The President Is a Sick Man

by Matthew Algeo

  At this point the surgeons discovered just how far the cancer seemed to have spread. The antrum—the cavity above the roof of the mouth—was filled with what Keen described as a “gelatinous mass . . . totally different in appearance from the typical epithelioma of the roof of the mouth.” Bryant gingerly scooped out the gelatinous substance with a small spoon.

  This drawing, originally published in Transactions & Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, depicts the tumor as it appeared in the president’s mouth. The dotted line corresponds to the area that was removed during the operation. COURTESY OF THE HISTORICAL MEDICAL LIBRARY OF THE COLLEGE OF

  PHYSICIANS OF PHILADELPHIA

  Fortunately for the president, his eye socket was “clearly free from invasion.”

  The doctors disinfected the wound with Thiersch’s solution and packed it with gauze.

  At 1:55 P.M. the operation was over. It had taken nearly an hour and a half. Five teeth, about a third of the upper palate, and a large piece of the upper left jawbone had been removed. The resulting cavity was two and a half inches long and nearly an inch wide. The president’s pulse had fallen to eighty. His temperature was 100.8 degrees. He’d lost at least six ounces of blood—and, of course, had received none in transfusion. But he was still alive.

  This laryngeal mirror and cheek retractor were used in the secret surgery on President Cleveland. Dr. William Williams Keen had bought the unusual retractor in Paris nearly thirty years before the operation. MÜTTER

  MUSEUM OF THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF PHILADELPHIA

  “Never did I feel such a deep, almost overwhelming, sense of responsibility as during that operation,” Keen wrote years later. “In itself, it was nothing as compared with many others I have done of greater difficulty and danger, but in its possible consequences for good or evil, none I ever was involved in could compare with it.”

  The nation, of course, was utterly ignorant of the drama that unfolded on the Oneida that afternoon. If they thought about him at all, Americans assumed their president was just going up to Buzzards Bay for a little rest and relaxation. That’s what he’d told them.

  In fact, at the very moment President Cleveland was slumped, unconscious, in a makeshift operating room on board a moving boat on Long Island Sound, the nation’s attention was fixed on the opposite end of New York State. A steeple jack and tightrope walker from Ontario named Clifford Calverly was attempting to cross a wire strung over Niagara Falls. Ten months earlier Calverly had made the trip on a three-quarter-inch steel cable in a record-shattering two minutes and thirty-two seconds. This time his pace was more leisurely. At one point the daring funambulist skipped rope on the taut wire two hundred feet above the roiling water. Then he brought a chair out, sat down, and—as if all that weren’t dangerous enough—he smoked a cigarette. His feats rivaled those of Jean Francois Gravelot, a.k.a. the Great Blondin, a Frenchman who crossed the gorge on a tightrope more than a dozen times in 1859 and 1860, once with his manager on his back. Calverly’s manager wasn’t on his back—at least not literally—but his act, according to one report, “caused the immense throng of people who lined the bridges and banks of the river to catch their breath with astonishment and fear.”

  Yet even Clifford Calverly’s extraordinary exploits paled in comparison to the secret proceedings on the Oneida.

  At 2:25 P.M., the president began to regain consciousness. Understandably, he complained of pain. He was given a shot of morphine. Then the doctors half carried, half dragged the enormous, groggy, almost-naked chief executive to his cabin. Keen recalled, “What a sigh of intense relief we surgeons breathed when the patient was once more safe in bed can hardly be imagined!” Of course, Cleveland wasn’t out of the woods yet. It remained to be seen whether the ether would aggravate his kidney condition or trigger side effects. And other postoperative complications—blood poisoning, localized infection—were quite possible. The doctors still weren’t certain he would survive.

  Nonetheless, by any measure, the operation had been a success. Not only had Cleveland pulled through, but the surgery had taken place entirely within his mouth, without any external incisions. The president’s eyeball hadn’t been displaced. His moustache was intact. When the swelling subsided and he was fitted with an oral prosthesis, his appearance would be perfectly normal. And once he mastered the prosthesis that would be inserted in his mouth—and if everybody else kept their mouths shut—the deception would be complete. No one would ever know what really happened on the Oneida.

  Cleveland spent the rest of the day in his cabin, drifting in and out of consciousness. The doctors took turns at his bedside, watching his vital signs and reading to him to pass the time. At one point the disoriented president looked up to see Dr. Erdmann at his bedside and demanded to know what was going on. Satisfied with the explanation that he was recovering from surgery, Cleveland then asked Erdmann where he was from.

  “Chillicothe,” the doctor replied.

  “Oh,” said the president with great difficulty. “Do you know a Mr. Nigbe there?”

  “Yes, he’s the druggist.”

  “Well, is he so poor that he needs a job from me?”

  “No.”

  “Then he won’t get one!”

  With the gauze packed into the wound in his mouth, Cleveland’s speech was barely intelligible. When the packing was removed, it was utterly incomprehensible, resembling, in Keen’s words, “the worst imaginable case of cleft palate.”

  Late that afternoon, Dr. Hasbrouck asked to be let off the yacht at New London, Connecticut. He had an important appointment in Greenwich the next day, and if he wasn’t put ashore by nightfall, he’d never make it on time. His request was denied. Bryant deemed it far too risky. Cleveland’s condition was still precarious. Hasbrouck’s services would be needed if another operation was necessary overnight. And if the yacht ran aground or hit a rock while docking, the jolt might trigger a hemorrhage or a stroke. Besides, Bryant feared suspicions would be aroused if the Oneida docked unexpectedly.

  Hasbrouck was irate. When he’d agreed to assist in the president’s surgery, he’d told Bryant about the operation in Greenwich. But Bryant was adamant. Hasbrouck would not be put ashore at New London until the next morning.

  By the evening Cleveland’s condition was stable. His pulse improved to ninety, and his fever subsided. The doctors, tired and hungry, took a light supper on the deck while the steward watched over the president. Afterward, cigars were passed out, and a bottle of whiskey was uncorked. (Keen abstained from the latter.) The weather, which had so far cooperated magnificently, was turning. A cool breeze blew, and high clouds raced across the nearly full moon. The flickering lights of New London were barely visible on the horizon. The Oneida moved in big lazy circles on the sound, in a holding pattern until Hasbrouck was let off in the morning. Bryant pulled out the small glass jar containing the matter removed from the president and held it up for all to see. The doctors began discussing its pathology. They agreed that it appeared to be an epithelioma, the same form of cancer that had killed General Grant. But the gelatinous mass from the president’s antrum puzzled them; it seemed to be a different type of cancer altogether.

  One of the doctors also pointed out a curious characteristic of the tumor: it had perforated the president’s palate. In other words, it had grown through it, not simply on it. An uncomfortable silence befell the deck. Everyone knew what that meant: a tumor that perforates tissue can be a symptom of syphilis.

  The conversation quickly turned lighter.

  Around ten o’clock the doctors went to bed and, presumably, slept quite well.

  Early the next morning, July 2, Hasbrouck was landed at New London without incident. That afternoon the president was feeling much better. He even managed to get out of bed and walk a bit. By the next day, July 3, he was “up and about,” according to Keen. He was even strong enough to climb the narrow staircase to the deck, where he signed the ship’s register.

  On July 4, 1893, A
mericans did their best to celebrate Independence Day, despite the country’s financial troubles. At the World’s Fair, a crowd of one hundred thousand was enthralled by the most magnificent display of fireworks in memory, launched from boats anchored in Lake Michigan. Philadelphia—which had lent the Liberty Bell to Chicago for the fair—held “patriotic exercises” at Independence Hall and a regatta on the Schuylkill. In New York, police bemoaned the growing popularity of firecrackers. “Crackers are getting more dangerous for children to play with every year,” a Sergeant Walsh lamented. At Niagara Falls, Clifford Calverly marked the occasion by crossing the gorge after dark, setting off Roman candles along the way.

  All that was missing was Grover Cleveland.

  Incredibly, the president’s whereabouts were unknown on the Fourth of July. He hadn’t been seen or heard from in three days. Usually, it only took the Oneida fifteen hours or so to get from New York to Buzzards Bay. Naturally, the reporters assigned to cover Cleveland’s arrival at Gray Gables began to get curious. About eight reporters had been sent to the president’s summer home, mostly from the larger daily papers in Boston and New York. They were staying at Walker’s, a hotel near the Buzzards Bay railroad depot, about a mile and a half down the road from Gray Gables and not far from the town of Bourne. Privately, some began to speculate that the president was unwell. After all, he had been looking awfully haggard lately. Publicly, though, there was nothing to report but the banal speculations of locals. Under the headline “No Sign of the Oneida,” the New York Times correspondent reported that “it is the opinion here that the yacht is at anchor down the bay awaiting the clearing of the thick fog, which will allow her to proceed.” The changing weather had given Cleveland the perfect cover.

  On the whole, the papers regarded the president’s disappearance with remarkable insouciance. The Times’ bland report was buried on page five and was considerably shorter than an adjacent story about the arrival of Jefferson Davis’s widow, Varina Howell Davis, in Rhode Island for her summer holiday. The scant attention paid the chief executive’s extended absence illustrates just how superfluous the presidency was in 1893. A succession of relatively weak, ineffective presidents—Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, and Harrison—had practically emasculated the office. Cleveland had done his best to wrest control of the government from an all-powerful Congress—he was the first president to invoke executive privilege, and, as we have seen, he was unafraid to exercise his power to veto bills he found objectionable. But he never really succeeded in restoring vigor to the presidency, which may explain why his disappearance seems to have sparked more curiosity than concern.

  Still, even in 1893, it was rather unusual for the president to go missing.

  Late on the night of July 4, the Oneida anchored about two miles off Sag Harbor, on the eastern end of Long Island. In the darkness, Erdmann, Janeway, Keen, and O’Reilly were put ashore in the naphtha launch. Bryant rode along to fetch some supplies for the yacht.

  And then the Oneida slipped back into the darkness and fog.

  ______________

  * The moniker Gilded Age was popularized by Mark Twain, who intended it as an epithet: to gild was to be obnoxiously extravagant.

  * Grover was a baseball fan but never attended a game as president. “What do you imagine the American people would think of me if I wasted my time going to the ball game?” he rhetorically asked the Chicago White Stockings star Cap Anson in 1885.

  * The station was demolished in 1908. The National Archives is now on the site.

  PART II

  THE SCOOP

  6

  THE COVER-UP

  BUILT ON MONUMENT POINT, a small peninsula jutting into Buzzards Bay on the western end of Cape Cod, Gray Gables was frequently called a cottage, but it was actually an imposing, three-story, gray-shingled mansion with eight gables and a wraparound porch. A massive stone fireplace dominated the main parlor, where the Clevelands frequently entertained. Grover had first come to the area in the summer of 1889. The journalist Richard Gilder, one of Grover’s friends from New York, kept a summer home on the bay, and he invited the then-former president up to do a little fishing. It was love at first cast. Grover found the fishing so exceptional—the bay was thick with bluefish and sea bass—that he returned the following summer and, in 1891, bought Gray Gables.

  Besides Gilder, several other friends from New York kept summer homes nearby, including actor Joseph Jefferson, journalist L. Clarke Davis, and Commodore Elias Benedict. In fact, it was at a party at Gilder’s home that Grover first met Benedict, who remembered the occasion this way: “Toward the middle of the evening two strangers entered, one rather short, but the other a very powerfully built figure, and dressed in a manner somewhat in contrast to the rather summery garments of the others present. ... A moment later I was shaking hands with Grover Cleveland. The shorter man was Dan Lamont.” Cleveland and Benedict discovered they had much in common: both had come of age in Buffalo, both were fanatical fishermen, and both were sons of Presbyterian ministers. “We . . . found to our delight,” Benedict said, “that we had both suffered in about the same measure from the severity of the Calvinistic Puritanical atmosphere which had surrounded our boyish days.” They soon became a fixture on the bay, their lines trailing behind the Oneida, with Grover in a floppy straw hat and the commodore in a captain’s cap.

  Some of the best times of Grover’s life were spent at Gray Gables. In the company of his friends around the big fireplace or out on the porch, the raconteur of old would return. With a cigar in one hand and a whiskey in the other, he was the life of the party. “With a few familiar friends,” Richard Gilder wrote, “he was the soul of good company; not dominating the conversation, but doing his share of repartee and storytelling, with all the aids of wit, a good memory for detail, and, when necessary, the faculty of mimicry.” Joseph Jefferson liked to tell Grover he’d gone into the wrong profession; he should have been an actor.

  Gray Gables was the Cleveland family’s summer home on Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts. Often referred to as a cottage, it was actually a three-story mansion. It was here that Grover came to recuperate after his secret operation on the Oneida. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

  Frances Folsom Cleveland, photographed around 1886, the year she married Grover. At twenty-one, Frances was the youngest First Lady in American history. In the summer of 1893 she also became the first incumbent First Lady known to be pregnant. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  But there would be no witty repartee on this visit to Gray Gables. Grover would barely be able to speak.

  While the Oneida bobbed aimlessly in the foggy waters of the bay, Frances Cleveland waited anxiously inside the big gray house. It had been two weeks since she’d met with Dr. Bryant in New York to discuss the peculiar lesion in her husband’s mouth. Then she’d come up to Gray Gables to wait for Grover to join her. Frances knew an operation was taking place on the Oneida, and though Grover tried to downplay the seriousness of it, she was rightly concerned. Wireless telegraphy was still a gleam in Marconi’s eye, so there was no way for Frances to receive any information directly from the yacht. Perhaps Keen or one of the other doctors sent her a message after disembarking, but even then she would have received only the sketchiest of details. Not until she saw Grover with her own eyes would she know his true condition. It must have been an excruciating vigil. Yet, for the secret to be kept, it was imperative for her to project an air of casual indifference. On the morning of July 4, some papers reported that Mrs. Cleveland was worried about the president’s absence. Some even suggested the president was seriously ill. Among doctors in New York, there was even a rumor circulating that the president had had a tumor removed from his mouth. Inevitably this rumor made its way into the pages of the more sensational papers.

  That afternoon, Frances telephoned the reporters waiting at Walker’s hotel and asked them to refrain from publishing any more “disquieting stories” about the president. She explained that there was no mystery about his whereabouts: he was fishing, a
nd he “intended to take his time and stay as long on the way as the fishing would warrant.” Local anglers said the bluefish were expected to return to the bay any day. The president, Frances insisted, “was well and in good health.”

  Frances was now seven months pregnant, and her condition was plainly visible. The newspapers noted the fact, of course, but always obliquely. Like “cancer,” “pregnant” was not a word suited for proper newspapers. Instead, readers were told of Mrs. Cleveland’s “expected illness.” Never before had an incumbent First Lady been known to be pregnant, and the birth of the Clevelands’ second child was anticipated even more eagerly than the birth of Baby Ruth. Frances’s pregnancy was a rare burst of sunshine in what was turning out to be a stormy year.

  With a toddler and an ailing husband to look after, the expectant Frances would have her hands full at Gray Gables. For help she summoned the president’s sister, Mary Hoyt, who lived in Beatrice, Nebraska. Mrs. Hoyt’s sudden departure for Gray Gables fueled more speculation about the president’s health.

  The Oneida finally reached Gray Gables on the night of Wednesday, July 5—more than four days after leaving New York. Cleveland, accompanied by Bryant and Lamont, took the launch to a small dock on the property. According to Bryant—hardly an impartial observer— the president was able to “walk sharply from the launch to his residence with but little apparent effort.” The Oneida, with Benedict on board, anchored off Monument Point for the night and, early the next morning, set sail for the trip back to New York.

  Conveniently, the president had arrived at such a late hour that the handful of reporters assigned to Gray Gables were back at the hotel and not present to witness his landing. The next morning, when they learned of the president’s late-night arrival, the reporters were irate. To mollify them, Dan Lamont, reprising his role as the president’s unofficial press secretary, issued a statement. He said the trip from New York to Gray Gables had been “leisurely.” He said the presidential party had “cruised slowly through Long Island Sound and came to anchor when they found good fishing grounds.” As for the president’s health, Lamont said it was “excellent, excepting that he was suffering from a slight attack of rheumatism.” The statement continued: