In the summer of 1893, President Grover Cleveland disappeared for four days to have secret surgery on a yacht. It was the beginning of his second term as president and the country was entering a depression, a delicate time in which a president's health was inextricably linked to that of the nation. So Cleveland decided to keep the surgery a secret — and so it stayed for years.
Today, that secret is the subject of Matthew Algeo's new book, The President Is a Sick Man. Algeo tells NPR's Steve Inskeep about the presidential illness that launched a cover-up:
"Shortly after he took office for the second time in 1893, he noticed a little bump on the roof of his mouth," Algeo says. "Around June ... he had noticed it had grown quite large. And the doctor diagnosed it as cancer, [saying], 'It's a bad looking tenant, and I would have it evicted immediately.'"
Cleveland worried that news of his diagnosis would send Wall Street — and the country — into a panic. According to Algeo, that wasn't an unreasonable concern.
"It would be a big deal today," he says. "It was an even bigger deal then because at the time there was a stigma attached to cancer. Newspapers would call it 'the dread disease.'"
So Cleveland decided to have the tumor secretly removed. The plan was for the president to announce he was taking a friend's yacht, the Oneida, on a four-day fishing trip from New York to his summer home in Cape Cod.
"And it was on that yacht that this operation was performed," Algeo says. "They assembled a team of six surgeons. [It] took about 90 minutes. They used ether as the anesthesia and they removed the tumor along with about five teeth and a large part of the president's upper left jawbone."
The surgeons managed to extract the tumor through the president's mouth, which meant there was no noticeable scarring and the president's trademark mustache was left untouched — key conditions for keeping the public in the dark.
Algeo says the operation was an extraordinary achievement in American medicine.
"The doctors took incredible risks. I mean, it was really foolhardy," Algeo says. "I talked to a couple of oral surgeons [while] researching the book, and they still marvel at this operation: that they were able to do this on a moving boat; [that] they did it very quickly. A similar operation today would take several hours; they did it in 90 minutes."