Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Little more than an hour later, Wilson engaged in a more publicized private meeting. For months, King Albert and Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, and their son Prince Leopold, had planned a trip to the United States, where they were meant to be guests at the White House. They were mid-ocean when Wilson suffered his stroke. As a result, they downscaled their itinerary and turned their ceremonial visit into a less formal tour of the States, traveling largely incognito. While visiting Washington, they stayed in the private residence of an Administration diplomat, and the Thomas Marshalls entertained them.

  Beyond his genuine admiration of the King and Queen, these noble survivors of German aggression making a state visit would have served Wilson well in his fight for the League. Recognizing the publicity value in the President’s receiving visitors and knowing what a boost it would be for Wilson to greet them, the White House arranged an informal meeting. Edith, Jessie Sayre, and Margaret Wilson received them in the Red Room. After tea, Edith asked if she might take His Majesty to see the President. Before doing so, the Royal Couple presented Edith with a beautiful wooden box, which contained eighteen plates, each with a hand-painted representation of a historic place in Belgium, some of which had since been destroyed. Queen Elisabeth presented Edith a fan of Belgian lace, adorned with diamonds and sapphires.

  Upstairs, King Albert demonstrated only “sympathy and solicitude” as he beheld the frail creature in his dressing gown and with a mustache and long white beard. While Dr. Grayson stood by, they spoke for a few minutes, after which Albert presented the china dishes and discussed each of the scenes depicted thereon. The President, in turn, offered the King a specially bound set of his History of the American People, the first volume of which he had autographed. After they said their goodbyes, Edith gave the Royal Couple a tour of the White House. Just when she thought they were leaving, the Queen said she wished to see the President. Edith saw no graceful way of denying her, and by the time they had returned to the bedroom, Wilson had removed his robe and returned to bed with a favorite gray woolen sweater that he had bought years earlier in Scotland draped over his shoulders. The Queen was delighted to have come upon him studying his new plates with a large magnifying glass. When the President asked after the young prince, the Queen said he was downstairs. Grayson permitted his entry as well. Present for all three of the bedside visitations, he provided the details to the press, including the King’s having told the President, “I hope that your ideas and ideals will be carried out. My feeling is that they will be.”

  Two weeks later, the Wilsons received the Prince of Wales, the man who would become King Edward VIII. Conversation between the President and the British media darling remained light, of little more substance than Wilson’s misinforming him that his grandfather Edward VII had slept in the very bed before him when he had visited President James Buchanan in 1860.

  Court intrigue accompanied the Prince of Wales’s visit, as the British Ambassador, Lord Grey, had been requesting a Presidential audience for weeks, and he was deliberately not asked to accompany Edward. That was evidently the result of Grey’s having invited an adjutant from England, Major Charles Kennedy Craufurd-Stuart, to be part of his delegation in America. Craufurd-Stuart, unfortunately, had a penchant for gossip, dining out on outrageous remarks. One such jape making the rounds of Washington’s finest tables was his comment that when Wilson had proposed to Edith, “she was so surprised that she nearly fell out of bed.”

  The bedside visit between the twenty-five-year-old Prince and the sixty-two-year-old President created a lot of cheery coverage, a welcome relief from the gloomy reports emanating from the White House. It suggested Wilson’s continuing recovery. Later that day, the press also reported his being wheeled to the rear porch of the White House, where he enjoyed the open air. On November 12, he called for a mirror and took a long look, turning his head from side to side. “Doctor,” he called out, before reciting one of his favorite limericks:

  For beauty I am not a star,

  There are others more handsome by far,

  But my face I don’t mind it

  For I am behind it,

  It’s the folks in front that I jar.

  He received his first shave in six weeks.

  • • •

  In all that time, the Senate had maintained its distance from the White House, less out of respect than for political advantage. Democrats did not want to draw attention to their leader’s helplessness, while Republicans happily exploited it. Lodge’s intention had never been to dispose of the League altogether, merely to disguise it as a Republican plan, thereby damaging the opposition party and Wilson’s reputation. Now, with the President sidelined longer than anybody had ever imagined, Lodge realized he could actually kill the entire Treaty, League and all. Lodge said he merely wanted “to Americanize the Treaty and the Covenant”—which Secretary David Houston translated as: “he would show the people that the Republicans had sufficiently rewritten the Treaty to save the situation.” With the Irreconcilables in his pocket, Lodge attempted to appeal to the Mild Reservationists by appearing reasonable, knowing that the minute he suggested anything directed toward Article X, the President would be intractable.

  Between the day of the President’s stroke and November 6, the Senate had approved in committee a list of fifty-two modifications to the Treaty—some minor administrative paper cuts, others substantive amputations. Senator Albert B. Fall alone introduced three dozen petty proposals—such as America’s sitting on commissions related to governance of the Saar Basin or sending troops to Upper Silesia or drawing the new Belgian border. Senator Lawrence Sherman of Illinois wanted to insert a phrase invoking “the gracious favor of Almighty God”; Senator Gore proposed adding an “advisory vote of the people” on top of any League decisions regarding nations resorting to war; La Follette wanted to excise the labor articles from the Treaty; Lodge wanted to strike the Shantung provisions. Under Hitchcock’s leadership, all the President’s men in the Senate had successfully defeated the amendments, prompting Lodge to spring right back with a list of what Hitchcock called “destructive reservations.” These items substantively reduced Lodge’s objections to fifteen points. In polishing them for presentation on November 6, the Republican forces designated the first as a “preamble,” so that Lodge could offer his own fourteen counterpoints. The opposition had effectively gridlocked the Treaty—to the point that anybody who had Wilson’s ear over the next two weeks offered but one solution: compromise.

  Gilbert Hitchcock was the first such visitor, sandwiched between the royal visits. Edith had allowed the President’s initial business conference because his advocate in the Senate sought guidance in attracting his undecided colleagues. Granted a half hour, he had encountered an “intellectually alert” but cadaverous Wilson, still with his wispy white beard. Propped up in bed, he buried his limp arm under the bedclothes. Wilson said he would accept “any compromise the friends of the treaty thought necessary to save the treaty, so long as it did not destroy the terms of the pact itself.” And he made it plain that Lodge’s reservations would “kill the treaty.” Hitchcock insisted that without some changes, American entrance into the League would be impossible. Wilson asked how many Senators would vote for the Treaty without reservations, and Hitchcock told him “not forty-five out of ninety-six.” Wilson groaned: “Is it possible, is it possible?”

  Hitchcock proved to be a dogged spokesman; but, as Senator Tom Connally of Texas observed, he was simply “no match for the snarling growls and the biting fangs of Lodge, Borah, Johnson and Reed.” As always, Lodge kept zeroing in on Article X of the Treaty, the guarantee against external aggression through collective security. Hitchcock insisted repeatedly that any such action demanded unanimity from the League Council and Congressional approval before America could commit to engaging in League actions. Lodge paid no attention, knowing that, in politics, constant repetition can harden even obvious falsities into facts. H
e just kept saying, “The article bypassed Congress.”

  While Edith had feared too much politics might weaken her husband, she knew that it was his lifeblood. Still, she filtered the information that reached him, limiting incoming opinions on the Treaty to those from friends in court. Tumulty reported that his inbox was filled with messages urging compromise. Bernard Baruch implored Wilson to accept that “half a loaf is better than no bread.” Herbert Hoover wrote that, considering the reservations as a whole, “they do not seem . . . to imperil the great principle of the League of Nations to prevent war” and should be accepted at once. Even the banished Colonel House—bedridden himself, with gallstones—got involved in an intricate back-channel effort that might not only rescue the Treaty but also put him back in Wilson’s good graces.

  House urged Stephen Bonsal, his worldly attaché from Paris, to meet with his friend Henry Cabot Lodge. In the course of their conversation on October 28 at Lodge’s house near Dupont Circle, Bonsal got the impression that the Senator was not as confident of “hamstringing” the Covenant as he appeared in public and that he was even prepared to compromise. Over two more conversations during the week, Bonsal induced Lodge to pencil right on a copy of the Treaty fifty words of “inserts,” which included a few phrases that underscored Congressional authority. Bonsal persuaded Lodge to agree that those conditions were implicit within the original document, but the old Senator maintained that he had improved the Treaty, the language of which he had found unworthy. “It might get by at Princeton,” he said, “but certainly not at Harvard.”

  Bonsal sent the Lodge-edited Treaty—which would surely have met Senate approval, if not unanimity—to House, who claimed to have forwarded it to Tumulty. Nobody knows if it ever got past his desk or if Mrs. Wilson simply dismissed it because it came from Colonel House or because she or the President saw Lodge’s rewrite of Article X, which Wilson would have automatically rejected. In all likelihood, nobody ever saw it—certainly not Senator Hitchcock.

  At first he thought that Lodge “merely wished to weave into the Covenant some of his great thoughts, so that this world charter would not, in the future, be regarded as a party document.” Now Hitchcock realized that Lodge’s “hatred of Wilson is very deep and his talking point is that, as the President did not permit any real Republicans to participate in the drafting of the Treaty,” the Republicans now had “a perfectly free hand in the matter of ratification,” a greater responsibility than would have been theirs had they been included during the initial drafting process. For his part, Hitchcock—like most of his Democratic colleagues—favored a ratified Treaty in almost any form, if only to “end the present disastrous anarchy that prevails in world relations.” But he was obligated to honor the President’s commands. Even when the White House handed them down indirectly, the message remained clear. “I am merely told ‘the President will not budge an inch,’” Hitchcock told Bonsal. “His honor is at stake. He feels he would be dishonored if he failed to live up to the pledges made to his fellow delegates in Paris.”

  And then, as the Senate vote approached, not even Edith Wilson could hold back any longer. “In my anxiety for the one I love best in the world,” she confessed years later, “the long-drawn-out fight was eating into my very soul, and I felt nothing mattered but to get the Treaty ratified, even with those reservations.” While sitting at her husband’s bedside, she said, “For my sake . . . won’t you accept these reservations and get this awful thing settled?”

  Woodrow turned his head on the pillow and reached out to take Edith’s hand. “Little girl,” he said, “don’t you desert me; that I cannot stand. Can’t you see that I have no moral right to accept any change in a paper I have signed without giving to every other signatory, even the Germans, the right to do the same thing? It is not I that will not accept; it is the Nation’s honour that is at stake.” Almost immediately, Edith felt ashamed for having joined his “betrayers,” even momentarily. “Better a thousand times to go down fighting,” he said, “than to dip your colours to dishonourable compromise.”

  On November 17, Senator Hitchcock returned to the White House for another meeting with the President. The Senator found a different man—clean-shaven and sitting up taller—in the Lincoln Bed. Hitchcock raised the subject of the Lodge Resolution, which he had sent in advance and which Dr. Grayson had read to the President. Wilson wasted no time in expressing himself: “I consider it a nullification of the Treaty and utterly impossible,” he said. Wilson maintained that the Lodge reservations cut “the very heart” out of the Treaty. “I could not stand for those changes for a moment because it would humiliate the United States before all of the allied countries,” he said. Hitchcock asked the President to explain just what effect a defeat of the Treaty would have.

  “The United States would suffer the contempt of the world,” he said. “We will be playing into Germany’s hands. Think of the humiliation we would suffer in having to ask Germany whether she would accept such and such reservation!” The President experienced a surge of energy such as he had not felt since taking to his bed. He unleashed a furious tirade over the political situation as well as his physical inability to combat it. “If the Republicans are bent on defeating this Treaty,” he said, “I want the vote of each, Republican and Democrat, recorded, because they will have to answer to the country in the future for their acts. They must answer to the people.” And then, making threats an invalid could not really back, Wilson said, “I am going to debate this issue with these gentlemen in their respective states whenever they come up for re-election. . . . I shall do this even if I have to give my life to it.” His spleen vented, Wilson said he held no hostility toward the Senators in opposition—only “an utter contempt.” With the exception of interpretations, Wilson insisted he was as unwilling as ever to compromise on anything that would require “a recommitment to council with other nations.”

  Wilson spent almost another hour asking Hitchcock to walk him through the last six weeks of legislative knavery that had led to the impending vote. “I have been lying on my back and have been very weak,” he said. He knew that he had been “kept in the dark” except for what Edith and Grayson had told him; and, he imparted that “they have purposely kept a good deal from me.” Upon leaving, the Senator said, “Mr. President, I hope I have not weakened you by this long discussion.” Wilson smiled and said, “No, Senator, you have strengthened me against the opponents.” In the hall, Hitchcock said to Grayson, “I would give anything if the Democrats, in fact, all the Senate, could see the attitude that man took this morning. Think how effective it would be if they could see the picture as you and I saw it this morning!”

  For the first time since his stroke, attendants rolled Wilson in his wheelchair onto the South Lawn, where his flock of Red Cross sheep continued to graze. Hitchcock returned to the Senate to make his best efforts to convince his colleagues. He drafted a letter—which he sent to Mrs. Wilson—for the President to send back, which stated his position on the upcoming vote. It urged friends and supporters of the Treaty to vote against the Lodge Resolution—“for in my opinion the resolution in that form does not provide for ratification, but rather for defeat of the treaty.” Later that day, Edith read the letter to her husband, who dictated some minor changes, the most consequential of which was changing the word “defeat” to “the nullification.”

  At Hitchcock’s direction, those Democrats who favored the Treaty caucused on the morning of November 19, 1919, to discuss the Lodge Resolution. Senator Underwood of Alabama moved that they unite against it; and then Hitchcock drew “Wilson”‘s letter from his breast pocket and read those same instructions to his most loyal supporters. Senator Ashurst asked to examine the letter and could not help noticing that the President’s signature had been rubber-stamped in purple ink. At noon the Senate convened for a final debate of the Treaty. It played out as Hitchcock had predicted: the Lodge Resolution of ratification met defeat, with thirty-nine ayes agains
t fifty-five nays—a combination of forty-two Democrats and thirteen Republicans, the Irreconcilables among them. Oscar Underwood introduced the unencumbered Treaty, exactly as Wilson had delivered it from France, and it faced an almost identical result, thirty-eight ayes to fifty-three nays. Incredulously, Henry Ashurst recorded in his diary that night that the Treaty of Versailles—a six-month labor of the world’s leaders, ratified by the principal Allied and Associated Powers and even signed by the enemy—could muster the votes of only thirty-eight United States Senators. With the Senate adjourning, Lodge would declare he had done all the compromising he intended to do. Underwood and Hitchcock concurred that the Treaty was deadlocked, but not dead. Partisan politics was that day’s only victor, the Treaty its victim. There would be a few months before everybody would revisit the document, during which time the President could allow the Senate to redraw the Treaty. One man held the power to break the stalemate, but he remained stuck in bed and in his unwillingness to compromise.

  Fearing the effect “the fatal news” from Capitol Hill would have on her husband, Edith broke it to him gently. Silence filled the room for a moment, until Woodrow said, “All the more reason I must get well and try again to bring this country to a sense of its great opportunity and greater responsibility.”

  Such wishful thinking did not seem out of place in the current White House, which was awash in denial. In order to maintain strict silence, Edith had banned the public from the White House and its grounds. In the private quarters and the empty public rooms, staff members tiptoed, unaware of just how sick the patient upstairs was. Those few in the know kept up appearances, pretending everything was all right and covering for the President wherever possible. Opacity bred suspicion, and the longer this masquerade continued without the President’s appearing in public, the worse the rumors became. Some said Wilson had lost his mind. His reciting limericks was twisted into talk of his babbling nursery rhymes. Enemies whispered that bars had to be placed over the White House windows—as, in fact, people suddenly became aware of such metalwork, failing to realize that President Roosevelt had installed it years earlier to protect the glass from his rambunctious children. In truth, the President’s health slowly and steadily improved; but as Ike Hoover later revealed, “If there was ever a man in bad shape, he was. He could not talk plainly, mumbled more than he articulated, was helpless and looked like a man fatally ill. Everybody tried to help him, realizing he was so dependent for everything.”