Kati Marton (7 page)

But the battle over America’s participation in the League of Nations had now grown fierce. Two of American’s titanic political figures were engaged—Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge, who despised everything Wilson stood for. “We shall make reservation after reservation,” Lodge vowed, “amend and amend, until there is nothing left.” Though the Massachusetts senator had himself preached international cooperation, politics were his chief motive for destroying the League. “If Wilson gets his League,” he told Undersecretary of State William Phillips, “the Republican Party will be done for fifty years.”

For Wilson, the League was a way “to cut out the heart of war,” or else “that heart is going to live and beat and grow stronger.” But in 1919, he was no longer up to a bare-knuckled fight. At a time when he most needed to be resilient, flexible and shrewd, he was dominated by his worst qualities—stubborn self-righteousness and intolerance of others’ views. He turned the battle for the League into an all-or-nothing national referendum about himself. If Congress was too blind to do his bidding, he would take his message directly to the people.

Edith was horrified at the notion of a long, transcontinental train trip, fearing that her husband was not up to it. But even she could not stop him from a mission he saw as a holy obligation. “I promised our soldiers,” he told her, “when I asked them to take up arms, that it was a war to end war; and if I do not do all in my power to put the Treaty in effect, I will be a slacker and never able to look those boys in the eye. I must go.” “Neither Dr. Grayson nor I,” Edith wrote, “could find an answer [to this].”

As the presidential train sped across the hot, dusty land, the president “grew thinner and the headaches increased in duration and in
intensity until he was almost blind during the attacks,” Edith wrote. “Only rest, complete rest, and an escape from the maddening crowds could restore my husband. But I was trapped.” The crowds grew bigger and noisier, and Wilson more fervent. Speaking through a fog of pain, he pressed on. “Never a moment to relax and rest,” Edith recalled. “And so on across the continent. From one city to the next, a small local committee would accompany us, which meant constant entertaining even on the train …. Dr. Grayson’s disregarded warnings against attempting the tour haunted my sleep.”

Eight thousand two hundred miles and forty speeches into his tour, in the baking, dry heat of Pueblo, Colorado, Wilson exhorted the assembled crowd, “France [is] free and the world [is] free because America had come ….” As the train rattled on toward Wichita, Kansas, that night, Woodrow cried out to his wife, “I’m terribly sick.” Edith called it the most heartbreaking night of her life. The president had suffered a stroke that temporarily paralyzed his left side. “Nothing the doctor could do gave relief.” Edith ordered the train to head back to Washington.

During the long homeward journey Edith made up her mind. “The dear face opposite me was drawn and lined; and as I sat there watching the dawn break slowly I felt that life would never be the same; that something had broken inside me; and from that hour on 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.” In this, the most astonishing passage of her memoir, she revealed her determination to cover up her husband’s condition, both from the country and from him.

“President Suffers Nervous Breakdown,” screamed the
New York Times
banner headline on September 27, 1919. “Tour Canceled. Speeding Back to Washington for a Needed Rest.” At Edith’s instruction, Dr. Grayson issued a calming, deliberately misleading statement from aboard the train: “President Wilson’s condition is due to overwork. The trouble dates back to an attack of influenza last April in Paris, from which he has never entirely recovered. The President’s activities on this trip have overtaxed his strength and he is suffering from nervous exhaustion.
His condition is not alarming but it will be necessary for his recovery that he have rest and quiet for a considerable time.”

Shortly after the president returned to the White House, he suffered another stroke, which permanently paralyzed his left side and blurred his vision. Soon, this condition was complicated by a urinary obstruction. He was so weak that Edith would not allow doctors to operate. Even after the urinary problem cleared up, Wilson only faintly resembled the dynamic figure of just weeks before. His once resonant voice was now an old man’s croak. He could neither read nor stand on his own. He grew a beard and mustache to disguise his slack jaw.

Determined to keep the tragedy from the country, Edith closed down the White House. Overnight, she converted the Executive Mansion into an infirmary, and the presidency itself into a form of therapy, incentive for a very sick man to get better. In those more trusting times, the very fact that the president was in residence seemed enough to reassure people. The press were easily manipulated. “Fortunately,” the
Times
concluded in an editorial, “there is every reason to accept the official assurance that it is not serious and that the tour was interrupted only because a continuation of the great strain to which it subjected the President might have led to serious illness thereafter.”

Behind the tightly drawn draperies, Edith and Grayson had assumed the powers of the presidency. Much later, and without a trace of irony, Edith explained that “The only decision that was mine was what was important and what was not.” Not the country, not Congress, not even his Cabinet knew the president’s real condition. The government was in a state of suspended animation. No bills were signed, no proclamations were issued, no appointments made, no posts filled. No leader led. Papers were shuffled and the wheels of the bureaucracy turned aimlessly. Edith governed by default, deciding the national agenda on her own. “It was my habit to acquaint myself with the context of each matter and put the papers in convenient stacks before carrying them to him for signature. We would prop him up in bed, and he would sign as many as he could before growing exhausted.”

The White House’s official line continued to be “He shows signs of improvement,” without further details or explanations. “I had been in
and out of the room many times during this period,” Chief Usher Irwin Hoover recalled, “and I saw very little progress …. All his natural functions had to be artificially assisted and he appeared just as helpless as one could possibly be and live.”

Edith was sustained by a blinding optimism. “For days [his] life hung in the balance. Then the will to live, to recover and fight for his League of Nations, almost imperceptively at first began to gain ascendancy over the forces of disease, and the President got a little better.” Hoover had a different memory. “He lived on; but oh what a wreck of his former self! He did grow better, but that is not saying much. I was with him at some time every day and saw him, even up to the end …. There was never a moment during all that time when he was more than a shadow of his former self …. It was so sad that those of us about him who almost without exception admired him, would turn our heads away when he came along or we went near him.”

In her own mind, Edith had assumed her “stewardship” not from personal ambition but solely to serve her husband. “I studied every paper, sent from the different Secretaries or Senators, and tried to digest and present in tabloid form the things that, despite my vigilance, had to go to the President,” she recalled. The president’s attention span ran to no more than a few minutes a day. Edith thought she could handle the job. Her husband had made statecraft seem easy. She was under the illusion that she could fill in for him by reading all the cables, decoding secret messages and putting off things she deemed unimportant. But this was fantasy, not statesmanship. In fact, by protecting and “serving” her husband, she was—there is no other way to put it—undermining the national interest.

Edith admitted much later that she had subordinated the country to her husband’s recovery. “Woodrow Wilson was first my beloved husband whose life I was trying to save, fighting with my back to the wall—after that he was the President of the United States.” Her most potent weapon was her control of all access to him. “One night,” Grayson recalled, “[the president] summoned me to his room, and, asking the nurse to leave us, he said, ‘I have been thinking over this matter of resigning and letting the Vice President take my place. It is clear that I
should do this if I have not the strength to fill the office ….” But Wilson never “broached this topic again.”

Later, Edith tried to justify her actions. She claimed that Dr. Francis X. Dercum, a Philadelphia nerve specialist, had advised her to “have everything come to you; weigh the importance of each matter, and see if it is possible by consultations with the respective heads of the departments to solve them without the guidance of your husband.” She wrote that Dercum had warned her, “every time you take him a new anxiety or problem to excite him, you are turning a knife in an open wound.” Edith further claimed that when she suggested Wilson might resign, Dercum replied, “For Mr. Wilson to resign would have a bad effect on the country, and a serious effect on our patient.” This, then, was Edith’s rationale for taking over the presidency and for keeping the rest of the country in the dark. Historians and doctors have since questioned whether any physician would give advice that struck at the heart of the Constitution.

Edith did not allow House’s letters to reach her husband. She blocked Tumulty from entering her husband’s sickroom. Vice President Thomas Marshall, held in contempt by Wilson (“A small caliber man,” Wilson had called him), was neither qualified nor particularly interested in assuming power and is best remembered for his bon mot, “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.” (The Twenty-fifth Amendment, ceding power to the vice president during presidential infirmity or death, was not enacted until after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.) Wilson had an uneasy relationship with his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, whose loyalty he always questioned. When, in desperation, Lansing called a Cabinet meeting to deal with the accumulated business, Edith called it a “betrayal” and reported it to her husband. Lansing resigned following the president’s censure. “In our case,” Edith wrote, “to have good nurses was almost as important as to have good Cabinet officers.”

The only other person aiding in Edith’s cover-up was Dr. Grayson, who later said he had advised the first lady to make a full public disclosure of her husband’s condition, and for the president to resign. Grayson claimed Edith overruled him on both counts. “She stood like a stone wall,” the doctor recalled, between the sickroom and the officials who insisted that their business was so important that they must see him. “
‘The welfare of the country depends upon our presenting this case to him in person,’” Grayson recalled one delegate’s assertion. “I am not thinking of the country now,” Edith answered, “I am thinking of my husband.”

As carefully as Edith and Grayson controlled news about the president’s health, wild rumors circulated about his condition. Some said he’d gone mad, pointing to the bars on the upstairs windows (installed earlier to keep Theodore Roosevelt’s young children from falling out). By December 1919, Edith could no longer prevent a congressional delegation from calling on her husband. “The Smelling Committee,” as Wilson dubbed it, consisted of Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico, an outspoken opponent of the League, and Senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, a staunch Wilson supporter. In a dark, windowless corner of the first-floor sickroom, Edith propped up her husband with pillows. His limp left side was well covered, while his good right arm was exposed. “Never was a conspiracy so pointedly or artistically formed,” Irwin Hoover recalled of the staged interview. Edith stood at the foot of her husband’s bed with pencil and pad in hand, “so I would not have to shake hands with [Fall].”

“Well, Mr. President,” Fall, a hearty westerner with a handlebar mustache, greeted Wilson, “we have all been praying for you.” “Which way, Senator?” the sick man asked. The Republican senator, later convicted for bribery in the Teapot Dome scandal, turned to Edith. “You seem very much engaged, Madam,” he said. “I thought it wise to record this interview,” she replied, “so there may be no misunderstanding or misstatements made.”

The charade worked. Fall told waiting reporters, hungry for any scrap of real news about the president, that Wilson was mentally fit and physically on the mend. The
Times
reported that the senators’ visit “[silenced] for good the many wild and often unfriendly rumors of Presidential disability.” Edith had won a critical round. There was nothing she could do, however, to save her husband’s doomed crusade for the League of Nations.

Though by mid-December Wilson was hobbling around, his mind never fully recovered. He grew ever more uncompromising about the League. Let the Republicans bear full responsibility for the fate of the
treaty, he thundered. He would not compromise one letter. Tragically out of touch, Wilson was still counting on public support to force Republicans to accept his terms. But the country’s mood had shifted since his tour. The war was over. There was money to be made, lives to be rebuilt. Wilson’s own party feared his obstinacy and Lodge’s growing strength.

Even the British tried to reason with their former ally. London dispatched former foreign minister Lord Edward Grey, nearly blind and ailing himself, on his final diplomatic mission. But Grey was carrying more than official freight. In his entourage was the man who Edith thought had entertained the capital in 1915 with his quip about her falling out of bed when the president proposed marriage. Crauford-Stuart had always denied having been the source of the joke, but Edith was unforgiving. Wilson demanded Grey send the diplomat home. Grey politely declined and waited for weeks for the freeze to thaw. Finally, he returned to London without ever seeing Wilson.