Dreamers and Deceivers (12 page)

“You have done your part, sir,” Grayson said. “You cannot continue. Not any longer.”

Wilson sighed and looked at the man who, other than Edith, was his closest confidant. “If you feel that way about it,” he submitted at last, “I will surrender.”

The tears fell freely down his cheeks. Wilson had pledged to give all he had for passage of the League. Now, Grayson knew, that’s exactly what he had done.

The White House

Washington, D.C.

October 2, 1919

Just as she had done each night since their hasty return home, Edith awakened every hour or so to check on her husband. At around 8
A.M.
, she found him on the side of the bed, trying to reach for a glass of water.

He had been unsettled ever since their return. Some days, his head ached so fiercely that he could do nothing except pace around the bedroom. Much to his discontent, Grayson had put him on bed rest. The
New York Times
reported that the president had experienced a nervous breakdown, caused by the strain of trying to gain passage of the Treaty of Versailles. Most people, including foreign visitors, had been barred from seeing him. Even Vice President Thomas R. Marshall was turned away.

Edith handed the glass of water to her husband and noticed his left arm hanging loosely by his side.

“I have no feeling in my hand,” he told her. “Will you rub it? But first, would you help me to the bathroom?”

She took his hands and helped him from the bed. He gripped her tightly, wincing with every step.

Once they made it inside, Wilson propped himself up on the sink. “Woodrow, I’m going to leave you for just a moment,” Edith gasped. “I’m going to call Grayson.”

The president nodded.

After making the call she hung up the phone, only to hear a loud crash from the bathroom. Running back inside, she found the president lying on the floor.

He was not moving.

Cabinet Room

The White House

Washington, D.C.

October 6, 1919

“The president’s mind is very active. He is very engaged,” Grayson told the assembled cabinet members. “And he’s very much annoyed that this meeting has been called. By whose authority? For what purpose?”

Of course, Grayson already knew the answers. It was the talk of all the newspapers. He understood that the cabinet was considering whether to put the vice president forward as temporary leader of the government, or perhaps to convene a temporary government-by-cabinet in Wilson’s absence.

Grayson was not happy about being called away from his patient to attend to such matters. Addressing the entire Wilson cabinet, he made it clear, as if there were any doubt, that the president and Mrs. Wilson resented the decision by Secretary of State Robert Lansing to convene an emergency meeting without the president’s knowledge or consent.

“The president’s condition is encouraging,” Grayson told them, adding that Wilson was still on bed rest and that only urgent matters should be presented to him.

Grayson had been a reluctant participant in this ruse. Immediately after his friend’s collapse, he had quietly suggested to Mrs. Wilson that the president consider resigning for the good of the country. Edith would not hear of it, and looked at him as if his very utterance was an act of cruelty and betrayal.

“Woodrow Wilson is the most brilliant president we have ever had,” she told him. “We can’t deny the country his leadership. Not at a time like this.”

It was easy to succumb to such arguments because he agreed with them. Cary Grayson loved Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was his friend, his confidant, and the closest thing to a father he’d ever had. He did not want for him to resign. He truly believed the president could recover. How could he turn his back on him now?

And yet he watched with some unease as Mrs. Wilson reviewed and approved documents for her husband. It was Edith who managed his
workflow, who decided which requests to answer and which to ignore. She was doing that, Grayson believed, out of loving devotion to a great man.

Sensing the awkwardness of the moment, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker spoke up. “We had only gathered today as a mark of affection for the president,” he maintained, as others in the room looked on skeptically. “Please convey our sympathy to the president and give him our assurance that everything is going along all right.”

The White House

Washington, D.C.

October 6, 1919

“If the Congress should ask questions concerning the employment of our naval forces in the Adriatic and Mediterranean, please refer the questions to me at once, informing the Congress you have done so by my direction and that the replies will be forthcoming in due course, unless the Executive should find that it was not compatible with the public interest to convey to the Congress at the time the particular information desired.”

Woodrow Wilson’s note to the secretary of the navy was precipitated by senators asking him for information on the reported landing of U.S. troops on the Dalmatian coast.

Now, as Edith reread the order, she couldn’t help but feel a surge of power. The note was not signed by the nation’s commander in chief. He was sleeping and far too ill to comprehend the issues anyway.

She had written every word.

The White House

Washington, D.C.

October 12, 1919

Under Cary Grayson’s supervision, the White House released its thirtieth bulletin on the president’s health, again labeling his illness as “nervous exhaustion.”

Grayson saw the skepticism in the eyes of the reporters he met with, and he certainly read it in their words. Many of them believed that the White House, preoccupied with the president’s condition, was unable to address a slew of domestic issues, foremost of which was the apparent lack of preparedness in welcoming troops home from the Great War.

Many soldiers were ravaged with disease and injury. Some were shell-shocked by the horrors of battle. With no plan in place to help returning veterans transition back into the domestic workforce, and with soldiers finding that immigrants had filled their jobs, riots and unrest had begun to spread. Unemployment and inflation were rising, and the administration seemed unable to handle any of it.

“The secrecy, and even the deception, practiced by court physicians in the case of a monarch similarly afflicted have no place in the procedure of an orderly republic,” the
San Francisco Bulletin
wrote. “We are a grown-up people and if told everything will be better prepared to face the worst if there is really no hope of improvement.”

That was bad, but what irked Grayson more was a quote in the
New York Times
from Republican senator George Moses of New Hampshire. Moses declared the president a very sick man who’d suffered from some sort of cerebral lesion. “[He] will not be any material force or factor in anything,” the senator stated.

“Senator Moses,” Grayson now told the press, taking the allegations head-on, “must have information that I do not possess.”

The State Department

Washington, D.C.

November 8, 1919

Secretary of State Lansing pleaded with the First Lady to allow her husband to offer him guidance on various important international matters.

First, he explained, there was the question as to whether the United States should recognize the new government of Costa Rica, which had a constitutional structure of the kind that Wilson had championed. In response Lansing received a note on White House letterhead and written in Mrs. Wilson’s hand:

The President says it is impossible for him to take up such matters until he is stronger and can study them. So if an answer must be made—the Sec. of State can say he (the Sec.) cannot act without the President’s consent and that the P. directs the matter be held in abeyance until he can act.

Next, Lansing had asked for guidance on how to handle the friction between the United States and Great Britain over England’s arbitrary seizure of German tankers. Again, Mrs. Wilson had replied that the president “does not know enough about this matter” to act.

Now a new political crisis in Syria demanded American attention. And again, the United States president was unable to offer his chief diplomat any guidance at all.

But the worst consequence of Wilson’s illness was, Lansing believed, the resolution of the Great War. Had Wilson been able to have a stronger voice in negotiations at Versailles, Germany’s punishment might not have been so onerous, which played into the hands of radical groups, like the growing Nazi Party. Instead, the Allies had carried out an act of revenge that many now feared would open the door to an even worse armed conflict in the years ahead.

The White House

Washington, D.C.

November 19, 1919

Edith glanced at the draft statement that Democratic senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska planned to read aloud to his colleagues who were still wavering over the matter of the League. She took a pen and scratched out the sentence that stated that if the treaty failed as it was written, as almost everyone expected it would, then “the door will probably be open for a possible compromise.”

Woodrow had never been open to compromise on the League.

And neither was she.

The White House

Washington, D.C.

December 5, 1919

Leaving her sleeping husband in bed, Edith Wilson left the room and waited for the senators to arrive. Like everyone else in Washington, they had been hearing rumors about the president’s health for months. Some of the rumors were more outlandish than others: that he’d had a massive stroke, or a heart attack, or that he’d gone mad.

The senators’ expedition to the White House came about due to the ongoing border skirmishes between Mexico and the United States ever since the end of the Great War.

The latest episode, which involved the kidnapping of an American consul, led to Congress passing a resolution that broke off diplomatic relations with the Mexican government. Senators were stunned to find out later that Secretary of State Lansing hadn’t spoken directly with the president in months.

Amid the outcry over this admission from Lansing, a Senate subcommittee was quickly assembled to determine whether Wilson was still fit for office. Republican senator Albert Fall of New Mexico and Democrat Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska were suggested as congressional emissaries to the White House in the hopes of forestalling any
further action. Nobody expected the president to agree to see them. Until suddenly, through Edith Wilson, he did.

Edith nodded to the two men as they were escorted into a dark, windowless room on the mansion’s first floor. She watched their eyes turn to the president, who had not been seen in public—or by any outsiders at all, for that matter—in months.

Wilson, dressed in a sturdy brown sweater, greeted Senator Fall with a firm handshake.

“We are all praying for you, Mr. President,” Fall told him.

“Which way?” he asked with a wry smile.

Still suspicious, the senator cast a glance in the First Lady’s direction, as she took dictation.

“You seem very much engaged, madam,” Fall said.

“I thought it wise to record this interview so there may be no misunderstanding or misstatement made,” she replied.

The senators spoke with the president for a few minutes longer. Wilson raised various points that seemed to indicate he was up to date on the situation in Mexico. Then the senators were quickly shown out of the room.

Edith breathed a sigh of relief. In preparation for the senators’ visit, she had consulted with Robert W. Woolley, the Democratic Party’s head of publicity, to determine how to give the impression of a vigorous and engaged Wilson. With Woolley’s counsel, and her husband’s active assistance, she had carefully constructed the scene.

The dark, windowless room was chosen so that it would be more difficult to see Wilson’s pallor. The president’s useless left arm was hidden under his bulky sweater and a blanket. The chair for Senator Fall was deliberately placed to Wilson’s right, so that Fall could not see the paralyzed left side of the president’s face. Edith had spent hours coaching her husband on the details of the Mexican crisis so that he could at least mutter a few intelligible points. For the most part, the president had spent the past months unable to focus on anything. For weeks he hadn’t even been able to speak.

Her elaborate staging, it seemed, had worked. The
New York Times
reported that the meeting “silenced for good the many wild and often unfriendly rumors of presidential disability.”

The White House

Washington, D.C.

January 12, 1920

Woodrow Wilson had come down with another bout of influenza. Although Grayson had successfully kept this news from reporters and cabinet members, the latest setback troubled him greatly.

“I am not well,” Wilson said to Grayson, stating the obvious. He was in a gloomy state. The League of Nations had failed to pass and Wilson took the news hard. “It would have been better if I had died last fall.”

“We are doing all we can to relieve your affliction,” Grayson replied. But, for the first time, the doctor had real doubts about whether that was true.

“I fear I have no choice but to resign,” the president said quietly.

Considering the steel will of his patient, the notion stunned Grayson. That Wilson himself was musing about stepping down only underscored the severity of his latest affliction. But Grayson reluctantly agreed with him. How much more could one man take?

Together, the two men discussed taking a wheelchair to the Capitol so that Wilson could announce his decision to the Congress in person. But as soon as Edith caught wind of the idea, all talk of resignation ended. The country
needed
them in the White House, she reasoned. Quitting now was out of the question.

Besides, Edith was hard at work with her ailing husband on another urgent matter: exacting revenge upon the senators who had hindered the ratification of the League of Nations Treaty.

Her list had already reached a total of fifty-four names.

The White House

Washington, D.C.