Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 501

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The President Is a Sick Man: Wherein the Supposedly Virtuous Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman Who Dared Expose the Truth," by Matthew Algeo.

Jones then proceeded to tell Edwards a most incredible story. He had learned from his friend and fellow doctor, Carlos MacDonald, that Grover Cleveland was ill. MacDonald had heard the story from a dentist named Ferdinand Hasbrouck, who said he’d taken part in an operation to remove a cancerous tumor from the president’s mouth. The operation had been performed in total secrecy on the Oneida, Elias Benedict’s yacht. “Dr. Jones told me that the fact was sure to get out,” Edwards later recalled, “and that he thought there was no reason why he should not tell me the story.” 

Edwards was stunned. He’d just been handed the scoop of the century, though in time he might wish he hadn’t been. The story Jones told wasn’t merely sensational, it was inflammatory, and Edwards understood the repercussions of reporting it. The White House still insisted the president had suffered from nothing worse than a toothache and a touch of rheumatism. By revealing that Cleveland had actually had a cancerous tumor removed from his mouth, Edwards would singlehandedly plunge the administration—and, perhaps, the country—into turmoil. He would also be risking his good name, for the president’s allies were sure to kill the messenger, at least metaphorically. 

Determined to confirm the story, Edwards went into the city early the next day to call on Ferdinand Hasbrouck, the dentist who’d told Jones’s friend about the surgery in the first place. Hasbrouck lived in a handsome brownstone on 126th Street in Harlem, then the most fashionable neighborhood in the city. Edwards climbed the steps and rang the bell. Hasbrouck answered in his nightshirt. Edwards apologized for waking the dentist but explained that he was a newspaperman on deadline and needed to verify a few facts for a story he was writing. His introduction sounded innocuous enough. Hasbrouck invited Edwards inside. 

Edwards waited in the parlor while Hasbrouck went upstairs to change into his morning coat. When he returned, the dentist took a seat close to Edwards. Hasbrouck was fifty, wiry, and handsome, with thinning dark hair and a full beard. He’d fought in the Civil War and was slightly deaf, apparently as a result of his battlefield experience. He cupped his hand behind his ear as Edwards spoke. Almost nonchalantly, Edwards told Hasbrouck everything he’d learned about the operation from Jones: the rendezvous on the Oneida, the makeshift operating theater below deck, the surgery itself. 

Hasbrouck was flabbergasted. He listened in amazement. 

“Some of the physicians who were aboard the yacht must have told you that story,” he exclaimed. “You could not have obtained it in any other way!” 

Edwards calmly asked Hasbrouck if the story was true. 

Yes, Hasbrouck admitted, it was true. There was no point in denying it any longer. Hasbrouck told him everything. He also assured Edwards that the president had weathered the ordeal remarkably well and that the doctors were confident of his full recovery.

When the dentist finished, Edwards thanked him for his time and excused himself. He hurried to his office in the Schermerhorn Building and prepared a story about the operation for the Press, writing furiously in longhand as usual. He could not risk transmitting the story to Philadelphia by telegraph, however; a Western Union operator could not be trusted with such sensitive information. So Edwards phoned it in: he read the story to his editor at the Press over a telephone line. All the while, Edwards feared another reporter would beat him to the punch. “I was sure that the news would speedily get out,” Edwards remembered, “and I had the newspaperman’s desire to be the first to publish important news—what we call a ‘beat.’” 

It wasn’t just a beat. It was one of the greatest scoops in the history of American journalism, and it is still the most detailed account of a medical procedure on a sitting president to be published without authorization. 

The story appeared on the front page of the Philadelphia Press on August 29, 1893—the day after the House voted to repeal the Silver Purchase Act. In an age when exaggeration and even fabrication were acceptable journalistic devices, Edwards’s account is notable for its absence of hyperbole. The prose is simple, restrained, sober—a little flowery sometimes, but never sensational or maudlin. Edwards forsook hysteria for accuracy.

Given the conflicting accounts of the president’s health, the public was largely inclined to believe that E. J. Edwards had, at the very least, exaggerated the severity of the president’s condition. Some even believed he’d made the whole thing up, just as Alexander McClure kept insisting. The Cleveland administration’s strategy—constant denials and staged displays of the president’s fitness—paid off. Most Americans were probably already inclined to believe the Honest President anyway. Ironically, Cleveland’s reputation for integrity actually made it easier for him to pull off one of the great deceptions in American political history. 

Even Edwards’s peers were inclined to give the president, not the newspaperman, the benefit of the doubt. While acknowledging the “brilliant scope of Mr. Edwards,” the trade journal the Journalist concluded that “his assertion that the operation was for the removal of a cancerous growth must be set down, at least, as not proven, for while no official denial has been made, the doctors and near friends of Mr. Cleveland say that the operation was simply for the removal of ulcerated teeth and a portion of the jaw bone which had become affected.” 

Ultimately, E. J. Edwards’s reputation was seriously compromised. He had been labeled a “faker,” and that label would stick to him for a long time. The criticism was wholly unjustified, of course, but Edwards took it stoically, in a manner befitting a nineteenth-century gentleman. Yet it must have eaten away at him.