Woodrow Wilson was paralyzed, but the government was not. Congress passed a raft of bills that became law without him. The Supreme Court, designed to operate at a remove from the Capitol and the White House, rolled on. Inevitably there were delays in the executive branch, but by the time of the stroke, the cabinet secretaries were almost as autonomous as the justices. They had been managing domestic affairs largely on their own for almost a year, while Wilson concentrated on the peace.
Even the battle over the treaty went on without a pause. Only two days after his collapse in Wichita, Wilson lost his most influential Republican ally, William Howard Taft. Finally convinced that the Senate would reject a treaty without reservations, Taft publicly urged Wilson to compromise. With the peace of the whole world at stake, Taft argued, it was unacceptable for the president to say, “I won’t play because I can’t have my way.”
Colonel House, who had stayed in Europe to help organize the League of Nations, returned to New York in mid-October and soon wrote the White House to volunteer his services. When the first lady proved unreceptive, he boldly dispatched one of his former aides in Paris, Stephen Bonsal, to Henry Cabot Lodge. An old friend of the Lodge family, Bonsal was given a warm welcome, and Lodge seemed open to a compromise with the president. The senator took a copy of the treaty, penciled in the changes he wanted to see in the League covenant, and agreed that Bonsal could deliver them to Colonel House, who would forward them to the White House.
As Lodge reviewed the alterations with him, Bonsal noticed that they were much less strident than the fourteen reservations now attached to the treaty.I He also realized that Lodge’s suggested phrasing barely differed from the phrasing in the covenant. But when Bonsal mused aloud that Lodge’s latest additions to the original Article X went without saying, Lodge had a dry retort: “If it goes without saying, there is no harm in saying it—and much advantage.” Lodge also voiced his skepticism about the staying power of the League and his fear that if it broke down, the United States would be drawn into the world’s chaos. Nevertheless, Lodge entrusted his marked-up treaty to Bonsal, who raced to the post office and mailed it to House.
Thrilled, the colonel passed the word to Wilson. There was no reply, and when Lodge made no further move, Bonsal guessed that the senator’s pride had been wounded by the president’s apparent refusal of an olive branch. In his diary Bonsal blamed Wilson’s gatekeepers: “the president is kept a prisoner . . . and all the efforts of House and his friends to establish relations with our stricken leader have failed. Lodge may well think that . . . the president has snubbed him; on the other hand, the olive branch may never have reached him—altogether an unfortunate mess.”
• • •
House undoubtedly relished the prospect of saving the treaty, the president, and the world, and Bonsal seemed to think that a great opportunity had been missed. But the colonel erred in supposing that Wilson was looking for an alternative to his rigid stance. Even on his sickbed Wilson was determined to prevail, and the victory he envisioned required the opposition to yield. Certain that he was right—morally right—he held his adversaries in contempt.
As the vote on the treaty neared, Bernard Baruch and other friends urged Wilson to compromise. So did Gilbert M. Hitchcock, leader of the president’s fight for ratification without reservations. He was an excellent man for the job. Son of Nebraska’s first congressman, he had cut his teeth on politics. As a young man, he studied law and then took up publishing, making his newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, into one of the country’s best. A progressive Democrat in a state that often voted Republican, Hitchcock was elected three times to the House of Representatives and was serving his second term in the Senate. He was well liked and often praised for his courage, political finesse, and powers of persuasion.
But he was not a favorite of the White House. He and Wilson had clashed publicly on several occasions, and in the summer of 1919, when Hitchcock decided to take a vacation just after Wilson’s return from Europe, reports of a “lack of warmth” between the two men made the front page. It was big news because Hitchcock was the acting minority leader of the Senate. Had Wilson not been sidelined, he would have led his ratification battle and consulted Hitchcock as needed. Now bedridden, Wilson was stuck with Hitchcock.
And Hitchcock was stuck with Wilson. Like Lansing, Hitchcock thought that Wilson had blundered by spurning the Republicans who had tried to interest him in mild reservations. To the senator as well as to the secretary of state, it seemed that Wilson was denying the first law of political mathematics: ratification would require sixty-four votes, and he would get them only if twenty-four Republicans voted with the forty Democrats. But Wilson was unavailable during September and October, and during those months, the Strong Reservationists (out to minimize U.S. involvement in world affairs) and the Irreconcilables (against the treaty in any form) had persuaded the country that the treaty was riddled with flaws and that the League menaced the independence of the United States.
Hitchcock sensed that he was leading a lost cause, but despite his apprehensions and his lukewarm relationship with Wilson, he proved a steadfast ally as the treaty moved toward a vote. He called at the White House a few days after the stroke to tell Tumulty that forty Democratic senators were ready to do whatever the president asked of them. He also stood foursquare behind Grayson’s efforts to downplay the seriousness of the president’s physical condition. Wilson thawed too. Hitchcock was the first elected official allowed into the sickroom.
The senator was shocked by the president’s appearance. Overnight, he “had become an old man,” Hitchcock would write. “As he lay in bed slightly propped up by pillows, with the useless arm concealed beneath the cover I beheld an emaciated old man with a thin white beard.” (Wilson had grown it to conceal the left side of his mouth, which drooped because of the facial muscles weakened by the stroke.) The president was alert and resolute but taken aback when Hitchcock reported that the treaty could not win ratification in its original form. When Wilson asked how many votes he could get for a treaty without reservations, Hitchcock put the maximum at forty-five—far short of the necessary sixty-four. Wilson groaned and asked, “Is it possible, is it possible?”
In mid-November, four days before the vote, Hitchcock met with Edith Wilson and told her that the treaty would be beaten unless the Democrats accepted Lodge’s reservations. Edith excused herself and went off to beg her husband to bow to reality. “For my sake,” she pleaded. Taking her hand, he said, “Little girl, don’t you desert me; that I cannot stand.” He insisted that he had no moral right to alter a treaty he had signed without giving the other signatories the same opportunity. “Better a thousand times to go down fighting than to dip your colors to dishonorable compromise,” he said. Edith, apparently unaware that reservations did not require the Allies’ approval, could not continue the argument. On rejoining Hitchcock, she said that she would never again ask her husband to change his mind about the treaty.
A few days later Hitchcock tried again, writing the president indirectly, through the first lady. With the vote imminent, he had to have definite word of the president’s position, he explained. Did Wilson really want the friends of the treaty to reject Lodge’s resolution of ratification, with its fourteen reservations? In a note on the back of Hitchcock’s envelope, Edith Wilson confirmed that the president favored rejection.
Two days before the vote, Hitchcock was again allowed into the sickroom, and for more than an hour gently tried to put Wilson on the path to compromise. Wilson was not only unyielding, he vowed to take revenge against senators who voted against him. When Hitchcock asked for his thoughts on the consequences of the treaty’s defeat, Wilson predicted that the United States would incur the contempt of the world. But he seemed to prefer contempt to Lodge’s reservations, and he vowed to take revenge. “I am a sick man, lying in this bed,” he said, “but I am going to debate this issue with these gentlemen in their respective states whenever they come up for reelection if I have breath enough in my body to carry on the fight. I shall do this even if I have to give my life to it. And I will get their political scalps when the truth is known to the people.”
It must have taken courage to argue with an invalid at high risk for another stroke, but Hitchcock admitted his willingness to compromise with the Republicans on certain points. Wilson tried to show that he too was a man of compromise, willing to accept clarifying reservations but unwilling to make substantive changes. Hitchcock noted that compromise would be essential. “Let Lodge compromise,” Wilson snapped.
Hitchcock agreed that Lodge would also have to bend, but, he said, “we might well hold out the olive branch.”
“Let Lodge hold out the olive branch,” Wilson said. Perhaps he had forgotten the offer Lodge tendered through Bonsal and House, or perhaps Edith had not shown it to him.
On his way out, Hitchcock said he hoped that their talk had not been too tiring. Wilson assured him that it was invigorating. In a moment alone with Grayson, who had sat in on the meeting, Hitchcock said he would “give anything if the Democrats, in fact, all the Senate, could see the attitude that man took this morning.”
Perhaps inspired by Wilson’s high spirits, Grayson allowed his patient to venture outdoors later in the day, a first since the stroke. Taken to the lawn near the South Portico of the White House, he was rolled about in his wheelchair for more than an hour, after which the press was informed that the outing was one more milestone on the president’s journey toward recovery. There was another such outing the following day, and Grayson let it be known that the cabinet, then meeting in the White House, could see the president as he and his companions moved about the grounds. It is not known if any cabinet members saw him, but Grayson’s remark subtly implied that the president’s caretakers had nothing to hide.
• • •
Hitchcock allowed himself to think that the president’s fight could be won, although not on the first try. To hearten fellow Democrats, he drafted a message from the president, urging rejection of Lodge’s resolution of ratification because it was, in effect, a defeat of the treaty. The letter went on to explain that after the vote, the door would probably be open for a compromise resolution that would make ratification possible.
Wilson reviewed the draft and made two fateful changes, replacing the word “defeat” with “nullification” and deleting the mention of compromise. Both revisions were sure to anger nearly every member of the Senate. “Nullification” carried echoes of the nineteenth-century Constitutional crisis precipitated by South Carolina’s move to invalidate certain federal laws. In using the word, Wilson was accusing his opponents of flouting a higher authority.
The ferocity of Wilson’s opposition to the Lodge reservations has been variously ascribed to his hatred of Lodge, his innate stubbornness, and the psychological inflexibility that often afflicts stroke patients. All three factors seem to have played a part. Wilson’s stubbornness had always been pronounced, but it had served him well in his fights with Congress before the war. Unfortunately, his successes nurtured a sense of invincibility that ultimately worked against him. By 1918 he was regularly ignoring advice that could have spared him the debacles of the last years of his presidency. He had refused to listen when his wife and Colonel House warned that his letter urging Americans to vote Democratic in the midterm elections would backfire. He had refused to appoint prominent Republicans to the American peace delegation. He had refused Lansing’s suggestions for a League covenant better aligned with traditional American diplomacy. Jealously guarding his Constitutional prerogative to conduct foreign policy on his own, he had not even communicated with the Senate while he was in Paris. And when he came home to a huge fight, he had ignored all counsel to stay in Washington and negotiate.
On November 18, the day before the vote, Stephen Bonsal called on Hitchcock and found him close to despair. As he told Bonsal, most Democrats favored ratification even on Lodge’s terms, because they saw peace as the only way to steady a deeply unsettled world. Russia was still in the throes of a bloody civil war. The new government of Germany faced threats of Bolshevism, fascism, and hyperinflation. An Italian poet and war hero, Gabriele D’Annunzio, had raised a small army of super-patriots and seized control of Fiume. The British Empire was struggling to suppress independence movements in Ireland, India, and elsewhere, and Japan was waging the same battle against its restive subjects in Korea. Hitchcock agreed that the president’s purism was out of place in such a world, but he felt obliged to carry out the president’s instructions. “His honor is at stake,” Hitchcock explained. “He feels he would be dishonored if he failed to live up to the pledges he made to his fellow delegates in Paris.”
Hitchcock also confided that he found Lodge as mulish as Wilson. After several futile attempts to negotiate with him, Hitchcock concluded that the problem was not the treaty but Lodge’s hatred of Wilson. Watching Wilson and Lodge from the sidelines, Taft pronounced both men guilty of putting “their personal prestige and the saving of their ugly faces above the welfare of the country and the world.”
That evening Hitchcock made one last effort to interest the president in a compromise at some point in the future. Anticipating the defeat of both versions of the treaty—Lodge’s with reservations and Wilson’s without—Hitchcock wrote that he then would make a motion to keep the matter of ratification before the Senate. To underscore the necessity of concessions, Hitchcock enclosed a recent letter from Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, a Democrat who urged his party to rethink its opposition to Lodge’s evisceration of Article X. The League could institute a boycott or use other means to deal with disturbers of the peace, Walsh said. Hitchcock, aware that the first lady might keep his letter and Walsh’s from her husband, tried to ensure that at least one point got through: “I would like to say to the president that many Democrats hold the same view that Senator Walsh expresses.”
• • •
“Breakfasted early and went direct to the Capitol,” Senator Henry Fountain Ashurst told his diary on November 19. “The breeze from my motor-car stirred the dead leaves strewn about, and I knew that President Wilson’s treaty would soon be as dead as those leaves.” At ten-thirty he and his fellow Democrats listened as Hitchcock read Wilson’s call to reject the treaty with Lodge’s reservations. Hitchcock passed the letter around, and Ashurst noticed that it was signed with a rubber-stamp facsimile of the president’s signature, another indicator of the seriousness of his disability. Wilson’s writing arm—his right—was not paralyzed, but it had lost much of its strength.
The full Senate came to order at noon. Within minutes, Lodge read Wilson’s letter aloud, adding tartly that “comment is superfluous, and I shall make none.” It is not clear who leaked the letter, but Democrats were upset by the leak and Republicans were outraged by the content. Long frustrated by the president’s intransigence, they felt wounded anew by his charge of nullification. Ashurst heard sotto voce swearing from the Mild Reservationists, who had been hoping that Wilson would bow to reality.
For the first time in history, the Senate opened its doors to a treaty debate, and the crowd, too large for the galleries, stretched far down the corridor. After months of senatorial speechifying on every jot and tittle of the covenant, Ashurst wondered why he and his colleagues were being subjected to more. “For God’s sake!” he shouted. “Let us all keep our mouths shut and vote, vote, and only vote.”
Ashurst was applauded but outflanked. There would be another five and a half hours of oratory, much of it overheated. The low point was the diatribe of Lawrence Y. Sherman of Illinois, who said that the collective security promised by Article X made the League “an international homicide club.” Close behind was Frank Brandegee of Connecticut, who predicted that when the League faced its first international crisis, it would “blow up, just like an automobile tire when it is pumped too hard, and those who are riding in the vehicle will have to make other arrangements.”
The afternoon’s finest address came from William E. Borah of Idaho, a Republican and an Irreconcilable. Borah had been objecting to membership in an association of nations since the United States entered the world war, and the Paris Peace Conference had barely come to order when he rose in the Senate to say that “If the Savior of Mankind would revisit the earth and declare for a League of Nations, I would be opposed to it.”
Surprisingly, Borah’s opposition did not pierce Wilson’s thin skin, perhaps because the president recognized the senator as a kindred spirit. Borah too was a moralist. He loathed compromise. He excelled at oratory and had an outsized faith in its power. He preferred solitude to the camaraderie of his fellow politicians. Senator Borah also had a virtue not possessed by Senator Lodge: he refrained from attacking the president when he attacked the League.
On November 19, Borah poured out his fears and hopes for two hours. With or without reservations, the treaty would not have his vote, he said. As he saw it, ratification of either version would imperil American democracy. The Senate’s approval would put the United States into the League of Nations, which automatically thrust America into Europe’s affairs. And the beginning of that involvement would mark the end of George Washington’s principle of “no entangling alliances,” the bedrock of U.S. foreign policy for 150 years. Borah also argued that the peace made at Versailles was bound to fall apart because it was fundamentally unjust.
Worse, the United States would have a permanent seat on the League’s decision-making body, the Executive Council, which was dominated by the great imperial powers. The fact that the council could not act without unanimous consent was no consolation to Borah. There remained a deeper problem, he said, and he could see no way around it: “You cannot yoke a government whose fundamental maxim is that of liberty to a government whose first law is that of force and hope to preserve the former,” he said. “These things are in eternal war, and one must ultimately destroy the other.” Revolted by the thought of making the United States an accomplice to the overlords, he implored the Senate to cleave to the democracy created by the Founding Fathers.
• • •
In his closing argument, Hitchcock ripped into the Republicans who had mocked the president’s dream of a world organized for peace, and he reminded the Senate that an association of nations had been one of the war aims of the United States. Despite his conviction that ratification would require a compromise on Article X, Hitchcock defended Wilson’s insistence on the original, predicting that the Allies would feel abandoned if America shirked the military obligations that they had assumed. Hitchcock even stood up for Wilson’s use of the word “nullification.” “How can we think otherwise?” he asked. Pointing out that the reservations had been framed entirely by Republicans, including some of the Irreconcilables, Hitchcock said that self-respecting Democrats could not accept terms dictated by senators who were bent on the defeat of the treaty.
The voting started at five-thirty, and Lodge’s resolution of ratification, with its fourteen reservations, went down with 39 ayes and 55 nays. The ayes came from Lodge and the Reservationists who had lined up behind him. Hitchcock swiftly made a motion to adjourn, expecting that he and his allies would be permitted to present a new resolution in the morning. He had discussed the motion with Lodge and believed that Lodge would cooperate, but either Hitchcock had misunderstood or Lodge had changed his mind.
A long parliamentary boxing match followed, and Lodge won every round. As ten o’clock neared, the other senator from Massachusetts, Democrat David I. Walsh, broke ranks with his party and moved that the Senate vote again on Lodge’s resolution of ratification. Lodge happily gave his consent. Coming from a Democrat, the call for a second vote meant that when it failed again—which it did—it would be plain that the president’s own party had killed his treaty. As soon as the votes were in, Lodge plucked another Senate rule out of the air: when a second vote confirmed the results of the first, the contest was over. “The Senate has therefore taken final action,” Lodge said.
Senator Oscar Underwood, Democrat of Alabama, observed that the Senate had merely finished with Lodge’s resolution, not with the treaty. Underwood called for a vote on ratification without reservations. Lodge assented, secure in the knowledge that this proposition—Wilson’s proposition—would also fail to win the necessary 64 votes. The roll was called once again, producing 53 nays and 38 ayes. At that point, Senator Claude A. Swanson, Democrat of Virginia, collared Lodge and said, “For God’s sake, can’t something be done to save the treaty?”
Lodge was glacial. “Senator, the door is closed. You have done it yourselves.” He was equally curt with the Democrat Duncan Fletcher, who moved that the Senate apprise the president of the votes. There was no need, Lodge said. “I am sure that the president will take official notice of the action of the Senate.” Such communiqués were routine, but Lodge had come to the floor armed with a precedent for not informing the White House of a treaty’s defeat. When he trotted it out, Fletcher appealed to Marshall. No match for Lodge in a contest over Senate rules, the vice president allowed Lodge’s argument to stand. Blocking the message to the White House was a small thing, but it smacked of kicking a man when he was down. More than any other incident of the treaty fight, this slight showed the depths of Lodge’s hostility to Wilson.
Eleven o’clock had come and gone, but Lodge introduced one more piece of business, a resolution proposing that the United States make its own peace with Germany. Needing only a simple majority, Lodge got it, and the resolution was referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations for deliberation. To Hitchcock’s astonishment, Lodge then called for an adjournment sine die—without a fixed day for its next meeting.
A small group of Republicans, Borah and Lodge among them, went off to celebrate at the home of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a passionate Irreconcilable. The wife of Senator Warren G. Harding scrambled eggs for a midnight supper, and there was jubilation all around. A stranger to Washington might have wondered why the Reservationists, who professed to want the treaty, were as jolly as the Irreconcilables. The answer was that most if not all of them were like Lodge—Irreconcilables who found it expedient to masquerade as Reservationists.
• • •
When the Chicago Tribune’s correspondent asked Lodge who killed the treaty, he indicted the Democrats. When Hitchcock was asked, he objected to the question. “The treaty is not dead,” he said. “The president can resubmit it at the next session of Congress.” Trying to put the setback in a positive light, he noted that the Democrats had held firm while the Republicans, who “counted on being able to ram down the throats of the friends of the treaty a resolution of ratification framed by its enemies . . . could not do it.”
The press blamed Lodge’s strategy of “rule or ruin” and Wilson’s vanity. The New-York Tribune begged “sane men of both parties” to come together and save the treaty. On the one hand, the Tribune said, “the president’s assumption that his word shall be accepted as law must be smashed, and on the other hand, everything that is not required to preserve the Constitution and our national independence must be stricken from the reservations.”
From her exchanges with Hitchcock, Edith Wilson undoubtedly knew that the treaty would go down to defeat. But when the news arrived, she could hardly bear to tell Woodrow. As she remembered it, he listened, thought for a moment, and said, “All the more reason I must get well and try to bring this country to a sense of its great opportunity and greater responsibility.” He did not blame himself for obstructing the path to ratification.
Despite his banishment, Colonel House still wanted to help. On November 24 he sent two notes to the White House, one to the first lady and one to the president. He told Edith that although he hesitated to intrude while the president was unwell, he felt a sense of urgency about the treaty. Objectionable reservations could be adjusted later, and the important thing now was to make sure that the president’s great work would live, he said. “His place in history hangs in the balance.” In the note to Wilson, House advised public silence, another try at ratification when the Senate reconvened, and an understanding with Hitchcock that the treaty should be ratified “in some form.” A few days later, House wrote again. He was not counseling surrender, he said, but nearly everyone close to the struggle believed that the treaty could not be ratified without substantial reservations. He pointed out that Wilson did not have to agree to the reservations; he could simply accept the Senate’s vote. “I feel as certain as I ever did of anything that your attitude would receive universal approval,” House wrote. “On the one hand your loyalty to our Allies will be commended and, on the other, your willingness to accept reservations rather than have the treaty killed will be regarded as the act of a great man.”
House’s suggestions offered Wilson an honorable way out of the impasse he had created, but the colonel’s letters went unanswered. Suspecting that they had gone no further than Edith Wilson, House would never again volunteer advice to the White House.
Hitchcock continued to insist that the treaty was still alive, writing Wilson that the vote had produced only a deadlock. When the Senate reconvened, he said, “we will have eighty-one senators who favor or pretend to favor ratification in some form.” That gave him a margin of seventeen votes over the sixty-four required, and he was confident that a new resolution of ratification could succeed. Next Hitchcock reported that he had canvassed the Republicans and found a consensus for a reasonable compromise—one that would satisfy the Republicans but “still leave the League in good working order.”
• • •
Wilson put the treaty on hold and turned his attention to his seventh annual report on the state of the Union, due on December 2. He had delivered the first six in person but in 1919 was in no condition to compose the message much less give a speech. His voice was weak, and he sometimes burst into tears for no apparent reason (a common occurrence among stroke patients). Wilson’s mind was often sharp, but when he tried to read or write he could not concentrate for more than a few minutes.
The task of writing the message fell to Tumulty, who stitched together material supplied by cabinet members and gave the prose a Wilsonian feel with phrases and ideas borrowed from the president’s speeches. Unable to read the draft on his own because of his eyesight, Wilson asked Edith to read it to him and pencil in the changes he wanted to make. Most important, he deleted references to the treaty. Essentially a catalogue of the year’s achievements with a few recommendations for the year ahead, Tumulty’s creation resembled Wilson’s previous State of the Union messages, but it drew scoffs from Republican senators who suspected the White House of hiding the truth about the president’s health. George Moses, the first to disclose the rumor that Wilson had had a stroke, called the text “a very poor piece of literary mechanics, considering its putative authorship.” Albert Fall of New Mexico wondered just when Wilson had written it.
The critics were immediately answered by “persons close to the White House,” claiming that the serious stage of Wilson’s illness had passed, his penmanship had improved, and he was able to do more work with each passing day. But the bulletin failed to quiet the skeptics. On December 4, an agitated Tumulty telephoned Lansing to report that the Committee on Foreign Relations had instructed Senators Fall and Hitchcock to ask for a meeting with the president, ostensibly to discuss an escalating crisis with Mexico. William O. Jenkins, an American entrepreneur who also held a post at the U.S. consulate in Puebla, had been kidnapped by rebels and released, only to be clapped into jail by the Mexican government. Venustiano Carranza was still president, but the revolution ground on, and his deputies were insisting that Jenkins had staged the kidnapping in order to undermine public confidence in Carranza. Tumulty understood that the Jenkins episode was simply a pretext for a close look at the patient, and he feared that the visit would end with Fall declaring that Wilson was too ill to remain in office. Tumulty wanted Lansing to give him a good excuse for turning the senators away. Perhaps Lansing could not think of one, or perhaps he was trying to avoid being a party to the cover-up, but he was no help. He pointed out that if Wilson was as well as the official bulletins made him out to be, the senators’ request was not unreasonable.
When Grayson told Wilson that Fall and Hitchcock wanted to see him about Mexico, Wilson immediately grasped that the senators were coming on “a smelling expedition.” Relishing the challenge, he asked Grayson to invite them for two-thirty that afternoon and threw himself into setting the stage for their visit. He ordered the lights turned up in every part of the room except near his bed. He asked that his papers be stacked on the nightstand next to his good arm. He had himself shaved and helped into a sweater, which made him look like a perfectly healthy man who had just awakened from a nap.
Edith, cast in the role of secretary, was outfitted with a tablet in one hand and a pencil in the other, props signaling that she was a supporting character rather than a co-star. (In her memoir, she explained that the props also allowed her to avoid shaking hands with Fall, whose frequent cries for military intervention in Mexico disgusted the president. Wilson had ample reason to think that Fall favored intervention solely to protect the mining interests of Americans who paid handsomely for his legal advice.)
When Fall and Hitchcock arrived, Grayson played his part to perfection. He said that he had ordered the president into bed in order to conserve his energy, an explanation suggesting that the president would have preferred to be in a chair. In fact, Wilson was still too weak to sit upright on his own. When Fall asked how long they might stay, Grayson left the decision to the visitors.
Tumulty played the press secretary devoted to the public’s right to know. He allowed reporters onto the grounds of the White House for the first time since the stroke and stationed them on the main portico, where they would be able to interview the senators as they left. Like Grayson, he was crossing his fingers and praying that the president would turn in a bravura performance.
Upstairs, Grayson ushered the senators into the president’s bedroom. Fall opened the conversation with an arresting if dubious pronouncement: “I hope you consider me sincere. I have been praying for you, Sir.”
In a flash Wilson asked, “Which way, Senator?”
Fall laughed.
Wilson, who had been briefed on the friction with Mexico, acquitted himself well, and as implausible as it sounds, the Jenkins crisis came to an end in the middle of the meeting. As if in a play, an aide entered the room and beckoned Grayson to the telephone. Exit Grayson. Lansing was on the other end of the line, reporting that the Mexican government had just released Jenkins. Enter Grayson, delivering the good news.
Toward the end of their forty-five minutes together, Wilson told the senators that he expected to be on his feet soon and was looking forward to visiting the Capitol. With a touch of sarcasm, he asked Fall to pass the word to Moses.
The newsmen on the portico heard glowing reports from Fall as well as Hitchcock. Hitchcock, who had also seen the president two weeks earlier, said that he had improved considerably since their last meeting. Fall, taken in by Wilson’s stagecraft, reported that he had seen the president using both hands, something he was physically unable to do. Fall described Wilson’s speech as “somewhat thick” but, he added, “I could understand every word that he said.”
Believing that Wilson was more disabled than he appeared to Fall, Lansing wished that White House would come clean. In a memo to himself on the day of the smelling expedition, he wrote, “I think that the American people are entitled to know and the cabinet ought to know the truth. It is not a matter of invading the privacy of an individual. It is not Woodrow Wilson but the president of the United States who is ill. His family and his physicians have no right to shroud the whole affair in mystery as they have done. I would not blame Congress if they instituted an investigation to ascertain the facts.”
The facts that Lansing craved would not come to light for more than sixty years. The editors of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson left few stones unturned, but they did not see the papers of Francis X. Dercum, the Philadelphia neurologist who examined Wilson frequently after the stroke, until the 1980s, when a neurologist named Steven Lomazow acquired Dercum’s papers and shared them with the editors. In the files were two letters to Dercum from R. A. Rogers, a physical therapist sent to the White House a few days after the smelling expedition. Clearly reluctant to let anyone else in on the concealment, Grayson kept Rogers at bay for days. Not until Rogers threatened to leave did Grayson relent.
Both Woodrow and Edith liked Rogers, and the First Patient gamely submitted to a new regimen of baths, massages, and exercises. Writing Dercum after the first day of therapy, Rogers reported that the president was “pleased to think that there could be something more to be done for him.” But Rogers also reported that Wilson was still far from well. He had frequent dizzy spells even in bed, he was forgetful, he occasionally suffered from double vision, his muscles were weak, and he had virtually no stamina. He was also nervous and unable to sleep when he wanted. He still could not sit up in a chair for a meal. His stomach troubles—the “turmoil in Central America” that he described the first time he consulted Grayson—were still with him. And when his digestion was off, his irritability increased.
No doubt Grayson was aware of these symptoms, but he rarely if ever mentioned them in his diary once he began to trumpet Wilson’s progress. On December 13, with Rogers supporting his left side, Wilson stood on his right leg for the first time, and “White House officials” immediately announced that Wilson had been walking around his room—a gross exaggeration. The Washington Post took the announcement at face value and informed the world that the rumors of a paralyzed leg were false. But Wilson’s leg was paralyzed, permanently.
• • •
On December 15, prompted by a rumor that Republican leaders were hoping that he would soon make a move to end the deadlock on the treaty, Wilson broke his silence on the subject. The White House issued a statement saying that the president had “no compromise or concession of any kind in mind” and firmly believed that the Republicans should continue to bear the responsibility for the fate of the treaty and the state of the world.
Senators of both parties were dumbfounded, and Democrats who had supported Wilson’s position out of party loyalty began talking about desertion. Hitchcock’s most recent exchanges with Wilson had given him the impression that he should collaborate with the Mild Reservationists on a new resolution of ratification—one that would simultaneously honor Wilson’s ideals and alleviate the greatest fears of the Strong Reservationists. Evidently too peeved to contact Wilson after the statement, Hitchcock sent for Tumulty and asked him to find out what Wilson wanted. The reply came from Edith Wilson, who said that the president was “clear in the conviction that it would be a serious mistake for him (or for our side) to propose anything. Any proposition must come from those who prevented the ratification of the treaty.”
Defying Wilson’s wishes, Senator Underwood submitted a proposal for a bipartisan committee to draft a new resolution of ratification. Lodge, who could be as stubborn as Wilson, refused to consider the idea. Underwood persisted, begging him and Hitchcock to show some Christmas spirit and assure the country that both parties were willing to cooperate on the treaty. Underwood was still talking when Lodge got to his feet. “I do not think just on the eve of adjournment that this can be disposed of,” he said. “I cannot give my consent.” Angered by Lodge’s pettiness, the Mild Reservationists vowed that if he did not get out of their way, they would ignore his leadership. That night, when the Senate adjourned for the holidays, Republicans were in revolt against Lodge, Democrats were in revolt against Wilson, and the spirit of the Prince of Peace was nowhere to be found in Washington.
I. The Lodge reservations affirmed U.S. sovereignty in many matters, including membership, American representation in the League, the Monroe Doctrine, war, disarmament, immigration, and the conduct of foreign policy. Many Republicans had contributed ideas to the reservations, and Lodge arranged them in fourteen parts, a jab at Wilson’s Fourteen Points.These reservations and others are laid out and discussed in Thomas A. Bailey, Wilson and the Peacemakers: Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 387–94, and Henry Cabot Lodge, The Senate and the League of Nations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 178–226.
