Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
Wilson and Tumulty were so elated they talked of carrying the campaign into Massachusetts and lighting a fire under Senator Lodge back where his voters lived.
In Salt Lake City the Mormon Tabernacle was packed to suffocation. The heat was insufferable. Edith said she felt sick and blind from the lack of air and would have fainted if her maid hadn’t handed her a bottle of lavender smelling salts. She sent a handkerchief drenched with the salts by a secretservice man up to her husband. After his speech the President came back dripping with sweat. He changed his clothes, but Edith noticed he couldn’t seem to stop sweating.
At Cheyenne and Denver there were more parades, more delegations, more hands to shake. Wilson’s headache was continuous now, blinding. He suffered nerve pains in his arms.
In Pueblo he suddenly announced that he wouldn’t go to greet fifty thousand people waiting at the fairgrounds. He’d never said he would. When Tumulty showed him the itinerary with his okeh on it he lost his temper. Entering the new city auditorium Starling, the secretservice man who was right behind him, noticed that he couldn’t seem to see where he was going. The President stumbled on a step. Starling almost had to lift him up the steps to the platform.
Many of the reporters spoke of it as the best speech of the whole tour, but Starling, who stood right behind him to catch him if he fell, thought he seemed to lose the thread, to repeat himself. His enunciation was thick. At one point he broke down and cried.
“What of our pledges,” he cried, “to the men that lie dead in France … 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.”
With tears streaming down his face he told of Decoration Day at a cemetery for the war dead … French women putting flowers on the graves … “There was a little group of French women who had adopted these graves, had made themselves mothers of these dear ghosts by putting flowers every day on these dear graves” … He wished the men in public life who opposed the covenant could visit such a spot. “I wish that the thought that comes out of those graves could penetrate their consciousness … the moral obligation … to see … the thing through … and make good their redemption of the world.”
His peroration was in the old style: “Now that the mists of this great question have cleared away … we have accepted the truth 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.”
Tumulty was deeply moved. He saw tears in every eye. Edith Wilson was crying. The hardboiled newspapermen sniffled. “Down in the amphitheatre I saw men sneak their handkerchiefs out of their pockets … The President,” Tumulty wrote, “was like a great organist playing upon the heart emotions of the thousands of people who were held spellbound by what he said.”
Woodrow Wilson had covered something like eight thousand miles in less than a month. He had delivered thirtysix set speeches and all sorts of short addresses from the rear platform of his train. He had sat in on countless political meetings and exerted himself to the utmost in a dozen parades.
The night after the Pueblo speech, while his train was speeding towards Wichita, President Wilson, shortly after he had turned in, was stricken with unbearable pain. Grayson could do nothing to alleviate it. The President couldn’t lie down. He couldn’t stay still. He dressed himself and tried sitting up. There seemed no way of making him comfortable.
“It’s a stroke,” Brooks told Starling. “It’s all over now.”
“The Doctor and I,” Edith wrote, “kept the vigil while the train dashed on and on through the darkness … About five in the morning a blessed release came and sitting upright on the stiff seat my husband fell asleep … The dear face opposite me was worn and lined; and as I sat there watching the dawn break slowly I felt that life would never be the same … 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 the morning Wilson protested that he must continue his tour but Edith Wilson and Grayson and Tumulty took things into their own hands and ordered the train to head straight back to Washington. The special train sped across the countryside with blinds drawn as if there were a dead man aboard. When the train arrived in Washington the President had recovered sufficiently to be able to walk from the train to the car.
Three days later President Wilson was stricken down by cerebral thrombosis.
The first the White House staff knew was when early one morning Ike Hoover got a sudden call from Mrs. Wilson to send for Dr. Grayson. “The President is very sick.” The chief usher sent a car for Grayson to his house. When they went up to the President’s suite Hoover found every door locked. The door was opened just enough to let the doctor in and closed in Hoover’s face. When Grayson came back he was terribly shaken. “My God,” he told Hoover, “the President is paralyzed.”
The White House Circle
For weeks Wilson lies desperately ill. His left side is paralyzed. His speech is affected. His condition is complicated by acute inflammation of the prostate gland. Edith is convinced an operation is too risky. A stricture almost causes his death. Showing the extraordinary powers of recuperation he has shown in similar but less drastic attacks, gradually he begins to recover.
Edith Wilson is determined that “he must never know how ill he was … I must carry on.”
Without hesitation she takes upon herself complete charge of the sickroom and of such duties of the presidency as cannot be postponed. Ever since their marriage she has been giving him advice, and arranging his papers for him, and helping decipher messages in the private code he had with Colonel House.
Now Edith Wilson becomes de facto the President. Grayson collaborates humbly. He brings in trained nurses, consulting physicians. He rigs up the presidential suite as a small hospital They both take extraordinary precautions that no word of the President’s real condition shall reach the world outside. A nervous breakdown, Tumulty is told to report to the press. With rest and seclusion the President is recovering.
A few days after the President’s stroke, Lansing, profoundly disturbed, seeks out Tumulty in the cabinet room. In default of any real information the wildest rumors are current in Washington. The President is dead. He has lost his mind and is confined in a straitjacket.
Something must be done to cope with the situation. Lansing has a copy of Jefferson’s Manual in his hand. If the President really is incapacitated, he tells Tumulty, his powers and duties should devolve on Vice President Marshall. He points out the pertinent paragraph in the Constitution.
Tumulty flies up in his face. “Mr. Lansing,” he quotes himself as declaiming, “the Constitution is not a dead letter in the White House.” He needs no tutoring from Lansing about the Constitution. Whose business will it be to certify to the disability of the President, he asks hotly.
Lansing says it would be up to him and Dr. Grayson.
“You may rest assured,” shouts Tumulty, dropping into brogue in his excitement, “that while Woodrow Wilson is lying in the White House on the broad of his back I’ll not be a party to ousting him.”
He adds, almost in tears, “The President has been too kind, too loyal, too wonderful to me to receive such treatment at my hands.”
At that moment Dr. Grayson appears.
Tumulty turns to him. “And I am sure Dr. Grayson will never testify as to his disability. Will you, Grayson?”
Grayson will do no such thing.
“I then notified Mr. Lansing that if anyone outside of the White House circle attempted to certify to the President’s disability, that Grayson and I would stand together and repudiate it.”
Lansing retires crestfallen to the Department of State.
With Edith Wilson in command from behind the locked doors, such White House business as is essential is carried on.
To Break the Heart of the World
The news that the treaty may fail in the Senate has been received with consternation in England. When, in the cool light of afterthought, the British statesmen read over the Treaty of Versailles they find themselves in agreement with President Wilson that only a series of rational readjustments under a league of nations can save Europe from disaster. Smuts, who signed under protest, is aghast at the document he put his name to. John Maynard Keynes has resigned his job with the British treasury and is preparing his famous blast against the treaty’s iniquities.
House, in London, on his way home from fulfilling the pleasant task of helping pick Geneva for the League’s capital, has been busy stirring up the English. He wants them to let the American Senate know that the British Government will accept almost any reservations the senators feel necessary.
Sir Edward Grey, now Viscount Grey of Falloden, though ill and discouraged and nearly blind, is prevailed upon to accept a special embassy to Washington to make such agreements as are urgently needed to avoid a naval armament race and to get ratification for the League of Nations. The British Cabinet thinks of him as an eminent liberal almost certain to be congenial to President Wilson. He arrives in Washington the day Wilson is stricken on the train to Wichita.
A few days later House reaches New York from England so weak from an attack of gallstones he has to be carried off the boat on a stretcher. Hopelessly incapacitated himself, he sends his friend and erstwhile interpreter Stephen Bonsal to Washington. He knows that Bonsal, a schoolmate of the senator’s soninlaw, is on good terms with Lodge. They have in common a passion for the writings of George Borrow. If any man can talk the senator around it is Bonsal. At a couple of friendly interviews Bonsal fills the senator in on the gossip of the Peace Conference. He wheedles him into admitting that his reservations might be modified. Lodge pencils some suggestions, particularly certain changes in wording that might make him accept Article X, on a printed copy of the covenant which Bonsal just happens to have in his pocket Bonsal rushes this copy to the post office and mails it to House in New York. House promptly dispatches it to President Wilson at the White House.
No reply. Edith Wilson has ceased to deliver House’s letters to the President. She hates House and undoubtedly she feels that anything connected with the hated Lodge may upset her husband and bring about a relapse. Nothing is ever heard of Lodge’s modification of his reservations.
Senator Lodge, who knows of Bonsal’s intimacy with House, and who still considers the confidential colonel the quickest channel to the President’s ear, being touchy as a bear, is insulted by what he considers a direct rebuff from the White House. A few days later he reintroduces his reservations, in their original form, on the Senate floor.
Edith Wilson has cut all channels of communication with the President. When Sir William Wiseman, whom the Foreign Office sent ahead of the new ambassador, trusting in his intimacy with the confidential colonel to smooth the way, calls at the White House, Mrs. Wilson tells him the President is too ill to see him. “I had never liked this plausible little man.” Besides she knows he’s a crony of House’s. The eminent Viscount Grey suffers the same fate as Wiseman. Not even Tumulty has the courtesy to give him an interview. Without being received by the President he can’t function as an ambassador. After cooling his heels dismally for three months at the British Embassy he goes home in despair.
Edith Wilson, however, does consider the President well enough during this period to receive a visit from the King and Queen of Belgium. Like many another Virginian, Mrs. Wilson has a soft spot for royalty. She lets them in to see her husband in his bed and allows them to show him a beautiful set of china they have brought the Wilsons for a present. When the young Prince of Wales arrives in Washingon he is dutifully taken up to the sick man’s bedside.
Meanwhile the fulldress debate on the peace treaty resounds through the Senate chamber. Twice during November Edith Wilson allows Senator Hitchcock to see the President. He finds a tremulous whitebearded old man propped up with pillows. The paralyzed arm is hidden under the covers. Hitchcock still believes moderate reservations may win. When Hitchcock brings up Wilson’s own suggestions as a basis for compromise Wilson tells him, “Let Lodge compromise.”
As the day of the Senate vote draws near, the pressure for a compromise builds up in Washington. Herbert Hoover is using all the influence he has with the members of Wilson’s cabinet. Baruch, whom Edith likes, and who is a cordial friend of Grayson’s, urges them both to try to convince the President that enough senators are ready to vote for the treaty with moderate reservations if he will only give his consent. Half a loaf is better than no bread.
“For my sake,” says Edith, “won’t you accept these reservations and get this awful thing settled.”
He pats her hand. “Little girl don’t you desert me. That I cannot stand.”
Grayson puts in his two cents’ worth.
Wilson shakes his head. “Better a thousand times to go down fighting,” Edith quotes him as saying.
The day before the vote he dictates a letter to Hitchcock: “I sincerely hope that the friends and supporters of the treaty will vote against the Lodge resolution of ratification.”
Lodge uses all his parliamentary skill to set a trap for the Democrats. He arranges for the treaty to be brought to a vote first with his own reservations attached. Following the President’s instructions the southern Democrats join the diehard Republicans to vote it down. Then Hitchcock moves that the treaty be reconsidered with his moderate reservations attached. He is voted down by the Republicans voting solid. Lodge, to prove to the world that the Democrats are defeating their own treaty, now allows a new resolution to consider the treaty with his own reservations to be presented. In a rollcall vote, it is defeated by fortyone ayes to fiftyone nays, with the President’s Democrats voting against.
Senator Swanson of Virginia rushes across the aisle to Senator Lodge’s desk. “For God’s sake, can’t something be done to save the treaty?”
“Senator, the door is closed,” replies Lodge. “You have done it yourselves.”
By the end of December the President is well enough to dress himself and to hobble about a little with a cane. “He had changed from a giant to a pygmy in every wise,” wrote the White House usher. “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 when we went near him.”
For another fourteen months Woodrow Wilson lives on at the White House, immured in a sickroom. Every message, every newspaper passes through Edith Wilson’s hands.
“He must never know how ill he was; and I must carry on.”
When he is well enough to go out for drives in the White House motor car he sits covered by a cape in front with the driver, because it’s too painful for him to try to sit up in the back seat. He takes pathetic pleasure in the motion pictures that are shown him almost every afternoon, propped in his wheel chair in one of the large upstairs rooms.
By early February Wilson is well enough to settle with Lansing. Secretary Lansing has been calling informal meetings of the members of the Cabinet to keep the government rolling during the President’s illness. This is the last straw. He dictates a stiff letter asking for the Secretary’s immediate resignation.
Bainbridge Colby, erstwhile Progressive who became a devoted Wilsonian, and who has the reputation of writing a very good speech, is appointed in Lansing’s stead.
Illusions flourish in t
Wilson is convinced that the American people, the people who cheered him in Omaha and Seattle and Coeur d’Alene and Pueblo, Colorado, are for him and for his covenant almost to a man. Only the reactionary senators stand in their way.
He propounds a strange scheme: he will challenge the senators who are against the treaty to resign and seek re-election. He will promise that if they are re-elected he will induce the Vice President to resign and, after appointing a Republican Secretary of State he will resign himself; the Secretary of State will thus become President. Hasn’t he always believed in party government in the English style?
When the Senate reconsiders the Versailles Treaty, and the possibility arises that ratification may still be secured, with reservations tempered by compromise, Wilson again insists that Hitchcock’s obedient Democrats cast their votes against any treaty with reservations of any kind. So strong is the clamor for compromise that, even so, the treaty almost passes with the necessary twothirds vote. Only strict orders from the White House keep the Democrats in line for rejection. “We can always depend on Mr. Wilson,” says Brandegee to Lodge.
The theory is abroad that Wilson has insisted on rejection of the amended treaty because he wants a campaign issue for 1920. Can it be that he dreams of a third term?
When the Democrats convene in San Francisco in June the candidates are William Gibbs McAdoo and A. Mitchell Palmer. Wilson won’t let Tumulty give his endorsement either to his soninlaw or to his Attorney General. Newspaper articles are inspired about the President’s very good health. Photographs are broadcast taken from his good side. Colby is dispatched to San Francisco as bearer of a message from the White House: in case of a deadlock; why not Wilson?
The scheme goes awry. On the fortyfourth ballot a harmless Ohio politician named James M. Cox receives the nomination. His runningmate is the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.