Something must be done to cope with the situation. Lansing has a copy of Jefferson’s Manual in his hand. If the President really is incapacitated, he tells Tumulty, his powers and duties should devolve on Vice President Marshall. He points out the pertinent paragraph in the Constitution.
Tumulty flies up in his face. “Mr. Lansing,” he quotes himself as declaiming, “the Constitution is not a dead letter in the White House.” He needs no tutoring from Lansing about the Constitution. Whose business will it be to certify to the disability of the President, he asks hotly.
Lansing says it would be up to him and Dr. Grayson.
“You may rest assured,” shouts Tumulty, dropping into brogue in his excitement, “that while Woodrow Wilson is lying in the White House on the broad of his back I’ll not be a party to ousting him.”
He adds, almost in tears, “The President has been too kind, too loyal, too wonderful to me to receive such treatment at my hands.”
At that moment Dr. Grayson appears.
Tumulty turns to him. “And I am sure Dr. Grayson will never testify as to his disability. Will you, Grayson?”
Grayson will do no such thing.
“I then notified Mr. Lansing that if anyone outside of the White House circle attempted to certify to the President’s disability, that Grayson and I would stand together and repudiate it.”
Lansing retires crestfallen to the Department of State.
With Edith Wilson in command from behind the locked doors, such White House business as is essential is carried on. Through Grayson, Tumulty informs her of the problems of each day. She decides which items won’t worry the President too much and makes a show of consulting him and sends back a scribbled note for Tumulty to act on. When the time comes for a Thanksgiving proclamation, Swem, the private secretary to whom the Wilsonian style has become second nature, drafts it. This time Mrs. Wilson manages to get the President to sign his name. The document comes back with the signature barely decipherable, at the top instead of the bottom of the sheet.
The news that the treaty may fail in the Senate has been received with consternation in England. When, in the cool light of afterthought, the British statesmen read over the Treaty of Versailles they find themselves in agreement with President Wilson that only a series of rational readjustments under a league of nations can save Europe from disaster. Smuts, who signed under protest, is aghast at the document he put his name to. John Maynard Keynes has resigned his job with the British treasury and is preparing his famous blast against the treaty’s iniquities.
House, in London, on his way home from fulfilling the pleasant task of helping pick Geneva for the League’s capital, has been busy stirring up the English. He wants them to let the American Senate know that the British Government will accept almost any reservations the senators feel necessary.
Sir Edward Grey, now Viscount Grey of Falloden, though ill and discouraged and nearly blind, is prevailed upon to accept a special embassy to Washington to make such agreements as are urgently needed to avoid a naval armament race and to get ratification for the League of Nations. The British Cabinet thinks of him as an eminent liberal almost certain to be congenial to President Wilson. He arrives in Washington the day Wilson is stricken on the train to Wichita.
A few days later House reaches New York from England so weak from an attack of gallstones he has to be carried off the boat on a stretcher. Hopelessly incapacitated himself, he sends his friend and erstwhile interpreter Stephen Bonsal to Washington. He knows that Bonsal, a schoolmate of the senator’s soninlaw, is on good terms with Lodge. They have in common a passion for the writings of George Borrow. If any man can talk the senator around it is Bonsal. At a couple of friendly interviews Bonsal fills the senator in on the gossip of the Peace Conference. He wheedles him into admitting that his reservations might be modified. Lodge pencils some suggestions, particularly certain changes in wording that might make him accept Article X, on a printed copy of the covenant which Bonsal just happens to have in his pocket Bonsal rushes this copy to the post office and mails it to House in New York. House promptly dispatches it to President Wilson at the White House.
No reply. Edith Wilson has ceased to deliver House’s letters to the President. She hates House and undoubtedly she feels that anything connected with the hated Lodge may upset her husband and bring about a relapse. Nothing is ever heard of Lodge’s modification of his reservations.
Senator Lodge, who knows of Bonsal’s intimacy with House, and who still considers the confidential colonel the quickest channel to the President’s ear, being touchy as a bear, is insulted by what he considers a direct rebuff from the White House. A few days later he reintroduces his reservations, in their original form, on the Senate floor.
Edith Wilson has cut all channels of communication with the President. When Sir William Wiseman, whom the Foreign Office sent ahead of the new ambassador, trusting in his intimacy with the confidential colonel to smooth the way, calls at the White House, Mrs. Wilson tells him the President is too ill to see him. “I had never liked this plausible little man.” Besides she knows he’s a crony of House’s. The eminent Viscount Grey suffers the same fate as Wiseman. Not even Tumulty has the courtesy to give him an interview. Without being received by the President he can’t function as an ambassador. After cooling his heels dismally for three months at the British Embassy he goes home in despair.
Edith Wilson, however, does consider the President well enough during this period to receive a visit from the King and Queen of Belgium. Like many another Virginian, Mrs. Wilson has a soft spot for royalty. She lets them in to see her husband in his bed and allows them to show him a beautiful set of china they have brought the Wilsons for a present. When the young Prince of Wales arrives in Washingon he is dutifully taken up to the sick man’s bedside.
Meanwhile the fulldress debate on the peace treaty resounds through the Senate chamber. Twice during November Edith Wilson allows Senator Hitchcock to see the President. He finds a tremulous whitebearded old man propped up with pillows. The paralyzed arm is hidden under the covers. Hitchcock still believes moderate reservations may win. When Hitchcock brings up Wilson’s own suggestions as a basis for compromise Wilson tells him, “Let Lodge compromise.”
As the day of the Senate vote draws near, the pressure for a compromise builds up in Washington. Herbert Hoover is using all the influence he has with the members of Wilson’s cabinet. Baruch, whom Edith likes, and who is a cordial friend of Grayson’s, urges them both to try to convince the President that enough senators are ready to vote for the treaty with moderate reservations if he will only give his consent. Half a loaf is better than no bread.
“For my sake,” says Edith, “won’t you accept these reservations and get this awful thing settled.”
He pats her hand. “Little girl don’t you desert me. That I cannot stand.”
Grayson puts in his two cents’ worth.
Wilson shakes his head. “Better a thousand times to go down fighting,” Edith quotes him as saying.
The day before the vote he dictates a letter to Hitchcock: “I sincerely hope that the friends and supporters of the treaty will vote against the Lodge resolution of ratification.”
Lodge uses all his parliamentary skill to set a trap for the Democrats. He arranges for the treaty to be brought to a vote first with his own reservations attached. Following the President’s instructions the southern Democrats join the diehard Republicans to vote it down. Then Hitchcock moves that the treaty be reconsidered with his moderate reservations attached. He is voted down by the Republicans voting solid. Lodge, to prove to the world that the Democrats are defeating their own treaty, now allows a new resolution to consider the treaty with his own reservations to be presented. In a rollcall vote, it is defeated by fortyone ayes to fiftyone nays, with the President’s Democrats voting against.