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of the great tragedy which now faces the world,” he told them, “no decent man can count his personal fortunes in the reckoning.” 14 Grayson heard the decision with dread: “There was nothing I could do except to go with him and take such care of him as I could.” As Wilson boarded his special train, he complained about the dreadful headaches that he had been having. For almost a month Wilson made speech after speech, sometimes two, even three a day. He hammered at the same themes. The treaty was a great document for peace and for humanity, dearly bought with the sacrifice of the young American men who had gone over to fight in Europe. Those who opposed it back in Washington were partisan, shortsighted, selfish, ignorant, perhaps something worse. “When at last in the annals of mankind they are gibbeted, they will regret that the gibbet is so high.” He was glad, he told an audience in St. Louis, that he was away from the capital. “The real voices of the great people of America sometimes sound faint and distant in that strange city!” The crowds grew larger and more enthusiastic as he headed west. Supporters of the treaty grew moderately confident that it might get through if only Wilson would accept some of the milder reservations. 15

Wilson’s headaches grew worse and he looked more and more exhausted. Bad news came in from Washington. Sentiment was growing in favor of reservations. William Bullitt, still smarting from the repudiation of his trip to Russia, now took his revenge, making a dramatic appearance before the Senate hearings to paint a picture of one blunder after another in Paris. Worse, he said that Lansing, the secretary of state, shared his criticisms. Lansing issued an unconvincing denial. “My God!” exclaimed Wilson. “I did not think it was possible for Lansing to act in this way.” Grayson noticed with alarm that the president turned pale and saliva appeared in the corners of his mouth. In San Francisco, Wilson told an old friend, a woman whom he had once been close to, that the attacks on the treaty were simply personal. “If I had nothing to do with the League of Nations, it would go through just like that!”16

On September 25 Wilson was in Colorado. By now he was having repeated coughing attacks which Grayson attributed to asthma. He had to sit propped up at nights and could not sleep for more than two hours at a time. He spoke in Pueblo that afternoon, his fortieth speech in twenty-one days. “Disloyalty,” he said of the League’s opponents. There would be no compromise with them, no reservations to the covenant: “We have got to adopt it or reject it.”17

Wilson never spoke in public again. At two the next morning, Mrs. Wilson woke Grayson. He found the president in a pitiable state, ill, gasping for air, the muscles in his face twitching. Wilson feebly insisted that he must carry on. His wife and doctor overruled him. “The doctor is right,” Wilson told his secretary with tears in his eyes. “I have never been in a condition like this, and I just feel as if I am going to pieces.” The president was suffering, Grayson said in a public statement, from physical exhaustion and a nervous reaction affecting his stomach. The rest of the tour was canceled and the president’s train headed back to Washington.18

On October 2, at the White House, Wilson had a massive stroke that left him partly paralyzed on his left side. Although he would make a limited recovery over time, he was not physically or mentally the man he had been. He never effectively functioned as president again, although he continued to influence the battle over the treaty from his sickroom. Mrs. Wilson and Grayson took it upon themselves to conceal the full extent of his illness and to carry out his wishes. In the first weeks after the stroke, when it was not clear that Wilson would survive, they kept everyone except Wilson’s daughters and the essential nurses and doctors from seeing the president. The leader of the Senate Democrats, Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, was shocked when he finally saw Wilson on November 7. “As he lay in bed slightly propped up