When the Cheering Stopped (18 page)

That afternoon the question of whether the Senate should approve the treaty with the Lodge reservations was put to a vote. It was defeated by those men who complied with the President's instructions. Then the Senate voted on
the treaty as it was brought back from Paris. It was defeated by Senator Lodge's followers.

It was she, of course, who told him. He was silent for a long time and then he said, “I must get well.”

*
Grayson's retelling of the incident at the time perhaps gave rise to the widely believed rumor that the President's mind was a total blank save for an ability to recite childhood nursery rhymes.

*
The act was later passed over his veto.

8

On November 18 the members of the Cabinet, meeting at the behest of Secretary Lansing, were able to look from the Cabinet Room in the Executive Wing of the White House and see, over on the South Portico, the man who had appointed them to office. Huddled in blankets and wearing a cap, the President sat in a wheel chair. He was motionless. His wife and doctor stood by him. He was gazing at the sheep brought in as a wartime labor-saving move to crop the south lawn.

This was the President's first breath of fresh air since the fall in the bathroom. His wheel chair was not the usual invalid conveyance, for when one of the standard types was tried it was found to be useless for him: unable to sit upright in it, he slid down to one side and would have fallen to the floor. Instead, the White House usher, Ike Hoover, suggested a replacement—one of the single-person rolling chairs used then and now on the boardwalk at Atlantic City. A dealer in Atlantic City agreed to rent one out for five dollars a week, and when it arrived Hoover and some White House workmen changed the footrest part of it so that the President was able to sit with his legs out in a straight line from the seat in a fashion that afforded him more support. Seated in the chair, he was taken down in an elevator and rolled out onto the portico. He stayed perhaps fifteen minutes and then was taken back upstairs and to bed.

If this quick glimpse was all that the Cabinet men were to be given of their chief, they yet were operating under his orders. His stenographer, Charles Swem, had found that the President was unable to dictate for more than five minutes at a time—at the end of that period the
President would lose the thread of what he was saying and simply halt and fall silent as he gazed into space—but in the President's name dictates were given to his subordinates, the members of his Cabinet. Cary Grayson thought, correctly, that it would have been the part of cruelty to disturb the President with every detail of public affairs, and the First Lady fervently agreed, but there yet existed those questions for which decisions must be made. These questions were generally presented in written form upon the elegantly embossed stationery of the various government departments—The Secretary of State, Washington; The Secretary of the Navy—complete with circular seals of office. They were not presented in person, for when this was tried the callers found themselves confronted with a tall woman who said in response to all pleas for a personal interview, “I am not interested in the President of the United States. I am interested in my husband and his health.”

Many of the letters delivered to the White House by messengers from the various departments not only needed answers but absolutely had to have them. But for most of the letters, for by far the greater percentage, there were no answers. It was as if, to draw a homey parallel, a man running a store falls ill. The store remains open. The customers come in, stand in line, order their goods—and then wait. Their orders are not filled by the wife of the owner standing behind the counter. They order again. They wait. But the proprietor's wife either ignores them or seems to forget the orders. Eventually the customers, bewildered, go home. And yet they live on. They borrow food, or use cans stocked up in the cupboard, or eat out—or something. They postpone doing the wash, or they eat off paper plates—or something. They live on. Secretary of the Navy Daniels, for instance, would write the President that he needed the President's endorsement of a considered decision to expel from the Naval Academy a number of midshipmen who got drunk on a Caribbean summer cruise and contracted “immoral diseases.” The letter, citing applicable rules calling for what a responsible Secretary considered a desirable move, would be sent to the White House—and never heard of again. After a while Daniels would write Tumulty that the midshipmen
involved, after having been told they were going to be expelled, were still in residence at Annapolis, where by their presence they were hurtful to the discipline of their classmates. Daniels would beg for “speedy action”—quick dismissal of the men. There would be no reply. Daniels would apply again. Then he would somehow adjust the problem as best he could. Perhaps the men could be pressured into resigning. Even if worst came to worst and they stayed, the Navy would not be destroyed. Life would go on. Or—another case—Herbert Hoover, who held a number of temporary wartime posts, would send in his resignations to the President. There would be no reply or acknowledgment. Hoover would technically still be in government employ, having never had his resignations accepted, but he would close his government office and go on living.

If Secretary Lansing was agonizing about what to tell the still unreceived Lord Grey, it would not destroy Anglo-American relations that the Secretary got no instructions. Latin-American good will would be damaged, but not wiped out, by the failure of the White House to say whether or not the United States was going to recognize the new government of Costa Rica. Every few weeks the Secretary or one of the Under Secretaries would write the White House saying recognition should be accorded, and always there would be silence for an answer. Tumulty would be asked to lend his good offices to getting recognition approved and he would send up a memo to the family quarters. There would be no answer. Dozens of appointment-to-office forms were sent up for signature and, unsigned, they piled up, although the men they concerned would be taken into governmental offices and assigned work. (Still unsigned, the forms would forty years later repose in files at the Library of Congress.)

Initially all applications for Presidential action were given to Joe Tumulty. He was the President's secretary—it should be noted he performed the work that in later Administrations would require scores of men—and it seemed logical to deal with him. But actually Tumulty was allowed very little access to the President, not seeing him in the flesh for more than a month after the bathroom fall, and he was in fact reduced even to asking Margaret
Wilson “when you think fit” to get the President to give answers on various questions, including the selection of a new Secretary of Commerce to replace the outgoing William Redfield. (Tumulty was not consulted when eventually the choice was made; first Grayson offered the office to a man who declined it, and when another was found to take the job he was generally considered a poor choice.)

The loyal subordinate of a decade, Tumulty was slow to realize and admit that things were not as they had been. “Mrs. Wilson is keeping me from the President,” he told very close friends; he did not seem able to face it that were he able to be with the President eight hours a day things would not have been much better. He continued sending his memos: when Postmaster General Burleson complained that the President had not acted on a series of Executive Orders concerning Post Office appointments, Tumulty dutifully sent the letter up to the family quarters. This one came back, at least, but it was hardly answered: “The President says he is waiting to discuss the matter with Mr. Burleson. E.B.W.” Tumulty sent the letter and the First Lady's note back to Burleson: “I am enclosing a self-explanatory memorandum from Mrs. Wilson.”

After a whole series of letters from Lansing and Tumulty (“Would you please let me know if the President has decided whether he will receive Lord Grey?”) was ignored, Grey finally announced he was returning to England. He had been in the United States four months (so had Craufurd-Stuart) and was out of patience. Lansing wrote the President saying that although Lord Grey was never given a chance to present his credentials it might be wise for him to be informally received for a farewell chat. Lansing's letter was sent up with a note from Tumulty attached to it: “Dear Mrs. Wilson, What shall I say?” There was no answer from the First Lady. Lord Grey sailed. No good-by letter or telegram attended his departure. The veteran American diplomat Henry White, observing all this, wrote his half-brother, “The situation is a most extraordinary one. Only most urgent matters of routine are attended to. In fact there would appear to be almost a suspension of Government.” The journalist Ray
Stannard Baker wrote in his diary that it seemed to him “as though our Government has gone out of business.”

And yet business of a kind was being transacted. By far the majority of all letters to the President were ignored, and dozens of bills were becoming law without his signature, but certain matters were acted upon. Over the wide left margins of an elegantly typed letter, down to the bottom space under the typing, up the right margin and then across the top, weaving in and out of the title of the writer and his seal of office, there were each day penciled notes by a woman who had a total of just two years of formal schooling and whose round and enormous script resembled that of a twelve-year-old. The reader of these notes—Secretary of War, of Labor, or whatever—would have to rotate his returned letter in his hands and sometimes continue on to the envelope to find what the message in the childish handwriting was. For each scrawl began, “The President says” or “The President wants” and there was no one in the world to say that the President from his sickroom in the southwest portion of the second floor did
not
say or did
not
want. Secretary of State Lansing, a precise kind of man, found this business of getting one out of a dozen letters answered, and that one in such a fashion, an intolerable thing. The President, he told his friends, was in “such a condition that he was utterly unable to attend to public business.” He added that often he, Lansing, sent “memoranda reduced to the simplest form which anyone could understand” and that in return he got “answers communicated through Mrs. Wilson so confused that no one could interpret them.”

Eventually the First Lady took to receiving Cabinet members in her sitting room next to the President's room. She would tell the visiting Secretary what the President wanted done about a given problem, the verbal instructions being, she assured her caller, completely representative of her husband's wishes. She was certain she had it right, she would point out, because she had had early training in getting details down correctly: as a child she had learned to explain things very carefully so as to keep a crippled grandmother in touch with the doings of the town outside the grandmother's room. Sometimes, however, the Secretary would feel the instructions were not
comprehensive enough and would ask for amplification. In response to such requests the First Lady would upon occasion excuse herself, go alone into the President's room for a few minutes (closing the door behind her) and return with new details on what she said the President said. But actually she did this very rarely. She was far more likely to refuse to disturb the President and would either expound some more on her own as to what the instructions meant or simply leave the Secretary to make his own way with whatever his problem was.

None of the Cabinet men saw the President, none saw a word in his writing save for the handful of frighteningly unfamiliar-looking signatures, and there was nothing beyond the glimpse of him on the South Portico to actually prove that the President even lived. In her life before meeting the President the First Lady had been a completely unpolitical person unknown to anyone who moved in diplomatic or political sets, and it seemed impossible to Washington that she was really taking it upon herself to administer the government of the most powerful state in the world. Secretary of Agriculture Houston, playing billiards with a friend two days after seeing the President on the portico, said that he thought it must be Tumulty and William McAdoo who were running the government. Senator Lodge wrote Theodore Roosevelt's old Secretary of State, Elihu Root, that “a regency of Tumulty and Barney Baruch was not contemplated by the Constitution.” But Houston and Lodge were wrong. McAdoo and Baruch might send memorandums offering advice, but they were not running anything.

As for Tumulty, day by day he was becoming less important. The First Lady had always disliked him personally anyway, and his memos and requests were largely ignored, although he valiantly tried to keep up appearances to most outsiders. Tumulty industriously sent up advice on how to make common cause with various Senators so that in the new session of the Congress the League might yet be made a reality for America, but as a powerful force in the White House he was finished. Extremely anxious to see things worked out with the Mild Reservationists, Tumulty wrote the President that “I know you will believe me sincere when I tell you that in my opinion we
cannot longer adhere to the position we have taken in the matter of the treaty; the people of the country have the impression that you will not consent to the dotting of an ‘i' or the crossing of a ‘t.'” The memo was ignored. He might write the draft of a letter he wanted the President to send Senator Hitchcock suggesting compromise, he might send his letter up to the First Lady, and it would be ignored. He sent up Secretary Houston's endorsement of his plan; there was no response from upstairs. He asked the First Lady to read to the President an eloquent newspaper editorial calling for compromise; she wrote back, “I would not be willing.” This last outright refusal seemed finally to put the quietus on Tumulty and for weeks he sent nothing at all up to the sickroom. Before falling silent, however, he sent up a long memorandum summing up what was being left undone.