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Grover Tell the truth

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential

This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

MATTHEW ALGEO: He's not up there in a class with for distrust of the press, but Grover Cleveland really did not have friendly relations with a lot of the media. He rose so rapidly – he was elected mayor of Buffalo in 1881, governor of in 1882 and president of the United States in 1884. I mean, this guy in three years went from mayor of Buffalo to president. And he really wasn't equipped to deal with all the attention that came his way.

In the first presidential race in 1884, which he won, it came out that he had fathered an illegitimate child. And some of the more salacious newspapers printed very prominent stories about this, and this really turned Grover off onto the media in general. He had a basic distrust of reporters after that.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That's reporter and biographer Matthew Algeo. He's the author of 'The President is a Sick Man.' And this episode is about truth and lies -- and when a president can use either of those two to his advantage. It's also an episode about a secret cancer surgery at sea.

I'm Lillian Cunningham with The Post. And this is the halfway point. We've reached the 22nd episode of “Presidential.”

PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Grover Cleveland -- or Stephen Grover Cleveland, as he was actually named -- is our 22nd and our 24th president, which messes up the numbering system a lot. And he's the only one to do so -- the only president who has served two non-consecutive terms in the . He is also the last American president for whom there is no voice recording.

So, we're going to have a little fun with that and celebrate the end of a presidential era with a special guest -- Grover Cleveland. Or more specifically, Roman Mars playing Grover Cleveland.

Roman Mars is the host of the awesome podcast “99 Percent Invisible.” And you'll hear him a few times throughout the episode reading letters, giving speeches.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 So who is this guy? Cleveland was born in 1837 in Caldswell, . He was a Democrat, and he was president from 1885 to 1889. Then, comes in for four years, and then Cleveland returns and he's president again from 1893 to 1897.

What else? Well, for that, let's turn back to my conversation with Matthew Algeo. Could you paint a picture for me of this man Stephen Grover Cleveland? Pretend I'm about to go on like a blind date with him and you know the guy, and I don't know him at all. How would you describe the person who I'm about to meet -- physically how would you describe him and also just his personality type?

MATTHEW ALGEO: Well, physically he was a very big guy. He was our second biggest president, after Taft. He tapped out at about 300 pounds when he was president. But he was also a very graceful guy. People talked about how nimbly he moved and how well he could dance. He really was this weird contradiction.

His father was a Presbyterian minister and he was very taciturn. In official functions, he could come across as not very much fun. But on the other hand, when he was a young man in Buffalo, he loved to frequent the beer halls there and was quite a lot of fun. So, I guess if you were meeting Grover on a blind date, I would need to know: Are you meeting him at a political function or a social function?

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So you'd see two very different people.

MATTHEW ALGEO: Yeah it's really interesting, and I think you see this a lot in political figures. He had a hard time sort of letting the mask down when he was a politician. But in his general day-to- day life with friends, he was almost a comic. He would crack joke. He was a great impressionist. He could impersonate all the great political figures of his time, and so, he would constantly entertain his friends. But when he was hanging out in a political context, he was very remote.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: We're going to come back to Matthew a bit later, but I want to turn now to Michelle Krowl at the to dive into some of the other character traits of Cleveland's that launched him toward the presidency.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, I mean, he has this reputation from a pretty young age, early in his career, about being the incorruptible, upstanding, ethical guy, right? Hardworking as well. Holding people accountable.

MICHELLE KROWL: Oh, absolutely. That's much of a touchstone for him throughout his personal and political career -- that he's incredibly hardworking, kind of a nose-to-the-grindstone sort of person. He sees, particularly for public office, that it's almost like a trust between the people and himself -- that he's been hired to do a job, and it is his responsibility to do that job to the best of his ability, to serve the people to whatever extent he can.

An interesting example -- and this gets used against him later – is when he's the sheriff of Erie County in New York. He gets that office in 1870 and one of the responsibilities is to oversee punishments for criminals, and in some instances, when those criminals were executed by hanging, he was actually the one who did the hanging. He actually pulled the lever when a hangmen wasn't available. Not because he wanted to do the job, but because he felt it was part of his responsibility and he wasn't going to push it off on someone else.

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So of course, later on, when he's running for other political offices and president, then he becomes ‘the hangman of Buffalo.’ So that ends up being used against him. But he's also been known to be incorruptible, to be very honest, in that sense.

And that's one of the the things that propels him in his career -- because the people know that he's going to do what he thinks is right. He's going to look after their interests, particularly financial. Cleveland tends to be a fiscal conservative, and if it's an expense that he feels is unnecessary or has been padded to some degree, he will veto it. So, he's known as ‘the veto governor.’

You know, he hadn't been in politics long. So, he didn't owe a lot of favors. He wasn't taking bribes, he wasn't part of the political corruption. So, people saw him as part of the reform element of the political process, and that's what propels him into the series of jobs as mayor of Buffalo and then and then finally into the presidency.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I mean, these character traits must seem particularly admirable at the time, given the backdrop of political patronage and some of that corruption and money that we've seen in enmeshed in the political system up until this point.

MICHELLE KROWL: Absolutely. And that's one of the traits that voters are looking at and people in the party are looking at when they're putting him forward as a candidate. He doesn't come with the baggage of corruption, at least when you are looking at a political time where other people have been thought to be doing that or that's part of the whole political game. He does seem to be an almost a breath of fresh air.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do we see in his early story where he gets these traits from -- the hard work and also the sort of ethical righteousness?

MICHELLE KROWL: Some of the lack of of expenditures -- or maybe on the other hand you could call it a little bit of frugality on his part -- may come from the fact that when he was younger, his father was a minister. And Cleveland was just about to the point that he was thinking about trying to go off to college and then his father passed away, and now he was partly responsible for his mother and his siblings.

So, he never did go to college. But he studied law. For a brief period of time, he was a teacher with his brother in an institute for the blind. But it was really law where he found his calling. So, he was helping his siblings and not living beyond his means. Now, whether that was something that developed as a result of the circumstances in his family or whether that was just something innate in him that he was just by nature a frugal person -- that I don't now.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Because of this straight-shooting record, Cleveland gets the Democratic nomination in 1884 while he's serving as governor of New York.

MICHELLE KROWL: Cleveland didn't really have a burning ambition to be president. He kind of thought of it as something that providence would decree. ‘If I can do good for the party, if I can do good for my nation, then I will do my duty.’

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Right, this sort of sense of, ‘Well, if people want me to fill this role, I'll step

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 into it.’

MICHELLE KROWL: I mean, he must have had enough ambition to want to do the job, but it's not the burning passion of his life.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: During that 1884 campaign, a scandal breaks and it threatens to topple this image of the ethical, honorable Cleveland. There's a minister in Buffalo who tells a local newspaper that Cleveland fathered an illegitimate child.

MICHELLE KROWL: The story had a lot of potentially sordid elements to it. And Reverend Ball then embellished what was already there and made it a huge scandal. So, of course, you know, here's this person who's known for his incorruptibility and his trustworthiness and now he's confronted with this scandal that is being presented as quite an ethical lapse.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: The news starts to spread through more papers around the country and it seems to be swaying voters. There's even a famous editorial cartoon that comes out with a baby screaming 'Ma, ma, where's my pa?!'

So Cleveland's political allies start asking him what they should do – basically, how should they spin the story? Which parts should they deny? How can they try to keep the whole thing quiet? And Cleveland says:

ROMAN MARS: “Whatever you do, tell the truth.”

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This line gets forever associated with Grover Cleveland. And the truth was that Cleveland had slept with the woman and that the child might be his, even though he never really knows.

But in any case, he had decided to accept responsibility when the woman had told him years before and he had been helping them out financially. So he just comes straight out and admits all of this to the press and the crazy thing that happens is that there are a lot of voters who, all of a sudden, say, ‘You know, I've got a lot of admiration for that guy. He handled the scandal so forthrightly that I actually think he's even more honest than I did before.'

Now, not every voter of course felt that way, but enough did that Cleveland won the presidential election. He becomes the first Democrat in the White House since, well, , if you count Andrew Johnson as a Democrat -- which he was, but he was in the White House under a Republican administration, so that's a little murky.

If you don't count Andrew Johnson, then Grover Cleveland is the first Democrat in the White House since . So that's nearly 30 years. Welcome to the White House, Grover.

These are the opening lines of Cleveland's first inaugural address in 1885.

ROMAN MARS: “In the presence of this vast assemblage of my countrymen, I'm about to supplement and seal by the oath which I shall take the manifestation of the will of a great and free people. In the exercise of their power and right of self-government, they have committed to one of their fellow citizens a supreme and sacred trust. And he here consecrates himself to their service.”

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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, he wins the presidency. He comes into office. And a way that he gets described a lot is sort of as a watchdog president and as a president who vetoes things left and right.

And so it seems like a lot of how he defines what presidential leadership should look like is: keeping Congress in check.

MICHELLE KROWL: I do think that he does see himself more as a watchdog or the people's representative -- if he thinks it's wasteful spending, for example, he'll veto it. He vetoes a lot. He gives more vetoes than just about any other president combined, up until that point.

Pensions are a good example. There had been bills to give pensions to anyone who served in the Civil War -- on the Union side, of course -- for 90 days. Well, even by the , , that's still a lot of people who had served in the Union Army. But he didn't think that subsidies of that sort were a good idea. He also feared what that kind of program would do to the national treasury. When you start giving out even $12 a month, that's a lot of expenditure that is going to be coming out of the public funds. So, he vetoed that bill.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, and then there's also the famous bill that he vetoes that would provide federal aid to farmers in Texas, who have been experiencing a horrible drought. And he sort of puts his foot down and says he doesn't think that the government should be providing federal aid to help them through this crisis.

ROMAN MARS: “Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.”

MICHELLE KROWL: The other thing that Cleveland's very well known for is who he puts in office, because of course this is still an era where -- even though we've had civil service, we've had the Pendleton Act -- there's still an awful lot of jobs that are at the at the pleasure of the president. Postmasterships, for example.

And remember, the Democrats haven't been in office for quite a while. So, many will think, 'OK, this is great. Now, Republicans will be out. Democrats will be in. This is finally our time to be rewarded.’ And Cleveland won't do that. If you're a Republican and you're in the job already and you're doing a good job -- you're not using your position to further anybody else's ends, whether it be yourself or your party's – then he’s not going to throw you out. If you're doing a good job, you can stay.

But like every other president, he's just completely bombarded by requests for patronage jobs. And like many of the other presidents we've looked at, he ends up at his wit's end with these people because he can't please everyone. And he seems particularly annoyed with people from Buffalo, because, for one thing, he had been somewhat embittered by what had happened in Buffalo because of the whole illegitimate baby scandal and how that was received. But then he says something about, 'It's not that I don't care about by my friends in Buffalo. I really do. But now they seem to think that they're entitled to something, and the position I'm in now is so much bigger than that.'

You can find quite a few documents where he discusses, or he mentions, the the weight of

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 responsibility on him as president and that he'd like to do things for Democrats, he'd like to do things for his friends, but his responsibility to the people and to the office is so much higher.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: He enters the White House, and he's still a bachelor. And then he ends up marrying while he's in the White House.

MICHELLE KROWL: He does. He marries Frances Folsom Cleveland, and she had always gone by the name Frank. It's a little interesting situation. Oscar Fulsom had been Grover Cleveland's law partner and one of his best friends, and he was he was killed relatively young in an accident and left behind a widow and his daughter, Francis.

So, Cleveland essentially helps the widow -- is somewhat of a ward or a guardian to Frances, to Frank, and apparently had bought her her first crib. And so Cleveland had been in Frances's life for her entire life.

He had remained a bachelor; and at some point, maybe when she went off to college, he would write to her and send her flowers. And so at some point, a romance developed between them. Some people think it's a little odd that she was 27-years younger and he had been her guardian. But apparently they did fall in love and they were very devoted to one another, and so he asked to marry her and they got married in the White House in 1886.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: The Library of Congress doesn't actually have any of their love letters, unfortunately, because those have mostly stayed in Cleveland's family, and the family has not really wanted to make these letters public.

But there is one letter I came across that Cleveland had sent to Francis, not too long before their wedding. And Francis has obviously written to him about how she's trying to prepare for the responsibilities of being a first lady. And so this is what he writes back to her as part of his response.

ROMAN MARS: “I'm glad to believe that you appreciate something that is before you as the wife of the president and Lady of the White House. I guess there never was anyone so young and so unused to such responsibilities who occupied the place before. And my anxiety is, my very darling child, that you should be as well prepared as it is possible.”

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And then he goes on:

ROMAN MARS: “Of course the more other people admire and praise you, the more proud I should be. But I love you exactly as you are and for just what you are and, that Darling, you must never doubt.”

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And he ends the letter with:

ROMAN MARS: “Write me all the time, Darling, and tell me just exactly how much you love me. And if you love me better and better or less and less.”

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Signed:

ROMAN MARS: “Always, your old love. GC”

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MICHELLE KROWL: It's the only time that the president has been married in the White House, while he's the acting president. And it was a very small wedding, as kind of befitting both of them that they didn't want to have, you know, a big spectacle kind of wedding. But the press just went nuts with it because A) He's the president and B) She was much younger than he was.

She was only 21. He's 49 when they get married. But she immediately becomes very, very popular because she's young and she's vivacious and so, in that sense, they complement one another. Because even though he has friends and he can be a social person, she's definitely much more outgoing. To some degree she’s kind of a political helpmate, in the sense of humanizing him a little bit more and making him a bit more popular.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Here is like a musical interlude. This is where our discussion of Cleveland's first term ends -- because he loses his re-election for a second term. On the way out of the White House, though, Frances turns to the staff and she says 'We'll be back.' And she's right.

After four years of Benjamin Harrison being in office, Grover Cleveland is going to win back the White House. But before he does, during those four years while he's kind of twiddling his thumbs, he and Frances have their first child. Baby Ruth.

MICHELLE KROWL: And then once they start having children -- they ultimately have five -- they seem to come at a pretty rapid clip: 1891, 1893, 1895, 1897. Then they wait five years and have another one.

He's very cute about the children. In September of 1892, his first daughter, Ruth, has been born, and he's writing to his friend . And the first thing he says is -- since it's 1892 and it's the presidential nomination -- the first thing he says is, “Take my advice, dear friend, and never run for president.”

But then he says, “Mrs. Cleveland and the baby are as well as possible. Both would send their love.”

Well, what you can see when you look at the original is, after underlining 'never run for president,' then it's 'Mrs. Cleveland and the baby’… and the word 'baby' is all capitalized, and it's about two or three times the size of every other word. You see just the delight of fatherhood -- kind of the wonderment of it.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So in 1893, Cleveland, Frances and Baby Ruth head back to the White House and he is, up until that point, and ever since that point, the only president who's been able to pull that off.

This is from his second inaugural address:

ROMAN MARS: “While every American citizen must contemplate with the utmost pride and enthusiasm, the growth and expansion of our country, the sufficiency of our institutions to stand against the rudest shocks of violence, the wonderful thrift and enterprise of our people, and the demonstrated superiority of our free government, it behooves us to constantly watch for every symptom of insidious infirmity that threatens our national vigor.”

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Alright, so there are a number of things we could talk about for Cleveland's second term. He's pushing for the , he sends in federal troops to break up the -- and the backdrop for all of this is that, as Cleveland takes office again, the country is going through the worst economic crisis so far in its history. Railroads are failing, banks are failing, people are losing their jobs.

But what we're going to focus on for the remainder of this episode is the story of Cleveland's secret surgery at sea.

Cleveland finds out a couple months into his second term that he has a malignant tumor on the roof of his mouth. It's actually the same type of cancer that Ulysses S. Grant had. And so here is where we turn back to Matthew Algeo to talk about this time that Cleveland decides to hide the truth.

Walk me through why it is that he decides he needs to keep this quiet. I mean, part of it stems from this fear that if he goes public with it, it could further destabilize the country at this shaky time, right?

MATTHEW ALGEO: Right. Really, there were two reasons that Cleveland wanted to keep the cancer secret. One was political. At the time, the great political question was gold versus silver. What should our currency be based on?

He was a gold guy. He thought the currency should be based on gold. His vice president, Adlai Stevenson -- the grandfather of the future presidential candidate -- was a silver guy. And so Cleveland was afraid if it came out that he was sick, that he had cancer, that Stevenson, his vice president, would sort of step up and take over things and he would not support Cleveland's policies on the monetary issue.

And also at the time, cancer was called the dread disease. It was the disease that no doctor dared mention its name. There is a stigma attached to it. And Cleveland thought, politically, it was not in his best interest to be attached to the cancer. And then there was that thing we talked about -- where he was very private guy and he just didn't think it was anybody's business that he had cancer.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And also, he's already built up quite a distrust for the press, dating back all the way to when the illegitimate child story broke about him before his first presidency.

MATTHEW ALGEO: Right.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, I'm guessing there's also a certain fear there that if he goes public with it, sort of who knows how the story will spiral?

MATTHEW ALGEO: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, that was another reason he wanted to keep his cancer operation secret. He just didn't trust reporters.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So now, tell the story of what he decides to do. He finds out that he has this tumor, that he's going to need to have surgery to have it removed. And what's his solution?

MATTHEW ALGEO: Shortly after he took office in March of 1893, he discovered a rough spot on

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8 the roof of his mouth. And there was so much going on in the country with the financial panic and railroads going out of business, so many businesses going under, that he really didn't pay much attention to it.

It was a couple of months later where he finally had a doctor look at this rough spot on the roof of the mouth, and his doctor determined that it was a bad tenant, who should be removed immediately.

And so, Grover decided that he would have an operation to remove this tumor, but he would do it on a friend's yacht. He had a friend E.C. Benedict who he had often gone fishing with on his yacht. And so what they did is, in July of 1893, Grover went up to New York. He hopped on the yacht that Benedict owned, they sailed across Sound to , where Grover had a summer home, and in those three or so days while they were on Long Island Sound, there was an operation performed.

They had recruited about five or six doctors, the best in the country, and they performed this operation on the deck of the boat, actually underneath the deck. They took out about a quarter of his upper palate. A large tumor was removed and preserved, put in a jar. You can still see it today at a museum in , but the operation proved more or less of a success.

They had to cover up the aftermath of the operation, since so much of his palate had been removed. Grover Cleveland couldn't speak anymore. And so, there was a dentist recruited who fashioned a prosthetic device that he could pop into the top of his mouth and this restored his speaking voice and the shape of his face. And due to all these measures taken -- the operation took place entirely within his mouth, his famous mustache was untouched -- all these things made it possible for him to keep the operation secret.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And he lucks out that there's good weather for the time that he's scheduled to be on this boat to have a surgery performed on the open sea.

MATTHEW ALGEO: You wouldn't want rough seas, and in the book I wrote about it, I checked the weather forecast, and they were very lucky. They had very calm seas for the 48 hours that they were basically engaged in the operation. There was concern that if there had been rough seas, it might have triggered an ulcer or a stroke. And so he was incredibly lucky. Considering medicine in the 1890s, he was incredibly lucky that he survived this surgery, and not only survived it, but, you know, ended up living for another 10, 15 years.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This is just about the first successful medical story that we've reached, because there have been some pretty horrendous ones up until this point.

MATTHEW ALGEO: Yeah, a lot of these don't end very well, do they? With presidents, a lot of times, they don't get the best care. You would expect they would, but they're so paranoid about anybody knowing what's wrong with them that they employ old family doctors and that sort of thing. And of course, the medical care in general was not that great until we get into the early-to- mid-20th century. So, Grover really lucked out.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And, of course, we have seen with other presidents where, in addition to maybe not wanting to destabilize a shaky economy or something like that, there's also just a sense of, as president, wanting to project an image of health and vigor and strength that has kept many

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 9 presidents in our history from being forthright about conditions they're suffering from or illnesses they have.

MATTHEW ALGEO: It's a very long list. And, of course, it includes Wilson and Harding and Kennedy and Reagan to a certain extent.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Alright, so he has this surgery at sea and there are reporters at the time who are covering the president and there does start to be a little bit of suspicion about the fact that he's disappeared for a few days, and it's over the Fourth of July.

So, how does this start to shake out? How inquisitive are reporters?

MATTHEW ALGEO: Partly because he's had this reputation of being forthright, there are a number of people who seem to just trust that he would actually be honest if there were something wrong or that there were some news to share.

It’s almost like he had invested all this political capital in honesty and then cashed it in on this one big lie -- the cancer operation. The cover story was that he had a dental procedure on the boat and that he had two teeth removed, which technically was true, but they didn't mention the fact that he also had this cancerous tumor removed from the roof of his mouth and basically had a quarter of his upper palate removed.

MATTHEW ALGEO: There was a reporter named E.J. Edwards who worked for the Philadelphia Press at the time, and he had a friend of a friend who was a dentist in New York and had heard rumors that Cleveland had actually had this tumor removed, and he was able to verify those.

And in August of 1893, he published a story in the press -- 'The president, a very sick man.' And it really detailed the operation that had occurred on Cleveland on the boat earlier that summer. But Cleveland denied it, and all his spokespeople in the administration denied it. They continued to insist it was just a dental operation. And the public were really inclined to accept Cleveland's version of events.

And so E.J. Edwards, the reporter who really broke one of the great scoops of the 19th century, was kind of vilified as a cancer faker, as a rumor monger. It wasn't until many years later, long after Cleveland was dead, that Edwards was finally vindicated by one of the doctors who took part in the operation and then finally admitted the truth.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And it might be helpful just to give a quick portrait of the news landscape at the time. This is a time when there's been an explosion in newspapers, and a lot of the coverage is sensational, right? I mean, the idea of an investigative reporter, who's serving the public good is still kind of a new concept.

MATTHEW ALGEO: Yeah. E.J. Edwards was definitely one of the first. I guess you would call him a modern investigative reporter. Newspapers at the time were just unabashedly partisan -- Democrat or Republican -- and so, you read the paper that agreed with you. It's kind of like the echo chamber we have on the Internet today.

And so, E.J. Edwards really stood out as a reporter who -- beginning in the 1880s and into the 1890s, first with the Philadelphia Press and later with the Wall Street Journal -- reported many

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 10 stories that now we would consider very traditional investigative journalism. It was unusual at the time for a reporter to really try to get to the bottom of things the way E.J. Edwards did. And he went on to have a very good career, but this always sort of hung over him -- this accusation that he had made up this story about Grover Cleveland.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What do you think was most transformative about this episode in the American presidency --the nature of the cover-up and the relationship with the press?

MATTHEW ALGEO: I think there's a couple of things -- one, you know, Grover's successor is McKinley and then, of course, McKinley is assassinated and Teddy Roosevelt becomes president. And you really see the beginning of the activist, muscular presidency with TR. And you can almost chart a similar thing with journalism -- that you're just beginning to see a kind of independent investigative journalism, beginning with Grover Cleveland in that period of 1893 to 1897. And then you see it pick up a little bit more. So you're in this amazing transitional period -- both in politics and journalism.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you think that how truthful a president is with the press is at all indicative of how honest and uncorrupt that person is politically? Because it almost seems like Cleveland's story potentially shows that a politician can be cagey with the press, and yet still be a pretty upstanding public servant.

MATTHEW ALGEO: Wow. That's a tough call. That's a tough call. It was one of the things that really bothered me researching the book -- that Cleveland had this reputation for honesty, yet at the same time really vilified this reporter. I mean, what makes me sad about it is that if Cleveland had come out in 1893 and said 'I had cancer' -- and cancer, at the time, was so stigmatized, it was a terrifying disease that was almost universally fatal -- if he had come out and said, 'I have cancer. I'm going to have this operation' and then at the end of it he ended up living, he survived -- it could have been this amazing victory against the stigma attached to cancer at the time. And he didn't have the courage to do that, which is a shame. He really could have changed people's attitudes.

I think Cleveland, like all politicians, was a pragmatist, you know. And he did things -- even if he thought it was for the best of the country -- that sometimes might not be personally the most admirable thing to do. And I think every public figure, politician -- presidents, especially -- have to have to contend with this. They can make the argument that maybe Nixon thought the same thing in 1973 and 1974. So, I guess I just leave that up to each person to decide if that's appropriate -- to lie when you think it's the right thing to do.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Grover Cleveland left the White House in 1897 and he and his family moved to Princeton, New Jersey. He died in 1908 while Teddy Roosevelt was in office, and his last words were:

ROMAN MARS: "I have tried so hard to do right."

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