The tracks were cleared, and with a separate engine leading the way, the presidential special started for Washington. As the last of seven cars, the Mayflower caught the sway of the whole train, adding considerably to Wilson’s suffering. Grayson twice ordered the engineer to slow down. When the president was awake, the first lady did a fine imitation of their quiet evenings at home—making small talk, knitting, and generally trying, she said, “to go on as though the structure of our life did not lie in ruin around us.”
Forty-nine agonizing hours after leaving Wichita, the Wilsons were back in the White House. Unable to work or even read because of the pain in his head, Woodrow spent the rest of the day pacing. Over the next few days he began feeling somewhat better, but at 8:50 a.m. on October 2, Edith Wilson phoned Ike Hoover, the chief usher, to say that the president was seriously ill and she wanted Grayson. After sending a car for the doctor, Hoover raced upstairs to offer his assistance. Finding the doors locked, he waited in the hall for Grayson, who was shown in and reappeared ten minutes later. Throwing his arms in the air, he said, “My God, the president is paralyzed.” Hoover never again heard anyone in Wilson’s inner circle use the word “paralyzed.” The most serious case of presidential disability, along with a White House cover-up of unprecedented magnitude, had begun.
Hoover had a close look at the president that afternoon while helping to rearrange furniture in the Lincoln Bedroom. He would remember Wilson stretched out on the bed, “just gone as far as one could judge from appearances.” Wilson had had a major stroke caused by a blood clot in the middle cerebral artery of the right half of his brain. His left arm and leg were paralyzed, much of his vision was destroyed, and the impaired muscles on the left side of his face made it difficult for him to swallow. He had collapsed in his bathroom, hitting his head as he sank to the floor. Edith heard a groan, went to his aid, and found him unconscious.
Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall, first in the line of presidential succession, rushed to the White House as soon as he learned of Wilson’s collapse but was turned away. A man who felt several sizes too small for the vice presidency, Marshall was afraid of becoming president and terrified at the prospect of having to take the office without any preparation. Wilson ignored him for five and a half years after taking office, and the inattention would undoubtedly have continued if Wilson had not decided to go to the Paris Peace Conference. When Republicans complained that his absence would leave the United States without a president, Wilson designated Marshall “acting president” and asked him to chair cabinet meetings for the duration. Marshall played the part, but only for a few weeks, because the cabinet secretaries paid him no more attention than Wilson had.
• • •
Lansing, who was in New York when Wilson was stricken, returned to Washington that evening and telephoned Grayson, who would only say that the president was in bad condition. Next morning Lansing went to see Tumulty, who took him into the Cabinet Room and revealed that Wilson was gravely ill. “In what way?” Lansing asked. Apparently torn between a promise of secrecy and a sense that the facts ought to be disclosed, Tumulty resorted to pantomime, drawing an imaginary line down the length of his left arm. Lansing understood: paralysis of the left side. Tumulty summoned Grayson, who described the president’s illness as nervous exhaustion requiring complete rest. Grayson said nothing about a stroke but admitted that if the president recovered, it would probably be months before he could resume his duties.
Lansing raised the idea of invoking the Constitution and calling on Marshall to serve as president while Wilson was incapacitated. Losing his temper, Tumulty said he did not need a tutorial from Lansing on the Constitution.I And just who, he wanted to know, would certify to the president’s disability? When Lansing advised a statement by Tumulty or Grayson, Tumulty declared that he would not be a party to any attempt to oust the president. Grayson took the same position. Tumulty added that if anyone outside the White House tried to prove that Wilson was not up to his duties, “Grayson and I would stand together and repudiate it.”
Two days after the stroke, Grayson and the other doctors called in to treat the president realized that the paralysis would be permanent and decided that the public should be told. But Grayson’s notes of the discussion say that “in view of the wishes of _____ this was deferred.” He filled in the blank a few sentences later, after explaining that despite the new prognosis, “I thought it was wise to issue general statements only. Further, Mrs. Wilson, the president’s wife, was absolutely opposed to any other course.” The many official bulletins that he and Tumulty prepared for the press over the next four months were deliberately vague and contained no mention of paralysis or a stroke.
Deeply upset by Wilson’s illness, Tumulty had seen Lansing’s overture as yet another betrayal of Wilson. But Lansing had not gone to the White House with nefarious intent. As secretary of state, he outranked every member of the cabinet but the president and wanted to ensure that Wilson’s illness did not paralyze the executive branch. Undeterred by Tumulty’s outburst, he told Newton Baker, the secretary of war, that Wilson was paralyzed, and asked if a cabinet meeting was in order. Baker thought it was.
On Monday morning, every cabinet secretary attended a meeting convened by Lansing. The first order of business was an interrogation of Grayson. What was the exact nature of the president’s trouble? Lansing asked. How long would he be sick? Was his mind clear or not? After months of concealing the decline in Wilson’s health, Grayson easily fielded the questions and went so far as to put Lansing on notice. The president was improving though not yet up to conducting business, Grayson said, and his mind was not only clear but active—so active, in fact, that he had been “very much annoyed” when told of the cabinet meeting, and he had demanded to know why and by whom it had been called.
Lansing was taken aback by the report of the president’s anger, and Secretary Baker rescued him by suggesting that Grayson tell the president that the cabinet secretaries had come together as a mark of their affection for their chief, that they were looking out for his interests, and that the government was running smoothly. The cabinet approved the idea, and after Grayson was excused, there followed a long discussion of whether to take action under the disability clause. Lansing favored the idea, but the rest of the group was inclined to wait and see.
There were many reasons not to act. Congress could legislate on its own, and the bills it passed would automatically become law if the president failed to sign them within ten days. Also, the question of who would declare the president disabled had no clear answer. To some, the cabinet seemed a logical choice, if only because of a tradition in place since 1821: five presidents had died in office, and in every case the secretary of state, acting for the cabinet, had notified the vice president of his succession to the presidency. The cabinet had never ruled on a case of presidential disability. What if the secretaries disagreed on whether Wilson was too sick to perform his duties?
On Capitol Hill, there was a thought that Congress should arrange the transfer of authority from a disabled president to a vice president, because members of Congress were elected officials and cabinet members were not. Yet another camp held that the decision should be made by the Supreme Court. With no clear path to follow, no substantive information on the president’s condition, and a vice president dreading the prospect of assuming the presidency, Washington was reduced to watchful waiting.
• • •
Neither Grayson nor Tumulty would hear of removing Wilson from the presidency, but they soon shared the big secret of the sickroom—the stroke—with trusted outsiders. Grayson told Breckinridge Long, third assistant secretary of state, that the president’s life might hang in the balance for weeks. Though Wilson’s blood pressure was returning to normal, he was very weak, and some of his veins were worrisomely thin. Fearing that the smallest upset might have disastrous consequences, Grayson had even banned newspapers from the sickroom. Long shared the information with Lansing.
Tumulty briefed J. Fred Essary of The Baltimore Sun and asked him to brief the vice president. Explaining the need to delegate the task, Tumulty claimed that no one from the White House could talk to Marshall even unofficially for fear that the conversation would be seized upon as proof of the president’s inability to govern. Tumulty did not reveal that Wilson was unable to govern. Nor did he say that any White House approach to Marshall would have been vetoed by Edith Wilson, who feared that the vice president would capitulate to the Senate’s demand for treaty reservations, the very thing her husband had repudiated on his speaking tour. Immediately after seeing Tumulty, Essary went to the Capitol and informed the vice president that the president might die at any moment. Stunned, Marshall bowed his head, fell into a silence, and could not climb out. Essary thought it best to leave, but he looked back from the door and saw Marshall, hands clasped, still staring at his desk.
Though the cover-up at the White House cannot be excused, it can be explained. The president’s three guardians were in shock. They put the interests of the patient first. They hoped that he would soon be well. And because the disability clause of the Constitution was vague and untried, they were in unknown territory. But there was a recent precedent for a temporary transfer of power, and the guardians were aware of it: Wilson’s designation of Marshall as acting president during the Paris Peace Conference. With the “acting president” model in mind, Tumulty or Lansing could have asked the attorney general about the possibility of devising a temporary transfer of power on grounds of temporary disability. If the framers of the Constitution had not envisioned such a solution, neither had they ruled it out. But it does not appear that the idea was ever considered.
• • •
Edith Wilson’s memoir gives a markedly different account of the crisis. Writing twenty years after the fact and still seething at accusations that she had promoted herself to de facto president, she told her readers that she was writing as if she “had taken the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—so help me God.” As she remembered it, she wanted the doctors to be frank about the president’s possibilities for recovery so that she could “be honest with the people.” She also claimed that she had been open to a Marshall presidency. Had she forgotten? Was she lying? Or were Tumulty and Grayson lying when they blamed her for the cover-up?
According to Edith, the doctors said that because Wilson’s mind was clear and because he had begun to gain ground, recovery was possible as long as he was kept free of every problem while Nature repaired the damage done by the stroke. Edith said she pointed out that every matter that came to the president was a problem. And she claimed that she asked whether it would make more sense for Marshall to take the reins so that the patient would get the undisturbed rest he needed. Did Tumulty and Grayson lie? Did Edith’s memory fail her? Or was this another coat of whitewash?
Francis X. Dercum, a distinguished neurologist called in by Grayson, supposedly suggested an alternative to Marshall in conversation with Edith: “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. In this way you can save him a great deal. But always keep in mind that every time you take him a new anxiety or problem to excite him, you are turning a knife in an open wound. His nerves are crying out for rest, and any excitement is torture to him.”
Edith wrote that she resisted the proposal until Dercum suggested that the president’s resignation would injure the country and the patient. As Edith remembered it, Dercum said that the president had “staked his life and made his promise to the world to do all in his power to get the treaty ratified and make the League of Nations complete. If he resigns, the greatest incentive to recovery is gone; and as his mind is clear as crystal he can still do more with even a maimed body than anyone else.” Dercum allegedly reminded her that after five years of talking with him about public affairs, she was well equipped to serve as his go-between.
Writing in the 1980s, the neuropsychiatrist Edwin Weinstein took a skeptical view of Edith’s reconstruction of her conversation with Dercum. Weinstein pointed out that Dercum’s voice sounds just like Edith’s. Also, Dercum was fully aware that Wilson’s recovery would be slight, and in such circumstances, Weinstein wrote, it was “extremely unlikely” that a doctor would have taken on the responsibility of suggesting that Wilson was up to the demands of the presidency. Many of the records in the case were buried in Grayson’s papers until 1991, but once these documents were uncovered, it was clear that Wilson had no intention of leaving office until the end of his term and that he and his wife were determined to conceal the facts of his condition.
About one point there is no doubt: Edith went to work as Woodrow’s assistant, studying requests and reports from government officials and preparing digests of matters she deemed essential for his consideration. “I, myself, never made a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs,” she wrote. “The only decision that was mine was what was important and what was not, and the very important decision of when to present matters to my husband.” But if Edith Wilson was not setting policy or taking action as the nation’s chief executive, she did wield more power than anyone else in the White House for the final seventeen months of her husband’s presidency. With his wife as gatekeeper and with the cooperation of Grayson and Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson continued to be President Wilson. The gate was high, it rarely opened, and business was anything but usual at the White House.
On occasion Grayson also served as a go-between. Just after the cabinet meeting convened by Lansing, the War Department heard from General William S. Graves, commander of the U.S. forces sent to Siberia in 1918. The end of the world war and the start of Russia’s civil war had left Siberia and the Allied mission in chaos, but the Americans stayed on and took up the humanitarian task of protecting rail shipments of food. In the fall of 1919 they found themselves caught between a Bolshevik advance and a Japanese drive to seize control of the Siberian coast. General Graves wanted to know what his government expected him to do. Baker discussed the situation with Lansing and Josephus Daniels of the Navy Department, and when all agreed on the need for a presidential decision, they enlisted Grayson as messenger. The problem, which had been building for months, did not catch Wilson by surprise or overtax his weary mind. He asked Lansing to request an immediate Japanese response to a recent American communiqué expressing concern about Japanese intentions in Siberia.
Minuscule as the president’s role was, Grayson made the most of it. On October 11—only nine days after the stroke—he issued a bulletin saying that the doctors considered the president’s progress encouraging and that although his recovery would be very slow, he had already taken care of some official business. For good measure, Grayson gave his fellow Americans a peek into the sickroom, revealing that a Victrola had been installed for the patient’s pleasure and that the first lady often read him poetry and light prose. With a few deft strokes, Grayson had sketched a picture of a president who was ailing but well tended and able to carry out his duties.
Though Grayson has been thrashed for his part in the cover-up, he was a man in an impossible position—a physician who happened to be an admiral, torn between the tradition of doctor-patient confidentiality and his oath as a naval officer to uphold the Constitution. But however conflicted Grayson might have felt, he quickly came down on the side of confidentiality. He fended off all challengers, including friends as devoted to Wilson as Baruch and Daniels. Two weeks after the stroke, when Baruch suggested that it was time to share the facts with the public, Grayson professed to agree but said that he and the other doctors were waiting until they felt they could give a definitive prognosis. (In fact, the prognosis had been reached forty-eight hours after the stroke.) Six weeks later, when Daniels repeated Baruch’s suggestion, Grayson again agreed but offered a different excuse: “I am forbidden to speak of it. The president and Mrs. Wilson have made me make a promise to that effect.”
• • •
The first attempt to scale the wall of secrecy surrounding the stroke was made by a freshman senator, George H. Moses of New Hampshire. A Republican strongly opposed to the entire Treaty of Versailles, Moses wrote a friend back home that Wilson was “a very sick man. He suffered some kind of cerebral lesion. . . . His condition is such that while this lesion is healing, he is absolutely unable to undergo any experience which requires concentration of mind . . . . Of course, he may get well—that is, he may live, but if he does he will not be any material force or factor in anything.”
Although Moses had hit the mark, Dercum and Grayson immediately attacked the senator’s credibility. Many absurd rumors were making the rounds, Dercum said, and the one passed along by Moses was “nonsensical beyond discussion.” When Grayson was asked to comment, he coolly asked whether Senator Moses was a physician. Told that he was not, Grayson said that the senator “must have information that I do not possess.”
Suspecting that there was more to the story, The New York Times noted the swelling chorus of demands for specifics. Grayson parried by telling a group of reporters that Wilson’s mind was as clear as ever and that he was capable of conducting business but still needed a long rest. If he and the other doctors were to ease their restrictions, they might regret it, he said, and “when I have the care of the president’s life in my hands, I consider it my duty to take no chances whatsoever.” He promised that nothing would be withheld from the public if the president’s health took a critical downturn.
The critical downturn came on the same day, October 14, with a swollen prostate gland that blocked the flow of urine and caused a dangerously high fever. At least one of Wilson’s doctors argued that without surgery, he would die within two hours. Others, led by Grayson, insisted that Wilson was so weak that the surgery might kill him. The doctors left the decision to Edith, who sided with Grayson. His bulletin for the day falsely reported that the president’s overall condition was good. Fortunately, several days of hot compresses eliminated the constriction, and the fever abated. But the American people were never told that their president had spent several days on the brink of death or that the setback had undone the slight recovery he had made since the stroke.
Ike Hoover would remember Wilson lying helpless for weeks. Once a day he was lifted out of bed and deposited in an armchair but had to be propped up to remain in place. After a time he could sign documents, although even that seemed to wear him out. A month after the stroke, when he was placed in a wheelchair, he was too weak to sit up. The chair was adjusted so that his legs could be stretched out straight, a posture that held him upright. “If ever there was a man in bad shape he was,” Hoover wrote. “There was no comparison with the president who went to Paris and before. He was changed in every way and everyone about him recognized and understood it to be so.”
In her memoir, Edith Wilson tried to cast doubt on Hoover’s account by challenging a few of its details, but the thrust of his observations was corroborated decades later by Bert E. Park, a neurosurgeon and student of medical history. A study of the records of Wilson’s stroke brought Park to a blunt conclusion: “Wilson was seriously disabled, both in a medical and Constitutional sense, despite Grayson’s and other doctors’ assertions to the contrary.” Given Wilson’s heart trouble and his history of small strokes, a major stroke was inevitable and, said Park, “neither Wilson’s thought processes nor his conduct in office would ever be the same again.”
I. The pertinent passage, part of Article II, reads: “In case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President.” The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1967, supersedes the original and is much more comprehensive, covering succession to the presidency, the appointment of a vice president to fill the vacancy created when a vice president moves up to president, and the procedure to be followed when a president is temporarily disabled. The amendment was prompted by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which left the office of president in vulnerable hands: the new president, Lyndon Johnson, had suffered a heart attack some years prior, and next in line were the seventy-one-year-old speaker of the House and the eighty-six-year-old president pro tempore of the Senate. The history of the Twenty-fifth Amendment is well told in Birch Bayh, One Heartbeat Away (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).
