Dreamers and Deceivers (2 page)

Cleveland and Lamont arrived at the train station and boarded a special car prepared for them by the railroad’s owner. The president placed a supremely high value on discretion. Once aboard, his first priority was to order a cigar and a whiskey. His second order of business was to pull down the window shades. A private man even under ordinary circumstances, Cleveland knew the purpose of this trip was anything but ordinary. The press and public were on a “need to know” basis, and as far as he was concerned, there was nothing about this journey that any of them needed to know.

Cleveland had frequently received good press, especially as it related to his anticorruption efforts as mayor, governor, and president, yet he still despised reporters. As the train left the station, he recalled all the times journalists had poked their noses in where they didn’t belong, beginning with their coverage of the Maria Halpin affair.

At times, Cleveland’s rage at reporters turned to fits of anger. At other times, he found an outlet for his frustration by writing blistering letters to newspaper editors. To one publication, he wrote that “the falsehoods daily spread before the people in our newspapers are insults to the American love for decency and fair play of which we boast.” To another, he blasted “keyhole correspondents” for using “the enormous power of the modern newspaper to perpetuate and disseminate a colossal impertinence.”

The whiskey soon arrived, as did the cigar. With all the shades pulled down, Cleveland was able to relax for the first time since he’d hoisted himself into the presidential carriage. Only after he and Lamont were safely away from the Washington, D.C., area did Cleveland raise the shades to enjoy the views as the New York Express chugged northward.

The sights outside the president’s window, however, were not always pleasing to his eye. Occasionally the train would pass by shantytowns filled with jobless vagabonds and homeless families making the most of what tin, cardboard, and spare lumber they could find to create shelter.

The train was moving fast, but he could still see the misery in the sunken eyes of the unfortunate inhabitants. Cleveland knew that unemployment was at an all-time high, that stocks were anemic, that banks, railroads, and factories were failing, that farm foreclosures were rampant, and that all the wrong rates were rising: interest rates,
unemployment rates, and, if the papers were to be believed, suicide rates as well. Even so, Cleveland was not prepared for the wretched, impoverished conditions he saw from his window. The shantytowns looked like refugee camps in some third-world, war-ravaged country.

The tragic sights of suffering steeled the president’s resolve to repeal the Silver Purchase Act. Just that morning, before surreptitiously leaving the capital, he had called for a special session of Congress to consider repealing the law he blamed for the country’s woes. He was sure he could persuade them to eliminate the act. He was coming off a landslide election and the political momentum was squarely on his side. Only public disclosure of the purpose of the trip he was now on could stop him.

Cleveland arrived in Jersey City, New Jersey, and boarded a ferry for Manhattan. His destination was a luxurious yacht anchored in the East River, which would then sail him to his vacation home in Massachusetts, on Buzzards Bay, off Cape Cod. Before he could get there, however, he had to deal with a handful of reporters who had discovered that the president was no longer at the White House. They were curious to know why he had left Washington on the eve of debate over the Silver Purchase Act.

“I have nothing to say for publication, except that I am going to Buzzards Bay for a rest.”

New York City

July 1, 1893

Early Evening

Among the reporters who had been on the ferry with Grover Cleveland was Elisha Jay Edwards, known to readers of his almost daily column by his one-word penname: Holland.

With a thick, light brown mustache that did little to obscure his handsome, angular face, Edwards was among the most diligent and respected journalists in the nation. A skilled researcher and writer, he had graduated from Yale Law School in 1873 and then stayed in New Haven to practice law. Those plans changed when he purchased an
interest in New Haven’s
Elm City Press
. Before long, his photographic memory, penchant for dogged investigations, and ability to write quickly, clearly, and elegantly made him the best reporter in that Connecticut city.

The early 1870s were the beginning of a drastic, two-decade media expansion. New printing technologies and a rise in literacy were the driving forces behind a threefold increase in newspaper sales. During that era, no publisher was as respected and feared as the
New York Sun
’s Charles Dana. It was Dana who plucked the talented Edwards out of obscurity and brought him from New Haven to New York in 1879.

After ten years of twelve-hour days with Dana, Edwards took a job as the New York correspondent for the
Philadelphia Press
. It was there that “Holland” became one of the most read syndicated columnists in the country.

Six days a week, in newsrooms across the nation, reporters would begin their day by asking the same question: “What does Holland say today?”

As the evening sun set outside his window in the Schermerhorn Building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Edwards wrote out the next day’s column in longhand. It included a bit of gossip about Interior Secretary Hoke Smith, “the only member of the cabinet who has dared to assert himself in the presence of the president,” and a little news about “a delegation of starving miners” who “may be sent to Washington from Colorado and Montana demanding from President Cleveland not bread but silver, which is the same to them.” Finally, near the end of the column, was a note about how President Cleveland and his friend Elias Benedict were planning to spend much of July together at their vacation homes on Buzzards Bay. “Mr. Benedict says that Mr. Cleveland is as impatient for the sea bass fishing and as hungry for a day’s sport trolling for bluefish as a schoolboy is for the first day of his vacation.”

On Board the
Oneida

East River, New York City

July 2, 1893

10:30
A.M.

As the
Oneida
pulled anchor on a warm, sunny morning and set sail northward, the president of the United States smiled and relaxed comfortably on her deck. He always felt his best when surrounded by old friends, and he had plenty of them now lounging beside him: his friend Elias Benedict, Lamont, and Joseph Bryant, who was his brother-in-law, family doctor, and frequent fishing companion. Over the years, Cleveland had traveled more than fifty thousand miles on the
Oneida
, often with some combination of these three men at his side and a fishing pole in his hand.

Cleveland’s affinity for the boat was understandable, perhaps even unavoidable. With two masts and a glistening white 144-foot hull, she was a sleek, spectacularly gorgeous yacht. In 1885, the vessel—then named the
Utowana
—won the prestigious Lunberg Cup race. Soon after that, Elias Benedict purchased it and rechristened her
Oneida
.

The president chatted amiably with his friends about matters large and small while the
Oneida
glided past dozens of other boats in the East River. Their destination, Buzzards Bay, was no secret, and a typical trip would take about fifteen hours. But Cleveland and his friends were all too aware that this was no ordinary journey. The expected departures from their usual route, as well as what would happen on that route, were known only to a handful of people—including the four gentlemen currently lounging on the ship’s deck, as well as a small number of passengers who had been hidden belowdecks, out of sight from the utterly unsuspecting public and press corps.

Shortly before noon, Cleveland watched as Joseph Bryant rose from his deck chair and walked toward the steps leading belowdecks. “If you hit a rock,” Bryant called to the captain, “hit it good and hard, so that we’ll all go to the bottom!”

Cleveland was not amused.

On Board the
Oneida

July 2, 1893

12:05
P.M.

One of the small, tastefully decorated rooms belowdecks was a saloon. Grover Cleveland walked into it and stood in the middle of the room.

A socially active ladies’ man back in his Buffalo days, Cleveland had been in hundreds of saloons over the course of his fifty-six years. But there were at least two unusual, even bizarre, aspects about the appearance of this particular one and the man who now stood in it.

The first was that the saloon had been stripped of all but one piece of furniture.

The second was that the three-hundred-pound president of the United States was standing nearly naked, wearing only his underwear and walrus mustache.

“I am ready for you,” said the commander in chief. “Are you ready for me?”

New York City

July 3, 1893

Elisha Jay Edward was midway through the
New York Times
and all but done with his cup of tea when he noticed it.

N
O
S
IGN OF THE
O
NEIDA

T
HE
P
RESIDENT
H
AS
N
OT
Y
ET
A
RRIVED AT
G
RAY
G
ABLES

The dispatch was buried in the middle of a tall column, below other short reports about a shooting at a boardinghouse and a political quarrel between an Irish-American organization and the mayor of Newark, New Jersey.

Buzzards Bay, Mass.—The weather is thick in Buzzards Bay, and there are no signs of the yacht
Oneida,
having on board the Presidential party. Nothing has been heard of the party since they left New York.

The report’s last paragraphs noted that the “usual run” from Manhattan to Buzzards Bay was “fifteen hours,” and it stated that “inasmuch as the boat has not been reported at any of the ports, it is the opinion here that the yacht is at anchor down the bay awaiting the clearing of the fog, which will allow her to proceed.”

Despite the breezy tone of the
Times
report, one fact was unavoidable: The president was missing.

New York City

July 4, 1893

E. J. Edwards’s curiosity was further aroused when he arrived at the Schermerhorn Building on Independence Day and learned from the morning papers that President Cleveland was still unaccounted for. It had been three days since the
Oneida
slipped through the narrow channel between Manhattan and Queens, and no one on dry land had heard from the president since.

Dressed in a dark suit, necktie, high-collared shirt, and high-topped leather shoes, Edwards continued to skim the morning papers and noticed that the more sensational of them were speculating that Cleveland was somehow in trouble. There were rumors of a serious illness, although Edwards thought that to be unlikely, as it would be cause for a return to shore, not a reason to remain at sea.

Edwards knew that if Cleveland were gravely ill, it would spell doom for the repeal of the Silver Purchase Act. Foisted on Cleveland’s ticket for political balance at the Democratic convention, Vice President Adlai Stevenson was a staunch silverite. If fence-sitting congressmen sensed that Stevenson would soon be assuming power, they wouldn’t dare cross him and his pro-silver allies.

Edwards believed there was little sense in dwelling on such far-fetched possibilities. Newspapers could speculate as much as they wished
about the president’s seventy-two-hour absence, but Edwards thought Cleveland’s disappearance didn’t seem out of character. The president was famous for his desire for privacy, and he wasn’t the kind of man who needed much of a reason for keeping his whereabouts a secret.

The possibility of a serious illness seemed especially unlikely to Edwards for one additional reason: On the ferry to New York, Cleveland had said that he was merely “going to Buzzards Bay for a rest.” He had assured reporters there was nothing out of the ordinary about the trip. And, as everyone knew, Grover Cleveland was nothing if not honest.

New York City

Morning, July 7, 1893

Six days after Cleveland had set sail from Manhattan, E. J. Edwards was finally beginning to have doubts about the president’s story. The morning papers reported two pieces of intriguing news.

The first concerned the president’s reemergence. Yesterday morning, the eight reporters awaiting his arrival at Gray Gables on Buzzards Bay had learned that Cleveland, Lamont, and Bryant had reached land in the middle of the night and slipped into Gray Gables without informing a single member of the press. When reporters pressed Lamont for an explanation of the president’s arrival—four days late and seemingly clandestinely choreographed—Lamont assured them the trip was “leisurely,” the party had “found good fishing grounds,” and that Cleveland’s health was “excellent, excepting that he was suffering from a slight attack of rheumatism.”

The second news item detailed the transcript of an interview with Dr. Bryant conducted the previous evening by an unidentified reporter for
United Press
.

United Press:
Doctor, a number of conflicting stories are told concerning the illness of the president. Some of them make the matter very serious. You would confer a great favor by making some sort of official statement.

Bryant:
The president is all right.

United Press:
From what is he suffering?

Bryant:
He is suffering from rheumatism, just as was reported this afternoon. Those reports were correct.

United Press:
Then, Doctor, the report that he is suffering from a malignant or cancerous growth in the mouth and that an operation was necessary and had been performed to relieve it is not correct?

Bryant:
He is suffering from the teeth; that is all.

United Press:
Has an operation been performed?