Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  The effect was overpowering, as toward the end of his speech, the President struck several deeply emotional chords. He spoke of the responsibility he felt as the advocate for a special class of citizens. “My clients,” he explained, “are the children; my clients are the next generation. They do not know what promises and bonds I undertook when I ordered the armies of the United States to the soil of France, but I know. And I intend to redeem my pledges to the children; they shall not be sent upon a similar errand.” When the President spoke of Decoration Day at the cemetery in Suresnes, there was hope, not anger, he said, that “some men in public life who are now opposing the settlement for which these men died could visit such a spot as that. . . . I wish that they could feel the moral obligation that rests upon us not to go back on those boys, but to see the thing through.” In dissociating America from the others who fought in the war, Wilson said, “There seems to me to stand between us and the rejection or qualification of this treaty the serried ranks of those boys in khaki—not only those boys who came home, but those dear ghosts that still deploy upon the fields of France.” In those moments of Wilson’s speech, Tumulty would later recount, “a great wave of emotion, such as I have never witnessed at a public meeting, swept through the whole amphitheatre.” Not only were Edith and most of the women in tears, but he also saw several men, including the hard-boiled press corps, sneaking handkerchiefs from their pockets.

  Instead of pulling out all the stops as he reached his conclusion, Wilson soft-pedaled his delivery, letting his words alone carry the message. “There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to,” he said, “and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace. We have accepted that truth, and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and, through us, the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.”

  Back at the train, Wilson complained again that his head ached. The pain had not stopped all day, sometimes blinding him. Dr. Grayson thought a walk might offer relief; and so, twenty miles out of Pueblo, the train stopped on the tracks, letting the Wilsons and Grayson off to stretch their legs on a country road for almost an hour. Agent Starling trailed behind. An elderly farmer happened by and, recognizing the President, presented him with a head of cabbage and some apples, hoping they might become part of his dinner that night. Walking toward the train, Wilson saw a soldier in a private’s uniform, evidently ill, sitting on the porch of a house set back from the road. The President climbed over the fence to talk to him, and the boy’s parents and brothers soon joined them, visibly moved to see the President of the United States ministering to the sick soldier.

  The walk did him a world of good. The pain subsided, his appetite returned, and after dinner with Grayson and Tumulty, the Wilsons prepared for bed. When the President heard that crowds were forming at each station in Colorado, he remained awake, finding five thousand people at Rocky Ford. Grayson extended Wilson’s apologies to the crowd for not being able to appear, but just before the train pulled away, Wilson emerged to grasp the hands of those closest to him. He waved goodbye and then retired for the night.

  Edith repaired to her room, where her maid brushed her hair and gave her a massage. At 11:30, by which time she thought her husband had fallen asleep, he knocked on their connecting door and asked to see her. She found him sitting on the side of his bed, his head pressed against the back of a chair set in front of him. The pain had grown so unbearable, he asked her to summon Grayson. The doctor arrived and found a man in the middle of a breakdown. He was nauseated; his face twitched; he gasped for air in the worst asthmatic attack of the trip. Wilson complained that the walls of the tiny compartment were closing in on him. He dressed, and they moved to the roomier “office,” where nobody could offer any remedy beyond bolstering him with pillows. Duty now demanded that Grayson recommend canceling the rest of the tour, which Wilson begged him not to suggest. In the hostile political climate, he knew that his enemies would pounce upon his cessation as a sign of weakness. He told Grayson that he would be better by Wichita and that any further discussion of aborting the trip would only keep him awake the rest of the night. Sometime around 4:30, while sitting upright in his seat, Wilson fell asleep. Edith shooed Grayson off to bed, saying she would maintain the vigil.

  Dr. Grayson promptly awakened Tumulty, to apprise him that continuing the trip could have fatal consequences. The two advisers conferred with Mrs. Wilson, who had just endured what she called “the longest and most heartbreaking” night of her life. As they were all of the same mind, Grayson waited for the President to awaken, at which time he would explain their decision. But when he entered the President’s compartment, he found Wilson shaving, with no intention of abandoning the schedule. Edith and Tumulty expressed their opinions, but the President would not listen. “Don’t you see that if you cancel this trip,” he explained, “Senator Lodge and his friends will say that I am a quitter and that the Western trip was a failure, and the Treaty will be lost.” Tumulty assured him that nobody would ever consider him a quitter. Gradually, Wilson faced the truth.

  “My dear boy,” the President said, crumbling, “this has never happened to me before. I felt it coming on yesterday. I do not know what to do.” His left arm and leg had numbed. Looking at Tumulty, he begged for a twenty-four-hour reprieve, a postponement: “I want to show them that I can still fight and that I am not afraid.” Privately, Grayson argued, at last, that Wilson owed it to the country as well as to Mrs. Wilson and his children to “stop now before very serious developments should occur.” He maintained that Wilson was unable to deliver another speech. Now, too exhausted even to fight back, the unhappy warrior allowed, “If you feel that way about it, I will surrender.” And then, he quietly added, “This is the greatest disappointment of my life.”

  Grayson beckoned Tumulty back into the room. “I don’t seem to realize it,” Wilson told him, “but I seem to have gone to pieces. The Doctor is right. I am not in condition to go on.” Unable to face anyone, he looked out the window at the flat countryside instead, as tears rolled from his eyes. “He accepted the decree of Fate as gallantly as he had fought the fight,” Edith recollected; “but only he and his God knew the crucifixion that began that moment—to stretch into interminable years, during which the seal he put on his lips, never to . . . voice a syllable of self-pity or regret, remained unbroken.”

  Edith made her own private compact as well, one that would assume public ramifications. First light had revealed how drawn and lined her husband’s face had become, suggesting interior distress even more severe. Life as she knew it “would never be the same.” And from that hour forward, she decided, “I would have to wear a mask—not only to the public but to the one I loved best in the world; for he must never know how ill he was, and I must carry on.”

  Tumulty sprang into action, calling for a stenographer and composing a statement for the press. It said that Dr. Grayson had insisted upon the cancellation of the rest of the tour—Wichita, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Memphis, and Louisville—despite the President’s “earnest desire to complete his engagements.” From the rail yard sidings in north Wichita, the newspaper correspondents raced to find telephones so that they might break the news to the world. By telegram, Wilson informed each of his daughters—Margaret visiting in New London, Jessie Sayre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Nell McAdoo about to arrive in Los Angeles—that he was returning to Washington and that there was nothing to be alarmed about. The reception committee in Wichita sent an emissary to the train to inform the President that 25,000 Kansans had hoped to see him; and a telegram from the committee in Oklahoma City expressed sorrow, as they had expected 100,000 people—more than inhabited the city—to welcome him. After making most of the arrangements for the direct departure back to Washington, chief clerk Thomas Brahany went to the President’s compartment. He found Wilson sitting alone, slouched over, “with his head hanging and wi
th one side of his face drooping and with saliva running out from the corner of his mouth.”

  Wilson remained indisposed in his stateroom and in pain. Although most of the press dealt with the news in a fair and balanced manner, several opposition newspapers—such as the New York Sun—suggested that the whole matter was a ruse, that the President was not really sick. Within hours, however, word had reached most of the nation; and, as Grayson wrote in his journal that day, “there was deep sorrow for the most part among those who had watched the hard fight that the President had made in carrying his side of the Treaty controversy to the people themselves.” Whether one agreed with Woodrow Wilson or not, nobody disputed his dedication to his cause. More to the point, the tour was influencing Senators, as two who had been wavering had come back in line against all amendments. It looked as though the President might be able to craft a few “mild reservations or interpretations” and have his treaty approved.

  At eleven o’clock that morning, the Mayflower pulled out from Wichita. Along the tracks, from one station to the next, crowds gathered to watch the train pass—offering no cheers, only silent respect. Railroad officials charted the fastest route home—which retraced much of the outbound trip. Sympathetic messages arrived: a batch of telegrams awaited the President in St. Louis very early Saturday morning; cablegrams forwarded from Washington were brought on board several hours later in Indianapolis, including well-wishes from King George and Premier Clemenceau. Nothing could lift the President’s spirits or ease his pain. And though time was of the essence, Grayson asked that the train slow down because the Mayflower, being the rearmost car, rocked wildly from side to side, which kept Wilson from sleeping. The engineers periodically sped up, but in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Grayson insisted the train was not to exceed twenty-five miles per hour for the rest of the trip. They lowered the shades to block onlookers, creating the air of a funeral cortege. When Wilson was not trying to rest in his bed, he sat mute in the office compartment, where Edith kept him company, knitting and attempting to divert him with small talk. But, she observed, “the air was so heavy with unspoken agony that all seemed a travesty.”

  The President was up and dressed at eleven o’clock that Sunday when the train finally reached Washington—exactly forty-eight hours since Wichita. Although he looked like a ghost of the man who had left Union Station twenty-five days earlier, he summoned his strength and walked unassisted and perfectly erect from the Mayflower. Margaret Wilson ran through the train shed to greet him and waited as he bade farewell to the railroad personnel and newspapermen. She joined Edith, Grayson, and the Secret Service as they advanced toward the motorcars waiting outside. More than a thousand people in the station cheered. With a smile and a nod, he especially acknowledged the applause of a group of wounded soldiers on a bench in the Red Cross canteen.

  Within minutes the President was back in the White House. He wanted to attend church, but Grayson ordered him to bed at once. Too restless to nap and in too much pain to work, he wandered the long hall of the second floor, back and forth between his study and Edith’s room. As it was a sunny early autumn day, with the first smack of cool air he had felt in months, he and Edith and Grayson took a two-hour drive through the city parks. The President dozed most of the time.

  Upon their return, Admiral Grayson (as he was officially known) pulled rank. He believed Wilson needed a complete rest cure, and he imposed strict conditions. From that moment forward, he said, the President “should not be bothered with any matters of official character,” especially questions of a controversial nature. He banned conferences with Cabinet members and any other officials. “It was to be a complete rest, not partial rest,” Grayson underscored, “and nothing was to be allowed to interfere with the President’s restoration to health if possible.”

  The next day Edith invited ten of the journalists from the Western tour to tea. She hosted them alone, and they learned that the interdiction against official conferences was in effect indefinitely. The day after that, an urgent message from Sir William Wiseman of the British government arrived, requesting an audience with Wilson. Edith asked him to appear at eleven, at which time she said the President was too ill to receive him but if Wiseman would transmit the information, she would have a reply for him at two o’clock. In that interval, she mentioned the visit to her husband, who waved it off as nonessential. Grayson arranged for Wilson’s ophthalmologist and a leading neurologist to examine him at the end of the week.

  A shroud of secrecy descended upon the White House, which only raised suspicions. As Secretary of State Lansing saw things, the President’s advocacy of the Covenant had become nothing less than “a veritable obsession,” which had caused an abnormal mental state, a monomania that “excluded everything else from his thoughts.” Only complete rest, he suspected, would allow him to “regain normality.”

  By October 1, his third day home, Wilson displayed small signs of improvement. He catnapped at night and during his daily drives, and his appetite was returning. He expressed renewed interest in his work, though Edith arranged to run motion pictures at night in the East Room to divert him. That night he felt chipper enough to play billiards for a few minutes. Later, he insisted on reading Scripture to Edith, as he had done every night during the war, and she delighted in hearing some vitality back in his voice. After his reading, Wilson wound his watch, and they talked a while before he went to his room. Minutes later, Edith noticed that Woodrow had left his timepiece on her table. When she returned it, he grumbled about losing his memory. She said that was nonsense, that she forgot such things all the time. Afterward, she felt leaving the watch behind had not worried him that much; it was simply that “he did not want to relax the tight hold he was keeping on himself.”

  Edith had been having troubles of her own getting through the night, as she awakened frequently in order to monitor her husband’s rest. At dawn on October 2, she found him sleeping soundly, but then around 8:30, he was sitting on the side of his bed, reaching for a water bottle. As she handed it to him, she noticed his left hand had gone limp. “I have no feeling in that hand,” he said. He asked her to rub it. But first, he wanted help in getting to the bathroom. She supported him as he staggered those few yards, but it required a huge effort on his part. More terrifying to her were his spasms of pain with every step. Edith asked if she could leave him alone long enough for her to telephone Dr. Grayson. He said yes; and in that split second, Edith made a curious decision.

  Instead of going to the nearby bedroom phone, which connected to operators at the White House switchboard, she hastened down the hall to a private phone wired directly to the desk in the Usher’s Room. Ike Hoover answered the call, and Mrs. Wilson said, “Please get Doctor Grayson, the President is very sick.”

  While still on the phone, Edith heard a noise from the President’s apartment. Rushing back, she found her husband lying on the bathroom floor, unconscious.

  16

  PIETÀ

  Then tooke they the body of Iesus, & wound it in linnen clothes, with the spices, as the maner of the Iewes is to burie . . .

  —JOHN, XIX:40

  Edith pulled a blanket from the Lincoln Bed and draped it over her husband’s inanimate body. At last he stirred and requested a drink of water. In fetching it, Edith also grabbed a pillow, returning to elevate his head as she cradled him.

  Minutes later, a White House car delivered Dr. Grayson. He hastened upstairs and rapped gently on the locked bedroom door. Ike Hoover waited in the hall as Grayson and Mrs. Wilson lifted the President into his bed. The left side of his body was immobile. After examining his patient, Dr. Grayson returned to the hall. “My God, the President is paralyzed!” he said to Hoover, whom he immediately ordered to summon both Admiral E. R. Stitt of the Naval Medical Corps and the nurse who had attended Ellen Wilson in her final illness. Within hours, an array of doctors joined them, starting with a pioneer in neurology, Francis X. Dercum, professor of nervou
s and mental diseases at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College. Edith’s family physician, Sterling Ruffin, Wilson’s classmate Edward P. Davis, and eye specialist George de Schweinitz followed.

  Dercum examined Wilson in bed. He found his left leg and arm in a condition of “complete flaccid paralysis,” with the lower half of the left side of the face drooping. The President was conscious but somnolent. His temperature, pulse, and respiration were all normal, but in addition to his left side having lost all feeling, his left eye responded feebly to light. He had suffered a thrombosis—an ischemic stroke—a clot in an artery of the brain. Nothing had ruptured. Wilson’s abilities to think and speak escaped unimpaired. An air of quiet exigency filled the President’s bedroom as the medical team decided how to convert the White House into a convalescent home. The three Wilson daughters made their way to Washington.

  Outside the bedroom, the domestic staff remained completely in the dark. At day’s end, when the furniture needed rearranging to accommodate incoming medical apparatus, Grayson allowed only Ike Hoover to help him and the nurse move the various pieces. Hoover could not keep his eyes off the President stretched out in the large Lincoln Bed. “He looked as if he were dead,” Hoover observed. As Edith Wilson would impart years later, “For days life hung in the balance.”