Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,102

day. For a stretch of eight days, Garfield had nothing but enemata.

Then Bliss began altering the mixture. On one day he added 5 drams, or roughly 1.25 tablespoons, of whiskey. On another, he removed the egg yolk, which had been causing the president gastric pain, and replaced it with a small amount of charcoal. The danger was that, if the solution was too thick, this type of feeding could actually contribute to malnutrition rather than combat it. At first, Garfield seemed to rally, but as the days passed, he continued to lose weight at an alarming rate.

As well as being malnourished, Garfield was almost certainly suffering from profound dehydration. He had lost a dangerous amount of fluid through profuse bleeding on the day he was shot, and had continued to lose water every day, through vomiting, fever, drenching sweats, frequent enemas, and nearly constant drainage of his wound. Bliss had also been giving him almost daily doses of alcohol, from brandy to claret to whiskey, all of which are dehydrating. Not only was Garfield losing large quantities of fluid, he was not ingesting nearly enough. In a modern hospital, a sweating, feverish patient would be given at least two quarts of intravenous fluid every day. Garfield’s daily fluids never amounted to more than a single quart.

While newspapers continued to print Bliss’s assurances that the only danger to the president now was exhaustion, it was painfully apparent to anyone who saw Garfield that he could not live long. “This dreadful sickness will soon be over,” Harriet Blaine wrote to her son in late August. “Every night when I go to bed I try to brace for that telephone which I am sure before morning will send its shrill summons through our room. The morning is a little reassuring, for light itself gives courage.”

Each time she stepped into the White House, however, Harriet felt even that small source of strength slip away. It seemed that everyone she encountered, from the cook to cabinet members, had already succumbed to despair. Dr. Edson, who had spent many long nights by Garfield’s side, admitted to Harriet in a private conversation that she no longer held out hope. Robert Todd Lincoln’s “darkness,” she told her family, “is unillumined by one ray of courage.” Even Almon Rockwell, who, since the day of the shooting, had reacted with anger and indignation at the slightest suggestion that Garfield might not survive, looked as though he had already lost his old friend. His “feathers,” Harriet wrote sadly, “I imagined drooped.”

So desperate had the situation become that her husband felt that, as secretary of state, he was obliged to ask Chester Arthur to take over the president’s responsibilities, at least temporarily. “Your father [is] much exercised on the question of disability,” Harriet wrote to her daughter. “Should Arthur be brought to the front, and how?”

The Constitution was of no help. Nothing in it offered any guidance on how to determine when a president was no longer able to perform his duties. Nor was there any precedent. Only three other presidents had died while in office. Lincoln had lived only a few hours after he was shot; Zachary Taylor had succumbed to cholera in just a few days; and William Henry Harrison had survived only one month after contracting pneumonia while giving the longest inaugural address in history on a cold, rainy day. Garfield—much younger, stronger, and with a family to care for—had already lived twice as long as Harrison.

Finally, Blaine sent a cabinet member to New York to discuss the transition with the vice president. Arthur, however, made it clear that he would not even consider taking over the presidency while Garfield still lived. He refused even to return to Washington, concerned that it would appear as if he were preparing for his own inauguration. “Disappoint our fears,” his young invalid friend, Julia Sand, had urged him. “Force the nation to have faith in you. Show from the first that you have none but the purest of aims.”

In the White House, Blaine found it impossibly painful to talk to the president about any of this. Garfield, however, had no illusions about his chances of survival. When asked if he knew that he might not live, he had replied simply, “Oh, yes, I have always been conscious of that.” What worried him now was not his own death, but the suffering it would bring to those he loved most. The last letter he would write was to his mother, in the hope