Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [115]
The train pulled out at 4:20 P.M.—right on time. The president’s departure was unannounced. By the time reporters in the capital learned that he’d called a special session of Congress, he was already gone.
Lamont did not disturb the president, who stared out the window, silently watching Washington melt into Maryland through a cloud of tobacco smoke. Every few miles the train passed a shantytown along the tracks, each populated by the victims of the Panic of 1893. They were known as the mudsill—the lowest of the low. Too poor even to afford the meager rents of tenements, they roamed the cities and countryside by the thousands: homeless, jobless, hungry, and desperate. “Men died like flies under the strain,” wrote nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century historian Henry Adams of the panic. Some families were reduced to eating grass.
The president didn’t have to worry about eating grass, but he certainly had his own concerns, even beyond his grave executive responsibilities. Office seekers still hounded him. His wife’s pregnancy—Frances was now due to give birth in two months—preoccupied him. And he had cancer. In less than twenty-four hours he would undergo radical surgery to remove the tumor in his mouth.
He still sat in silence, gazing out the window of the speeding Pullman, hurtling toward New York at a mile a minute. His only consolation was that not a word of his condition had leaked. The papers were oblivious to his impending operation. For that, at least, he was grateful.
Maryland gave way to Delaware. Wilmington approached. He demanded another whiskey.
Meanwhile, the five doctors who would assist Bryant in the operation the next day quietly gathered on the Oneida. Erdmann, Hasbrouck, Janeway, Keen, and O’Reilly were each ferried to the yacht from different piers in the Oneida’s naphtha launch, an early version of a motorboat with a notoriously unpredictable engine. O’Reilly had traveled to New York incognito under the pseudonym Major Miller.
At 10:32 P.M., the president’s train pulled into Jersey City. Dr. Bryant was waiting for him. So were several reporters, but Cleveland was in no mood for them. On the ferry from Jersey City to Manhattan—the panic had put an end to dreams of building a tunnel under the Hudson—he growled at a New York Times correspondent, “I have nothing to say for publication, except that I am going to Buzzards Bay for a rest.” It was the first of many half-truths, exaggerations, and outright lies that the press would be told about the operation.
The ferry ride took about twenty minutes, after which Cleveland, Lamont, and Bryant squeezed into Bryant’s landau and rode, unnoticed in the darkness, across Lower Manhattan to Pier A on the East River. The Oneida was anchored a good distance offshore to keep prying eyes at bay. The naphtha launch was waiting to shuttle the three men to the yacht.
Even by the Gilded Age’s gaudy standards, the Oneida was a fabulous boat. Built in 1883 and originally christened the Utowana, the yacht won the Lunberg Cup, an international race, in 1885. So impressed was Elias Benedict, a fanatical yachtsman, that he bought the boat, refitted it for comfort as well as speed, and renamed it the Oneida, perhaps to honor the first tribe to side with the Americans in the Revolutionary War. At 138 feet the Oneida wasn’t exceptionally large (J. P. Morgan’s yacht was more than twice as long), but it was fast and luxurious, capable of running thirteen knots and comfortably accommodating a dozen passengers. It had an iron hull, two masts, and a steam engine. The quarters below deck were plush, though, by necessity, somewhat cramped. The Oneida combined