John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

In Portland the crowds were sedate, but three times as many people stood outside the armory as could get in to hear the President. When the presidential cortege took a fast tour of the scenic drives up the Columbia River, one of the most popular of the newscorrespondents was killed in a car crash. The President and Edith Wilson were immensely saddened. People noticed that the President couldn’t seem to throw off the sense of shock. “It made us jittery,” said one of the secretservice men. “From then on nothing seemed to go right.”

San Francisco was a success in spite of efforts of the Irish societies to cause trouble. Berkeley and the bay towns were delirious. A special stop was made in Sacramento to boost the League in Hiram Johnson’s back yard.

The newspapermen declared that San Diego was the high point of the trip. Through a recently installed loudspeaker system the President addressed fifty thousand wildly enthusiastic people. “The war we have just been through,” he told them, “though it was shot through with terror, is not to be compared with the war we would have to face next time.” They shouted approval of the League. Los Angeles tried to go San Diego one better.

Wilson and Tumulty were so elated they talked of carrying the campaign into Massachusetts and lighting a fire under Senator Lodge back where his voters lived.

In Salt Lake City the Mormon Tabernacle was packed to suffocation. The heat was insufferable. Edith said she felt sick and blind from the lack of air and would have fainted if her maid hadn’t handed her a bottle of lavender smelling salts. She sent a handkerchief drenched with the salts by a secretservice man up to her husband. After his speech the President came back dripping with sweat. He changed his clothes, but Edith noticed he couldn’t seem to stop sweating.

At Cheyenne and Denver there were more parades, more delegations, more hands to shake. Wilson’s headache was continuous now, blinding. He suffered nerve pains in his arms.

In Pueblo he suddenly announced that he wouldn’t go to greet fifty thousand people waiting at the fairgrounds. He’d never said he would. When Tumulty showed him the itinerary with his okeh on it he lost his temper. Entering the new city auditorium Starling, the secretservice man who was right behind him, noticed that he couldn’t seem to see where he was going. The President stumbled on a step. Starling almost had to lift him up the steps to the platform.

Many of the reporters spoke of it as the best speech of the whole tour, but Starling, who stood right behind him to catch him if he fell, thought he seemed to lose the thread, to repeat himself. His enunciation was thick. At one point he broke down and cried.

“What of our pledges,” he cried, “to the men that lie dead in France … 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.”

With tears streaming down his face he told of Decoration Day at a cemetery for the war dead … French women putting flowers on the graves … “There was a little group of French women who had adopted these graves, had made themselves mothers of these dear ghosts by putting flowers every day on these dear graves” … He wished the men in public life who opposed the covenant could visit such a spot. “I wish that the thought that comes out of those graves could penetrate their consciousness … the moral obligation … to see … the thing through … and make good their redemption of the world.”

His peroration was in the old style: “Now that the mists of this great question have cleared away … we have accepted the truth and it is going to lead us and through us the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.”

Tumulty was deeply moved. He saw tears in every eye. Edith Wilson was crying. The hardboiled newspapermen sniffled. “Down in the amphitheatre I saw men sneak their handkerchiefs out of their pockets … The President,” Tumulty wrote, “was like a great organist playing upon the heart emotions of the thousands of people who were held spellbound by what he said.”

Woodrow Wilson had covered something like eight thousand miles in less than a month. He had delivered thirtysix set speeches and all sorts of short addresses from the rear platform of his train. He had sat in on countless political meetings and exerted himself to the utmost in a dozen parades.

The night after the Pueblo speech, while his train was speeding towards Wichita, President Wilson, shortly after he had turned in, was stricken with unbearable pain. Grayson could do nothing to alleviate it. The President couldn’t lie down. He couldn’t stay still. He dressed himself and tried sitting up. There seemed no way of making him comfortable.

“It’s a stroke,” Brooks told Starling. “It’s all over now.”

“The Doctor and I,” Edith wrote, “kept the vigil while the train dashed on and on through the darkness … About five in the morning a blessed release came and sitting upright on the stiff seat my husband fell asleep … The dear face opposite me was worn and lined; and as I sat there watching the dawn break slowly I felt that life would never be the same … and from that hour on I would have to wear a mask, not only to the public but to the one I loved best in the world: for he must never know how ill he was and I must carry on.”

In the morning Wilson protested that he must continue his tour but Edith Wilson and Grayson and Tumulty took things into their own hands and ordered the train to head straight back to Washington. The special train sped across the countryside with blinds drawn as if there were a dead man aboard. When the train arrived in Washington the President had recovered sufficiently to be able to walk from the train to the car.

Three days later President Wilson was stricken down by cerebral thrombosis.

The first the White House staff knew was when early one morning Ike Hoover got a sudden call from Mrs. Wilson to send for Dr. Grayson. “The President is very sick.” The chief usher sent a car for Grayson to his house. When they went up to the President’s suite Hoover found every door locked. The door was opened just enough to let the doctor in and closed in Hoover’s face. When Grayson came back he was terribly shaken. “My God,” he told Hoover, “the President is paralyzed.”

For weeks Wilson lies desperately ill. His left side is paralyzed. His speech is affected. His condition is complicated by acute inflammation of the prostate gland. Edith is convinced an operation is too risky. A stricture almost causes his death. Showing the extraordinary powers of recuperation he has shown in similar but less drastic attacks, gradually he begins to recover.

Edith Wilson is determined that “he must never know how ill he was … I must carry on.”

Without hesitation she takes upon herself complete charge of the sickroom and of such duties of the presidency as cannot be postponed. Ever since their marriage she has been giving him advice, and arranging his papers for him, and helping decipher messages in the private code he had with Colonel House.

Now Edith Wilson becomes de facto the President. Grayson collaborates humbly. He brings in trained nurses, consulting physicians. He rigs up the presidential suite as a small hospital They both take extraordinary precautions that no word of the President’s real condition shall reach the world outside. A nervous breakdown, Tumulty is told to report to the press. With rest and seclusion the President is recovering.

A few days after the President’s stroke, Lansing, profoundly disturbed, seeks out Tumulty in the cabinet room. In default of any real information the wildest rumors are current in Washington. The President is dead. He has lost his mind and is confined in a straitjacket.