family kerosene business in Newark, but in his late thirties, he quit and moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne for two years. Afterward, he enrolled at Princeton University, where he met Frances. In time he earned a doctorate. Frances used her connections at Wells College, where she was a member of the board of trustees, to obtain a professorship there for Preston, and after less
than a year on the faculty, lo and behold, he was named acting president. Eight months later, he and Frances announced their engagement. Preston, after grumbling that he could find no suitable accommodations for himself and his bride-to-be in rustic Aurora, New York, except for a vacant apartment over Hickey’s store, resigned his post at Wells. He returned to Princeton to be with his fiancée.
Preston was six feet tall and broad shouldered, with jet-black hair streaked with gray and a black mustache. He had a sarcastic sense of humor and was quite the connoisseur, smoked cigarettes, and played a “rattling good game of tennis.” He was also the subject of much chatter among the young ladies at Wells who were intrigued by the racing car he drove and his reputation for being “light on his feet.” The girls called him “Arty,” because he taught art history. They could not believe he was approaching fifty—he looked a decade younger. It was remarked that Frances Cleveland had endowed an art history chair at Wells specifically for Preston—“where she knew she could find him.”
Stout but still winsome at age forty-eight, Frances said her engagement to Preston gave her a sense of contentment. She told her friend Helena Gildor, “I feel sure you will like him . .
. This is not the enthusiasm of a girl—it is the settled conviction of a mature woman—whose standards of men you know.” Frances indicated that all her children approved of the match.
Others were not so sure. Jean S. Davis, who had been a playmate of Baby Ruth Cleveland, found it distressing that President Cleveland’s widow was marrying. No fan of the groom, Jean Davis recalled the “unpleasant shock when I read the headlines reporting the engagement. . . . And that it was Mr. Preston!” Frances Cleveland was to her a “national monument, and it distressed many of us to learn that the base was of clay.”
Preston could be eccentric and fussy about his clothes. During his brief tenure at Wells, the students kept count—he wore twenty-eight suits. Even the worshippers at the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton had something to say about his clothes when he took President Cleveland’s seat in church.
A Secret Life: The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland Page 36