How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (20 page)

Stephen Grover Cleveland, our twenty-second president, wanted the world to know that he was a good and honest man. He held himself to a very high moral standard, and he claimed to live by it from the minute he was born until the minute he died. Literally. His last words were “I have tried so hard to do right.”

Cleveland was a stern, efficient, no-nonsense type who believed in hard work (according to his staff, it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to see Cleveland working until three or four in the morning, several nights in a row). Character was important to Cleveland, a man who once said, “If we expect to become great and good men and be respected and esteemed by our friends, we must improve our time when we are young.” Was that from a campaign speech? Or in his inauguration? Nope. Cleveland said that when he was
nine years old
, and he never grew out of it. You know what
I
said at nine years old?
Neither do I, because it was probably bullshit
.

Cleveland’s whole life is littered with stories of him going to great lengths to do what he thought was right, both personally and politically. While Cleveland was campaigning, a woman he’d been casually seeing before his marriage approached him with a son and claimed that it was his. Cleveland didn’t know for sure that he was the father, but he still financially supported the child and checked up on him regularly, because he believed it to be the right thing to do. As sheriff of Erie County, New York, he strongly opposed the death penalty and fought to outlaw it. He was unsuccessful, unfortunately for Cleveland (plus all of those dudes who got the death penalty). When someone did receive the death penalty, he
personally
performed the execution, which was almost unheard of. Executioners existed—there was no reason for the sheriff to personally deal out the death sentence—but Cleveland believed that upholding laws, even laws he personally hated, was important, and he wasn’t going to force someone
else
to do it. This is a man with clarity of purpose.

Grover Cleveland made a good sheriff and a great politician because, in a time when political machines were sneakily making deals and wielding too much behind-the-scenes power, Cleveland stood tall as incorruptible. He never allowed himself to be seduced by office-seekers and special interest groups. “Public office is a public trust,” Cleveland said, and that trust was sacred to him. Cleveland’s goodness was superhuman. Biographer Allan Nevins said that he “had no endowments that thousands of men do not have. He possessed honesty, courage, firmness, independence, and common sense. But he possessed them to a degree other men do not.” Mark Twain said that Cleveland’s character was on par with
Washington’s
, and Mark Twain was a dick to
everybody
.

That makes it all the more surprising to learn that one of the most shocking displays of presidential deception took place on Grover Cleveland’s watch.

During Cleveland’s second term as president, a cancerous tumor was discovered in his mouth. This was right around the time that presidents were constantly being followed by the media (they followed Cleveland all the way to his honeymoon, much to his dismay).
Cleveland knew that he couldn’t simply check into a hospital without the media taking notice, and he was worried about the news getting out. He worried about the impact it might have on the national economy (already on fairly unstable ground). He worried about what the rest of the world would think if they perceived America’s president as weak or sick. (And presumably he also worried about just, like, general cancer stuff.)

So the man who built his career around the image of incorruptibility staged a secret medical procedure. It was like an
Ocean’s 11
heist except instead of sending a ragtag team of specialists into a casino to steal a bunch of money, Cleveland sent a ragtag team of doctors and dentists into his mouth, to steal a bunch of cancer.

He assembled his band of skilled and trustworthy specialists and scheduled a top-secret cancer heist/surgery. Oh, and to make sure the media didn’t follow up, he arranged for the whole thing to take place
on a fucking boat
. He told no one but the men performing his surgery, the ship’s captain, and Daniel Lamont, his secretary of war. He didn’t even tell his vice president, the man who would assume the presidency should Cleveland die during his mysterious boat surgery.

On July 1, 1893, the standing president of the United States was sedated by nitrous oxide and ether, strapped into a chair anchored to the mast of a ship in the middle of the ocean, and received major surgery. Only about twelve people in the world knew about it; everyone else just thought the president was enjoying his Fourth of July weekend at sea (which, of course, is exactly what devious ol’ Cleveland
wanted
them to think). The already-risky surgery was made even more dangerous by being at sea (which is why most doctors today rarely suggest getting mouth-cancer surgery on a boat). The doctors cut into Cleveland’s face and into his sinuses—making sure all of the incisions happened inside the president’s mouth, so as not to leave a visible scar—and removed a “gelatinous mound” of cancer. And, yeah, cancer comes in “gelatinous mounds,” because
gross
, right? Cancer sucks so much.

The secret procedure was a success, and the country didn’t even find out about it until decades later, nine years after Cleveland’s
death. Sure, the dentist who helped perform the surgery went public with the information as soon as it was clear that the president was going to be in good health. He believed the danger had passed, but when he tried to share the story with the world, the White House aggressively and categorically denied his claims. The dentist was ridiculed and ostracized as a liar.

See, being president changes a man. It turned honest Grover,
a man who paid child support for a kid who probably wasn’t even his, into a man who betrayed the public trust he claimed to hold so sacred. Be on guard. He’ll talk a big fat game about how honest and decent he is, but if his back is against the wall, there’s no
telling
what he’ll resort to.

Also, watch out for him because, even without his deviousness, Cleveland was terrifying. As a child, he wasn’t just talking eloquently about how to “become a great man”; he was also regularly ripping fence posts out of the ground with his bare hands. He was 5′11″ and 250 lbs of president and his fists were described as “ham-like,” which might be delicious but is probably just scary and painful. He loved hunting and often carried around a rifle that he nicknamed “Death and Destruction,” which isn’t a nickname a rifle earns for being
pretty
.

Still, as big and ham-fisted and bacon-fingered as he was, and as tough as he looked, Cleveland wasn’t in a shape anyone would call “good” (he was, in fact, more of a gelatinous mound of a man than anything else). Apparently he stopped that fence-post-ripping shit as soon as he hit puberty. Cleveland loathed exercise and once said, “Bodily movement alone is among the dreary and unsatisfying things of life.” If you’ve ever worked out even a
little
bit, you’re more prepared for this fight than Cleveland, and almost certainly faster. Aim for his jaw, avoid his rifle, and if you knock him down, stick around for a while to make
sure
he’s down. Like a horror movie serial killer, Cleveland was
notorious
for his ability to surprise everyone and come back as soon as they thought he was down for the count.

Benjamin Harrison is not to be fucked with. He was quick, stocky, and efficient with his actions, and according to historian William DeGregorio, he “tackled problems through mastery of detail.” Harrison was a man who, when convinced of his own rightness, was completely immovable (this, in conjunction with his cold nature, earned him the nickname the “Human Iceberg,” although I also have a pet theory that it’s because he singlehandedly sunk the
Titanic
with a head-butt). Harrison’s rigid and stern nature (he was described by Theodore Roosevelt as “cold-blooded”) applied to his schoolyard fights, his politics, and, presumably, his cage matches with time travelers.

Unfortunately for anyone who has ever come up against him, Harrison was
always
convinced of his own rightness, thanks to his deep and personal relationship with religion. A devout Presbyterian, Harrison was a former deacon and Sunday school teacher and, as
president, was so serious about his religion that he conducted no political business on Sundays. When he won the election, the first words out of his mouth were “Now I walk with God.”

You want to know the most terrifying kind of person? It’s the guy with a military background given absolute power who sincerely believes he was elected God’s friend. That’s a confidence that’s almost impossible to match. It was also a huge leap, because there’s some compelling evidence that Harrison’s win wasn’t exactly legitimate. He lost the popular vote to incumbent president Cleveland, and only won the electoral votes from New York (Cleveland’s home state) because the party bosses that ran New York were furious with Cleveland’s honesty and his reform efforts. The bosses wanted to punish Cleveland, so they got together, raised some money, and (possibly) stole the election for Harrison (when Harrison credited his victory to God in front of Matthew Quay, one of the bosses who ensured victory, Quay reportedly said “Then let God reelect you” before storming out of the president’s sight). Even though all evidence was pointing toward shady corruption, Harrison wanted to believe that God made him president, and nothing was going to shake him of that belief.