A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [69]
Tilden lived with a coterie of servants in a hundred-room stone villa. On warm spring days, he could be found on the veranda gazing out at his commanding view of the Hudson. The former governor suffered from colic and a stomach bloated with gas; unable to tolerate solid foods, he lived on broth. On a bad day, a bit of toast could bring on a spasm of vomiting and diarrhea. He had a weak heart and walked with a cane. One arm was useless, and he could barely make it to the top of the staircase without the assistance of his valet, Louis.
“What makes me puff so?” he would ask Louis.
Tilden was seventy years old when Manning went to see him. The party chairman found the rumors of Tilden’s failing health to be all too true. He was shocked at Tilden’s physical deterioration. Tilden’s good hand shook with palsy, and his facial muscles trembled, and his lower jaw drooped—the consequence of a paralytic stroke. His voice was a barely audible whisper. It was obvious that he did not have long to live. Yet his eyes—at least the one eye he could still see out of—still sparkled with intellect.
Manning laid everything out. He explained that he had met with Grover Cleveland the week before, and that Cleveland wanted to assure Tilden of his anti-Tammany credentials and commitment to the great principles of reform and good government. Manning also wanted Tilden to know that should Cleveland be elected president, he, Tilden, would have a hand in naming his cabinet.
Tilden hesitated—in part the natural objection an old man would have to being pushed, however gently, out the door and into oblivion. He said he did not want to be seen as favoring Cleveland or any other candidate, plus, he had “profound” questions about Cleveland’s credentials. Was this man really prepared to govern 60 million Americans? Tilden said he wanted to think about it for a day or two. Actually, it only took a day.
“I ought not to assume a task which I have not the physical strength to carry through,” he wrote Manning in a letter that was promptly made public. Tilden said his life in public service was now “forever closed.”
In Albany, Cleveland reached an understanding with Manning. He would stand as a candidate for national office, but only if President Chester Arthur or former secretary of state James G. Blaine of Maine secured the Republican nomination. Manning did not appreciate Cleveland’s hesitancy. “It’s difficult to understand the governor’s attitude,” he confided to William Hudson. Privately, he was peeved and wondered whether Cleveland had the fire in the gut that it took to play politics at the national level.
Cleveland tried to explain his position to one of his closest allies in Albany, New York—state comptroller Alfred Chapin. In the strictest confidence, Cleveland informed Chapin about the “woman scrape” he had gotten himself into back in Buffalo almost a decade before. He could only pray that it would not come out.
In early June 1884, Dan Lamont, William Hudson, and other key Cleveland advisors were gathered around a telephone in the Executive Mansion in Albany. All the ardent and ambitious men who were there that day were under forty, and they had hitched their wagons to the governor’s rising star. They were waiting for news from the Republican Party convention taking place in Chicago. It stood deadlocked between President Arthur and Blaine. Senator George Edmunds of Vermont was also in contention. At Exposition Hall the fourth ballot was under way.
Seated at the other end of the long table, busying himself with paperwork, was Grover Cleveland, utterly indifferent to the outcome of the political drama unfolding in the Windy City. Two months earlier, he had unburdened his heart to his sister Mary, telling her how he felt about running for president.
“I wish I might not hear my name mentioned in connection with it again,” he wrote her.