“Under the Covenant of the League of Nations, we can mind other peoples’ business and anything that affects the peace of the world, whether we are parties to it or not, can by our delegates be brought to the attention of mankind!”
The crowd roared—and Wilson smiled, knowing that victory was now only a matter of time.
On Board the Presidential Train in Montana
September 6, 1919
With each day of travel, Cary Grayson saw that Wilson’s condition only seemed to worsen.
The president was muddled in his speeches: He said Baghdad was in Persia, rather than Iraq; he confused the dates of treaties he was citing; and he claimed to have descended from American revolutionaries, when, in truth, none of his ancestors had lived in the colonies during the Revolutionary War. Most of these occurrences could be laughed off, the inevitable result of too many speeches, but Grayson knew Wilson was a man of precision. His faltering was, Grayson feared, a sign of greater trouble.
Wilson could barely eat, so Grayson prepared a daily diet of liquids and soft foods for him. Now severe throat pain was making it hard for the president to even swallow. Grayson, having watched the steady progression of symptoms, now had a new diagnosis in mind. With Edith listening anxiously by his side, he told the president that he had developed a throat infection, an alarming sign that his overall health was beginning to fail.
Pueblo, Colorado
September 25, 1919
As her husband delivered his fortieth speech in half as many days, Edith looked on with growing concern. He was not sleeping. His breathing was labored. He would sometimes appear to be choking. He would lose his train of thought during speeches, and he’d often repeat himself. He was more rigid than she’d ever seen him. Even with her.
Just before his speech, Edith asked Wilson to stop and take a respite. “No,” he told her. “I have caught the imagination of the people. They are eager to hear what the League stands for. I should fail in my duty if I disappointed them.”
It was true that thousands were turning out to see him. What wasn’t quite as clear was whether any of them actually opposed the League to begin with. Sure, there were occasional signs of dissenters—“Shall American boys police the world?” men would call out to him—but they didn’t seem to Edith to be likely converts to her husband’s cause. Which made her start to wonder: What was the point of this trip? Preaching to the choir would not change anything.
Speaking outside a large hall, underneath splendid red, white, and blue bunting, Wilson greeted the crowd. “Mr. Chairman and fellow countrymen, it is with a great deal of genuine pleasure that I find myself in Pueblo, and I feel it a compliment that I should be permitted to be the first speaker in this beautiful hall. One of the advantages of this hall, as I look about, is that you are not too far away from me, because there is nothing so reassuring to men who are trying to express the public sentiment as getting into real personal contact with their fellow citizens.”
Wilson, his voice gathering steam, then accused opponents of the League of being disloyal to their country. “I have perceived more and more that men have been busy creating an absolutely false impression of what the treaty of peace and the covenant of the League of Nations contain and mean.
“I find, moreover, that there is an organized propaganda against the League of Nations and against the treaty proceeding from exactly the same sources that the organized propaganda proceeded from which threatened this country here and there with disloyalty.”
He went on for an hour, until his head throbbed and his voice was hoarse. He defended the League and attacked his opponents. He said his efforts were essential to a just and lasting worldwide peace. And then he brought the audience, and some journalists as well, to tears as he closed his speech by citing the sacrifices of the American dead. “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.”
As Wilson basked in the thunderous applause, Edith cried as well. Not because of her husband’s words, but because she knew he would not make it much longer.
• • •
Edith Wilson beckoned the maid into her compartment. It was very late at night, so the First Lady said little as the maid brushed her hair and then offered a massage. With her husband sleeping in the next room—at last, he was getting some rest!—the women made a special effort to keep quiet.
Before long, they heard a knock on the door. It was the president.
“When you are finished,” he called out, “will you come in here?”
A pause, and then: “I’m very sick.”
Quickly summoning Dr. Grayson, Edith listened in horror as her husband now admitted what they’d all known for so long. He had tried to sleep, but the pain was unbearable. He couldn’t breathe. He was nauseous. She could see the muscles on his face twitching. He had difficulty moving his left side.
She saw a worried look crossing Grayson’s face and her heart began to race. She wondered if her husband would even survive the night.
On Board the Presidential Train to Kansas
September 26, 1919
5 A.M.
Cary Grayson came to the same conclusion as the First Lady: The western tour was over. The reporters would be told the president had an illness attributed to exhaustion. A telegram would be sent to Wilson’s daughters informing them of his early return, but assuring them there was nothing to worry about. All other stops were canceled. The conductor would send messages down their route to clear the tracks for the train’s speedy return to Washington.
Everyone agreed to the plan, except for the president, who, despite having managed to dress himself, still looked piteously ill.
“No,” Wilson told them. “No. I must keep on.”
Grayson could not relent to his friend’s whims. Not this time. “Any other course than returning to Washington,” he warned Wilson, “might bring disastrous, even fatal, consequences.”
But Wilson would not relent. Grayson and Edith looked at each other with exasperated expressions. The First Lady knew what she had to do.
Edith went into the bathroom and retrieved a small mirror. With tears in her eyes, she brought it to her husband. “Look at yourself.”
Wilson took the mirror and, for the first time, saw the reality. He swallowed hard and choked back tears. “I don’t want to be a quitter.”
“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 ha
d 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.