When the Cheering Stopped (20 page)

“You seem very much engaged, madam,” Fall said to her. “I thought it wise to record this interview so there may be no misunderstandings or misstatements made,” she grimly answered. Doubtless shaken by the cold look, Fall turned back to the President and asked if he had seen the Foreign Relations report on Mexico. “I have a copy right here,” said the President, and reached over to where it was, pointedly waving it in the air. “You see,” he went on, “despite the stories going the rounds, I can still use my right hand.” He mentioned the medical opinions-hawked by “Doc” Moses. “I hope the Senator will now be reassured,” he said to Fall, “but he may be disappointed.”

Fall desperately started talking about Mexico and the kidnaping of the consular agent. As he spoke, Grayson was called from the room, returning in a few minutes to announce in practically bad-melodrama fashion that word had just been received that the consular agent had been released by the Mexicans. This was the crowning blow to Fall, rendering his mission totally farcical. He got up, defeated. By then the First Lady was out of paper and she picked up a large brown franked envelope of Fall's and continued her note-taking upon it. She was thus able to take down the words of parting between the two men as Fall, apparently trying to salvage some shred of dignity from the meeting, bent over the President and took his right hand. “Mr. President, I am praying for you,” Fall said. “Which way, Senator?” asked the President with a chuckle. Fall fled.

Jubilant, Grayson saw Fall down to the door. As they went down, Grayson solicitously asked after Fall's health.
The Senator numbly said that he had been working hard and getting little sleep lately. “You have just left a man suffering a breakdown due to overwork and concentration,” Grayson said. He added tenderly, “You had better be careful.” Then he mercilessly threw Fall to the reporters outside. There were no questions about Mexico; instead it was how is the President, can he talk, is he paralyzed, what is his mental condition? Fall had to give the answers that spelled the end of the campaign to oust the President from his post and insured his continued residence in the White House for the remaining fifteen months of his term. The President had gathered all of his strength and, running in good luck, he had pulled the trick off. The people around him, knowing how it might have turned out, were ecstatic with joy. They knew how lucky he had been.

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Foreign diplomats sent to the United States, formally without status until they presented their credentials to the President in person, were told they could take up their posts and that the government would consider them “Appointed” Ambassadors with all the status of actual Ambassadors.

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Marshall privately told several persons that he thought the Lodge reservations should be accepted.

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It should be said that, unlike many of his successors, this President had never employed speech writers. Every word he had uttered was written by one man—himself.

9

In the mornings he awoke at eight and his valet lifted him into his chair so that, sitting up, he might eat breakfast and have the First Lady read the headlines from the papers. Sometimes, not often, he asked for an entire story to be read out. Then while he rested she went below to tend to the domestic affairs of the White House. When she came back up they sat together for an hour or so and she told him the official business with which she thought he should deal. He was very quiet, rarely speaking, but sometimes he would say a few broken words about what he wanted done. Even as he got the thoughts out he would forget himself in the middle of a sentence and falter into a silence that lasted until, motionless, eyes gazing out into space, he was brought up by her repeating of the last words he had uttered. Then he would come to himself and begin again, but after a few moments the weak voice would drift away so that they sat silently in the quiet which surrounded and inundated a building whose gates were closed, some literally padlocked, to the
public and almost all the world. Together they worked on the pardon pleas and departmental reports and sometimes he tried to dictate for a while; but it was no good. In the middle of a sentence he would slide off again into his unmoving silence from which only her gentle prodding removed him. Margaret would often come in to talk with him and he would try to smile for her and want to know about the children of Jessie and Nellie. He would say Margaret should send them his love.

Below, the great state rooms constructed to hold hundreds of people were completely empty. The curtains were drawn and in some the rugs were taken up so that it would be easier for his wheel chair to move over the floor. When the servants went walking through the Red Room, the State Dining Room, the East Room, their footsteps echoed. The Executive Wing was likewise dreary, vacant, quiet, and the reporters in the press room played cards. Ike Hoover's official White House diary, which in other days had listed ten visitors in two hours, drifted away into a series of single-line notations that “Dr. Grayson spent the night.” In late November the diary simply petered out.

Before lunch he would be slowly wheeled down the hall to the elevator and then out onto the South Portico looking out over the grounds, empty save for the sheep chomping at the grass. Sometimes one of the two women or Grayson or Ike Hoover pushed the wheel chair along the veranda until they reached the window of Joe Tumulty's office. Someone would tap on the glass so that Tumulty might come to it and say a few words carefully chosen to put in the best light the possibility that the Senate would in the new session pass the League as the President wanted it. Then they would go into the elevator in slow procession and the President and First Lady would take lunch in his study. Afterward he slept while she walked in the grounds. At four in the afternoon he would be propped up in bed and if he seemed strong enough to her she worked for an hour or so with him. After dinner he went to sleep. It would be seven-thirty or eight by then. Sometimes before he dozed off she read aloud to him from mystery novels—which she detested but he seemed to enjoy—but suddenly, in the midst of a passage
with no emotional significance, he would begin to cry. His hair was whitened and his face thin and haggard and seared, and he would sit shaking while she took his head into her arms and whispered “Darling, darling” until the sobbing ended.

December drew out and Christmas came and the girls were with him. On Christmas evening after he went to bed the girls and the First Lady and some of her relatives watched a movie run off in the East Room by Robert E. Long, the manager of a Washington theater, on a projector that was a gift of Douglas Fairbanks. The next day the First Lady told the President about it, and he said he would like to see it also, and so Ike Hoover called Long and asked if he would come again. Long again set up the projector and the screen, which was an enormous Lincoln bed sheet. Into the room then came the President in his wheel chair, his head bent forward and down, and Long was shocked to see him so. Before, at Long's theater, he had often seen the President and had thought him the personification of disciplined energy and power. Long and his assistant looked at each other in horror. They could hardly believe this bent figure unable to sit up straight was the same man. The flickering of the light on the bed sheet illuminated dimly the empty East Room with the giant crystal chandeliers and the classic cornicing and the gigantic mirrors and, across the uncovered hardwood floor, hanging on a wall, a gift of the French Government to the First Lady: a Gobelin tapestry depicting the marriage of Psyche. Alone in the midst of all this sat a few huddled figures watching
In Old Kentucky.
But when the climactic horse-race scene began, the excitement was too much and the First Lady told Long to stop. They wheeled the trembling President out and put him to bed and asked Long to come back the next day to finish.

Long did so, and every day thereafter he came again, each day carrying a new film. At ten-thirty he would arrive and set up the machine and a few minutes later the elevator would bring the President down to be wheeled through the empty rooms, one after the other. “My tour of inspection,” he said to the servants who saw him, and he would try to smile, his face twisting as he did so. The maids felt something breaking inside them as they watched
his attempt to be cheery, and after tremulously returning his smile they would bob their heads and hurry by. At eleven the films would begin, many of them not destined for general release until months in the future.

Hoover and Long had to scour the country to find suitable productions, enlisting the aid of the Hollywood studios. The President did not want to see the risqué comedies and the vamps and sirens, but instead wanted outdoor films, William S. Hart, Tom Mix, William Farnum, horses and the Western deserts and mountains. He would each day nod and try to smile for Long and, the room practically noiseless save for the slight hum of the machine, they would sit and watch—the President, the First Lady, Grayson. Sometimes a few servants would gather behind them, and so in the silent gloom perhaps a dozen persons would be where Abraham Lincoln each New Year's Day greeted thousands. Long asked if the President would like some musical accompaniment to the films, but the President said he would prefer not, which pleased Grayson's desire for quiet around the patient. Now and again the President would ask about a film mentioned in a movie magazine the First Lady, read him, and Long would telegraph the movie company involved and get a copy.

The First Lady's eyes rarely left him for a minute; Long noticed how in the dim flickering light she was constantly glancing away from the screen to look at her husband. But one day when she was quietly talking with someone Long noticed the President's head gradually falling forward. As everyone else watched the action on the screen, Long saw the President's head slowly come down so that his chin rested upon his chest. He was utterly unmoving, and the horrified Long was certain that he had just seen the President die. He frantically looked at the First Lady, but she was still talking and had not seen. Long miserably let the film run on, thinking that if he stopped it and the President was not dead it would constitute a shock to him that the film suddenly halted. So for two terrible minutes Long wondered what to do. Then the First Lady looked over and broke off her talk and went to her husband and, oblivious of the people, raised his head and let it rest on her breast while she mothered
him and kissed him and gently whispered. The film ended. The next day there was another.

Winter took hold upon Washington and a great dullness fell upon the closed and silent White House. Outside in the city Vice President Marshall was receiving a splatter of letters asking his intervention in the cases of soldiers in trouble and for his aid in getting pardons for Federal prisoners, and now and then a foreign diplomat took it as a duty to call upon him. (Although he would explain he could in no way act for the President, Marshall always had a welcome for the guest—“Glad to see you just the same.”) On Capitol Hill they argued about the League, and somehow the Cabinet members went about their duties, Attorney General Palmer doing the most dramatic work, arresting people right and left and nurse-maiding the country into what would later be called the Great Red Scare. Just before sailing home, Lord Grey spent Christmas with the family of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt,
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and the fact enraged the First Lady, who remembered Lord Grey's aide, Craufurd-Stuart.

Into the White House came greeting cards and some of them the First Lady read aloud to the President. One was from a little girl, Fairlie Amistead, who said she was sorry about the President being sick but thought he could recover best if he would come to her Alabama home, where he could have “milk and butter and sausages and spareribs and a good time.” The First Lady answered her that “I know the President would like to be well enough to see some of his little Southern friends who, like you, are interested in his recovery.” Sitting in bed, the President tried to read a little but found it difficult because his nose glasses would slip, so a Philadelphia eye specialist was called in to prescribe spectacles. “I want to look at your pupils,” the doctor said as he bent over the patient, and the ex-professor in the bed got off a weak pun: “You'll have a long job. I've had a great number of them.”

At night when he was asleep the First Lady sat long hours working on official papers and once she pointed to
a pile of newspapers and said to a maid, “I don't know how much more criticism I can take.” In fact the White House staff itself was free with criticism of her, some of the servants saying that now that the descendant of Pocahontas was in charge they were being forced to work for “an Indian.” Their rumors had it that her reluctance to urge his resignation stemmed from fear that this would destroy his will to live. She herself rarely smiled save when she was with him, and the strain told upon the people around her. Edith Benham, her secretary, had a complete nervous breakdown and had to give up her job, and Margaret also broke down and went South to try to recover.

In January there would be a Jackson Day dinner in Washington, and a Presidential letter was expected. Following the Cabinet meeting of January 6, Tumulty said to Secretary of Agriculture Houston that the letter was all prepared and that the Secretary's opinion of it was wanted. The letter spoke of the United States' failure to ratify the peace treaty and go into the League and warned that because of this Germany was able to defy the rulings of the Allies and go on the rampage as she had in 1914. Houston read it and pointed out that there was a treaty and a League ratified by almost every other nation in the world and that the German Army was largely disbanded and the Navy either on the bottom of the ocean or in Allied hands. He did not say so to Tumulty, but he did not for a minute believe the President had anything to do with the letter—“I could not understand how he could.” To a friend he said that the President was so ill that “something ought to be done about it.”