A Close-Up of Woodrow Wilson

...Meanwhile, regretfully, we must take him at his word that he has chosen to give us "a few glimpses of the human side of Woodrow Wilson...

...They constituted a screen through which nothing but doctors and nurses penetrated in either direction for seven or eight weeks...

...Later, Mrs...

...They merely confirm what we have known for some years about the qualities of an extraordinary President from scores of other memoirs and biographies...

...Grayson's quote shows Wilson sober and undeluded...

...Admiral Grayson was President Wilson's official and personal physician almost from the moment the latter entered the White House...

...perhaps the Admiral's diary, from which he prepared this little book before his death in 1938, will reveal others when and if it becomes available to scholars...

...At his door, like the protective cherubim God stationed at the entrance to the Garden of Eden, stood Mrs...

...He was more than that...

...Grayson recounts how Georges Clemenceau asked his opinion as to whether the President was bluffing (as some Americans had hinted...

...Papers or messages went in through Mrs...

...Grayson counselled against such a course, not on medical grounds on which he was competent to pronounce, but on the ground that Wilson was satisfactorily carrying on all the essential duties of the Presidency...

...He motored with him, went on trips on the "Mayflower," accompanied him to Europe...

...Later—the date is not pinpointed, a frequent Grayson failing—Wilson reverted once more to the subject, even to the length of describing how he would enter and leave the House of Representatives in a wheel chair to present his message of resignation...

...New to the best of my knowledge, however, or previously imperfectly known, are two incidents from the Paris Conference which are mentioned briefly by Grayson...

...Probably there was, in fact, no great mystery...

...Again, Grayson spells out a dramatic confrontation by Wilson of Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Vittorio Orlando, of which the Admiral was the only American witness and which hitherto has been only briefly referred to by Ray Stannard Baker (repeated more recently by Arthur Walworth), presumably on the basis of what Baker heard of it orally from Grayson...

...Wilson was evidently more clearsighted than many have given him credit for being...

...He was confidant, companion and shadow...

...He said somberly that "there is bound to be a reaction...

...One concerns the well-publicized episode when, in crisis of stalemate, Wilson ordered the SS George Washington to Brest as evidence of his readiness to break off negotiations...

...Grayson was with the President incessantly...

...The pleasure can be felt by anyone, because this is a readable book which presents an intimate account of the character and some of the actions of a major historical figure...

...Harold Nicolson, for example, in Peacemaking, is typical of those who have often accused Wilson of having been deluded into vainglory by the plaudits of the mob...

...He kept a diary, he was observant and he was intelligent...

...Of rather more than passing interest, too, is the remark he made to Grayson at Milan, where the adulation of the multitudes reached unbelievable heights...

...These are among the few but tantalizing nuggets of new fact...

...Out of these pages there does emerge a confirmation, however biased and subjective, of the picture which biographers have long since drawn of a rare and warm-hearted man—the highest type, though not the prototype, of American...

...In a concluding passage of delicate perspicacity and descriptive-ness, Grayson writes that "there was a sense in which Wilson lived apart and aloft...

...The central core of leadership, decision and power clearly lay suspended for a time, exercised by no one...

...Wilson and Admiral Grayson...

...One picks up this little volume with keen anticipation and puts it down with a curious mixture of pleasure and disappointment...

...Grayson says it was one of the President's greatest speeches—and he also recounts how Wilson savagely ordered Clemenceau to "sit down" when the latter sought to interrupt, an eloquent vignette of Wilson's great fighting qualities...

...Later, at their discretion, with their permission alone, and under their watchful gaze, visitors were sometimes briefly admitted...

...Of considerable historical interest is Grayson's account of two occasions on which Wilson talked to him about the possibility of resigning the Presidency...

...In the afternoon, Wilson passionately refuted this accusation and pleaded—in terms which were a striking forerunner of his "my clients are the children" speech at Pueblo on September 25, 1919, the night before he collapsed—for a peace with justice which would not recreate the cycle of endless European wars...

...Very likely, the decisions she brought out of the sick room were Wilson's, but the choices of matters to be presented to him and the manner of presentation were hers...

...Clemenceau had charged Wilson that morning with being pro-German and told him that he ought to wear the Kaiser's helmet...

...Reviewed by Perry Laukhuff Author, "Woodrow Wilson: President" The late Rear Admiral Cary T. Grayson was virtually the only person closely associated with Woodrow Wilson who never contributed to our knowledge of him...

...he lived in the White House for months on end in intimate personal contact with Wilson, played golf regularly with him in the days of good health, attended him on state occasions and nursed him through the gravest of illnesses...

...For 40 years the mystery has in some degree persisted: Who made the decisions...

...Wilson treated him as a son—for all that he appears never to have called him anything but "Doctor...

...Grayson replied that Wilson never bluffed and added that "if he ever starts for Brest to go aboard the George Washington, you and your entire French Army cannot turn him back"—a remark which conceivably helped influence the French to a somewhat more accommodating position...

...The disappointment will be felt by Wilson scholars and by historians generally that one who could have told so much revealed so little...

...Wilson acted as judge, interpreter and messenger and did in fact constitute a regency, however benign...

...The first was on April 13, 1920, the day before he held his first Cabinet meeting in six months...

...Now Grayson, too, has spoken, 22 years after his death, through the medium of a manuscript left among his papers and only just published...

...In the wee hours, the restless and ill President told Grayson he thought that if his recovery were going to be long delayed he ought to turn his office over to the Vice President...

...Yet he has produced (as far as we know) only this slender volume of somewhat rambling and not-very-analytical recollections...

...the people will "be disappointed and turn about and hiss me...

...Grayson saw more of Woodrow Wilson—the man and the President, both—than anyone else except the President's family...

...He could come down from the heights to mingle with other men, to discuss with them state policies, to laugh and chaff with them, but by nature his mind and spirit sought the high spaces—and high spaces are not populous...

...Wilson (when she chose) ; replies came out the same way...

...With a handful of what almost seem to be accidental exceptions, most of which are quite minor, this book produces very little new about Wilson...

...For 11 years, from March 1913 until the ex-President's death on February 3, 1924...

...Historians have looked forward most eagerly, perhaps, to Grayson's account of those dark and obscure months when the President lay an invalid in the White House...

...Bits and pieces of the executive power were exercised here and there throughout the Government —by Tumulty, by Cabinet officers and by others...