Here's Where It Gets Interesting - A Man of Iron with Troy Senik

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

On this episode of Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon shares a conversation with former presidential speechwriter Troy Senik. Troy is now the cofounder of Kite & Key Media and author of the new book, A Man Of Iron, which is a sweeping biography of a nonconsecutive two-term President whose time in public service often flies under the radar. Can you guess who Troy will be talking about today? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome. So happy you're here with me today. Who would you guess this title describes? A man of iron, the turbulent life and improbable presidency of fill in the blank. Who does that sound like? Would you have guessed Grover Cleveland? I'm chatting today with Troy Sinek, the author of A Man of Iron. And I think you're going to learn some very, very interesting things about a president who served two terms, but they weren't back to back. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. a subject of your new book. Sounds like a bit of a stretch, doesn't it? There were two real reasons. One was a matter of historical hygiene. We have had 45 presidents. The numbers are all wonky because of Grover Cleveland. Because of Grover Cleveland. That's right. You got to subtract one

from everything. So Biden's really 45. That's the important number to keep in your head. things. So Biden's really 45. That's the important number to keep in your head. Out of those 45, 14, only 14, less than a third, have had a full eight years. And if we were to run through that list together right now, they would all be household names with the single exception of Grover Cleveland. So I thought it was important for Americans to get a new appreciation and understanding of him. And the reason that I thought that it was important for Americans to get a new appreciation and understanding of him. And the reason that I thought that it was important, regardless of whether you agree with Grover Cleveland's ideology and the specific policy actions he took while he was president, I think particularly for a moment like now where people are cynical and somewhat downcast about American politics, not without reason, that there is inspiration to be taken from Grover Cleveland because his entire career, I think, is a rebuke to political cynicism. This is a guy who, in the course of three years, goes from being an anonymous

lawyer in Buffalo, New York, to being president of the United States, purely on the basis of the fact that in a moment when corruption is at maybe its high watermark in all of American history, he is known for integrity and a resistance to that kind of corruption, whether it comes from his own party or the other side. And I think that's pretty remarkable. And it's a legacy worth remembering. I would love to hear more about your background, too. How did you get to be a writer of presidential history? What have you been up to over the course of your adult life?

I've had a very strange and circuitous route to this book, Sharon. I got my start in this space, broadly speaking, when I was only 24 years old. I was hired as a speechwriter in George W. Bush's White House, very improbably. Usually when I tell people that they assume 24 and in the White House, you either went to an Ivy League school or your parent was a donor, neither of which were true in my case. I had an aggressively middle-class upbringing in a really anonymous and obscure part of Southern California. I'm a kid who grew up off a dirt road and rode horses instead of bikes. That was my childhood. And the serendipity that brought me to that point was I had a professor in graduate school who happened to like my writing and happened to be friends with the guy who was the chief speechwriter in the White House at that time.

And unbidden and without telling me, Sharon, he sent a sample of my writing to the chief speechwriter in the White House, and they asked me to come to work for them. And I was there through the remainder of the Bush administration and in subsequent years have primarily been a journalist. I was a newspaper columnist in California for several years. And I've also worked at a number of think tanks like the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. But my interest in politics stemmed from a childhood interest in history. And now it is all kind of circled back around to the point that I'm sitting to you today talking about a biography of Grover Cleveland. I know people are interested in this topic, so if you'll permit me one small deviation from Grover Cleveland, people always want to know, what is a think tank? What is that?

And how do you get paid to think about things? It's a very good question. And I think it stems from a confusion that most people have about where political and, more importantly, public policy ideas come from. The reality of it is, though, having worked for a president, having worked in a state legislature, having worked for a governor – I've seen this at several different levels – everything is always a rush. Everything is always a panic in a policymaker's office. is always a rush. Everything is always a panic in a policymaker's office. They rarely have the time to sit back and reflect and be deliberate and have people do research to understand how public policy issues really work. So the shorthand you hear for think tanks a lot of the time, which is a serviceable one, is that they are universities without students, which is to say that they are places where

scholars who are interested in public policy questions can go and do research. And what makes them a little bit different from the universities is there is sort of a shorter time horizon attached to that research, by which I mean the imperative is really for them to do research on things that will be important for political debates that are coming up soon. What should we do on economic policy? What should we do on energy policy? What should we do on foreign policy? And as a result, there's this kind of parallel ecosystem where a lot of politicians end up getting their ideas from. But that is kind of a rough outline of what life in a think tank looks like. Back to Grover Cleveland. How does a man go from being an unknown and three years later, the president? That seems highly improbable today.

You need to have laid the groundwork for a presidential run many times for potentially decades. Some people who win the presidency, clearly this happened. This is true of Joe Biden working in government for literally multiple decades before running for political office. And certainly there are exceptions to that. But how does a man like Grover Cleveland with his bushy mustache, how does he go from unknown to the White House? Grover Cleveland, so if you locate him in the year 1881, he's 44 years old. He's had a little bit of political experience prior to this, but pretty modest. He had been the sheriff in Erie County, New York, where Buffalo is. He lived in Buffalo about a decade prior to this, but pretty modest. He had been the sheriff in Erie County, New York,

where Buffalo is. He lived in Buffalo about a decade prior to this, in his mid-30s, a couple of years. And then he's been in private legal practice for a decade following. Grover Cleveland had a remarkable ability to attract jobs that nobody else wanted. So the whole genesis of his political career really starts with a visit to a pub in Buffalo in the fall of 1881 when he sees some of his fellow Democrats dispirited because they can't find anybody to run for mayor of Buffalo. There's a couple of good reasons for this. One is that Buffalo at the time was still a predominantly Republican town. So if you're running as a Democrat, you're going to start at a disadvantage. The other is, like a lot of city governments across the country, but this was particularly true in Buffalo, you were kind of understood to probably be an individual

of relatively low character if you even ran for one of these jobs. This is just how corrupt the civic infrastructure was at the time. But Cleveland had developed something of a reputation when he was sheriff for being incorruptible. The sheriff's office before he had taken it over was rampant with graft. And then in comes Grover Cleveland, a guy who, when they deliver the cordwood to the sheriff's office, will measure it all to make sure they're not being ripped off, whereas previous sheriffs would have not even questioned it and taken the kickbacks they would have gotten as a result. And this is really the genesis of what happens. He is a Democrat who consistently is able to attract Republican crossover voters in addition to Democrats because of this reputation for incorruptibility. It's important to remember

where we are in American history when we're talking about Grover Cleveland. Post-Civil War, Reconstruction era into the Gilded Age, Republicans are dominant. The Democrats are still trying to work off the albatross of being associated with the Civil War and with the Confederacy. And Cleveland is a northerner. Cleveland is a guy who had two brothers who served on the Union side during the Civil War. So he's at something of arm's length from that. And he's also benefited by the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, the Republican Party at this time, like most parties when they have sweeping control of everything, a rut tends to set in. I call it in the book political gout. They have it too good. And there is corruption rampant throughout their ranks for

that reason. And this is the reason that Cleveland is so appealing because there are factions of the Republican Party that have a real distaste for this and are willing to cross over for a reformer, for somebody who is resistant to corruption. So 1881, Mayor of Buffalo, 1882, Governor of New York, and by 1884, President of the United States. Even more remarkable at the time because he is, when he is sworn in, the second youngest president in American history, just slightly older than Ulysses S. Grant had been. I would love to hear more about Grover Cleveland's childhood and personal life. Did he have eight wives or 17 children? What was his life like before he dipped his toes into

politics? So he comes from a very modest background. He is very much kind of a self-made man. He is born in 1837 in Caldwell, New Jersey, which is North New Jersey, not far from Newark for us in the modern day. Back then, the infrastructure was so rickety, he would have had no hope of getting there practically. His father is a Presbyterian minister, and Grover is the fifth of nine children. They live a pretty modest existence. In today's money, the family lived on the equivalent of a little over $20,000 a year. Now, because he was a minister, there were some factors that cushioned that blow. They lived in a parsonage that was provided for by the church. But his father

is not quite an itinerant minister, but they are bouncing around a lot. He leaves New Jersey by the time he's three years old and lives in a succession of cities in upstate New York. And the thing that really changes his life, his personal life, is that at 16 years old, his father dies rather suddenly. And it is for this reason that Grover Cleveland is one of a handful of American presidents who never went to college. He didn't have the chance. He had been planning on going prior to his father's death, but his father dies, leaves his widowed mother behind. There's also a number of younger siblings that he has to provide for. So he gives up on the dream of college and goes in his late teens to New York City for a year with his brother, teaches in a school for the blind,

which he finds rather depressing, partially, I think, because he's still working out the issues around his father's death, partially because by all accounts, it seems as if the kids being taught in the school were not treated very well, were sort of warehoused there, and that the management of the school was very aggressive towards both the kids and the teaching staff. So his transition into the figure we know later in life comes after a year of teaching at this school. He decides, I've got to go West. I've got to make something of myself. I don't know what it's going to be, but I got to go somewhere else. And he decides partially, because remember, we're talking about an 18-year-old kid at this point.

He decides he's going to go to Cleveland, Ohio, partially because it has the same name that he does. It is in fact named after a distant relative of his. And halfway through the trip, he makes a stop in Buffalo where he has some family. He has an aunt and uncle there. And his uncle is a gentleman by the name of Lewis Allen, who is a very prominent man in Buffalo. Doesn't share Grover's politics. He's a Whig. But he sees potential in his nephew and says, why don't you stay here? We'll find you gainful work. We'll get you into a law firm. Because remember, at this point in history, you're not going to law school most of the time. You are reading law. You're going to work in a

firm. And his uncle does precisely this for him. Grover decides to stay in Buffalo. Grover ends up in the law in a pretty prestigious firm. And that's where he starts drawing attention. That's where he gets set on the path where we later find him in elected office. Drawing attention, by the way, mostly for the fact that he just works incredibly hard. There are all of these records of the fact that the normal office hours for Grover Cleveland are 8 a.m. to 3 a.m. That is just the way he did. I mean, he would have been medicated today, Sharon. Institutionalist. Yes. In the day, it was regarded as just purely admirable.

Wow. So he doesn't get married until he's in the White House. He gets married in 1886, the only president we've ever had married in the White House. He gets married, as a lot of people know, to a much younger woman. She's on the verge of 22 while he's in his late 40s, a woman named Frances Folsom. Now, there's a somewhat complicated story around this that most history books or most presidential histories get slightly wrong, which is that Frances Folsom was the daughter of Grover Cleveland's best friend and former law partner. That much is pretty widely known. And the way that you often hear this story is that she was then his ward, which leads people to think that he sort of raises this girl and ends up marrying her, which is not really what happened.

She does not live with him. She does not grow live with him. She does not grow up with him. In fact, her and her mother live in Minnesota for quite a while while he's living in Buffalo. And when she comes back in her later teens, she's actually engaged to somebody else. So the romantic relationship between the two of them really begins when she's in college. And one of the things that makes this so confusing for people is that there is this quote that you hear endlessly of Grover Cleveland's sister, having supposedly said that when he was a bachelor, she asked him why he hadn't bothered getting married. And he says, well, I'm just

waiting for my wife to grow up. Always implied that he had this in mind all along about Francis. I actually went back and found the document on which she had recorded that. And it's very clear when you read it, because she's providing you a chronology for when these events happened. That conversation happened prior to the Civil War, which is prior to when Frances Folsom was born, and probably prior to when Grover Cleveland had ever met her father. So his sister wrote this to connect it ironically to the fact that he married Frances, but in fact, he wasn't actually referring to her because she didn't exist at the time. And their marriage ended up, to answer your other question, producing five children,

three girls and two boys, all of which, as you can imagine, because of the age difference between them, came pretty late. Grover Cleveland had his last child in his mid-60s. This is also the reason that Grover Cleveland has living grandchildren today. And the most famous of their children was their first daughter, Ruth, mostly known for the fact that the baby Ruth Candy Bar is supposedly named after her. And tragically, Ruth ends up dying quite young in Cleveland's post-presidency. And it's really remarkable. I write about this a little bit in the book. Despite the fact that he was a minister's son, he doesn't talk a lot about religion, at least publicly. measure of religious faith, but there are a series of diary entries we have from him after his daughter dies, where he is really struggling with the idea that he cannot picture his daughter in heaven. All he can think of is his daughter in the ground. And in the book, I walk through these series of diary entries and letters that run the length of about two or three months, and you can

slowly sort of see him coming back. And You can slowly see he and Frances sort of accepting what had happened and consoling themselves with the idea that they could imagine her in heaven after a while. But for such a sort of stolid and in some ways rough man, it's this real peek inside his heart when you go through this period in his life and quite touching. Hey, Torontonians. Recycling is more than a routine. It's a vital responsibility. By recycling properly, you help conserve resources, reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, and protect the environment. Toronto's Blue Bin Recycling Program ensures the majority of the right items are recovered and transformed into new products. Recycling

right is important and impactful. Let's work together and make a difference because small actions lead to big change. For more tips on recycling, visit toronto.ca slash recycle right. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio!

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You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk about one of the things that makes Grover Cleveland's presidencies so unique is the time period between the two terms that he had in office. What led to that?

Why didn't he serve two consecutive terms in office? Well, you know, he came very close. I think one of the things that people forget about these non-consecutive terms is he actually won the popular vote all three times that he ran. In 1888, when he lost re-election, he just lost the electoral college. And then really only because of a couple states that were pretty close. In Grover Cleveland, when he ran for re-election the first time, ran on reducing the tariff, despite the fact that it was an issue that divided his party. And that was a big part of why he went

down to defeat in that reelection. He divided his own party, unified the other one. Generally not a good formula when you're running for president. But one of the things that helped restore him was that in the four years in between when Benjamin Harrison was president, tariff rates went up. The American people really felt the sting of that economically. So whereas he had looked premature on this and gotten way ahead of the public the first time he's running for reelection, no better position to be in when you're running again four years later than to have been vindicated by subsequent results. And that's a big part of why you get that restoration in the 1892 election.

What was his motivation for running again? I feel like most presidents would be like, listen, I lost game over. I didn't win. People made their voices known. Time to move on. What made him want to come back and run for a third time, hoping to get back into the White House? You know what's so interesting about that question, Sharon, is what you just described is exactly what Grover Cleveland was saying his first few years out of the White House.

This was not a guy who had a deep and burning ambition to always be climbing the political ladder. It'd be an overstatement to say he had no ambition, obviously, but this was not the controlling and consuming interest of his life. So for the first couple of years out of office, you see him writing to friends about how relieved he is to be out of Washington, to not have this burden on himself anymore. He really wants to spend time with his wife and start building a family. And I think a couple of things happen. One of them is that he starts to see his legacy, to use a word that wouldn't have really been appropriate then, but how we think about presidencies now, he starts to see his legacy being undone.

He starts to see the Harrison administration moving in the opposite direction that he did on a number of issues, including this issue with the tariffs. And the other, which you don't see voiced during this time, but you see it voiced after he leaves the presidency the second time, and I think it's fair to read it into this period, is a thing that every former president has to deal with. they get bored. They have had such immense responsibility. And while there is so much stress embedded in that, you get addicted to it. You get addicted to not just to the power, but to the constant exertion, to the constant mental exertion, to the constant use of your highest faculties. And I think it is very hard to resist the tug to get back to that and I think that was

at least part of what was animating him to pursue a second non-consecutive term what did his wife think of that was do you feel like she was like get back out there and try again buddy or was she do you feel like she was more like there are a number of first ladies who merely sort of gritted their teeth and bore their husband's political ambition. They hated their husband's political ambition. And they didn't enjoy being a first lady and they didn't enjoy having to have all the visitors and the parties and for a variety of reasons. having to have all the visitors and the parties and for a variety of reasons. Do you feel like she was part of the catalyst, the driver behind him wanting to run again? Well, that is such a good point you make. I mean, first ladies, this is really true. The White House can really be a gilded prison if you're a first lady. Absolutely. For all the reasons that we've

just described that it's attractive to the people running for president. Imagine that if you're the first lady, you're in a house that you can't really leave. Your husband's stressed out all the time, or in the future, your wife is stressed out all the time. It is really not a pleasant experience if you are just an accessory to it, at least for a lot of first ladies. Frances Cleveland, a little different. Not that she deeply enjoyed being first lady, although we should note that she was a very popular first lady, probably the most popular up until Jackie Kennedy. She's very young when she takes over. As I said, almost 22 when she becomes first lady. She's very beautiful. She's a sensation throughout the country to the point where

when a newspaper reporter in Atlanta makes up a story that she is no longer wearing bustles, the bustle market in the country collapses. That's what a fashion arbiter she is. But she was much more bullish on this than Grover. We have a quote recorded from her, which sounds like the kind of thing that somebody would have made up, but it is true, recorded by a White House staffer, that when in 1889, they are leaving the White House for Benjamin Harrison to come in, Francis Cleveland turns to one of the White House footmen and says, I want you to make sure that everything is right where we left it when we come back. And he misunderstands her, thinks that they're coming to visit at some point during the Harris

administration and asked her, well, when should I expect you? She said, we'll be back four years from today. So she had this in mind from the get-go. Grover took some persuading. And unfortunately, Cleveland did not take good care of his papers. We don't have a lot of personal correspondence. So to the extent that she was sort of working her will to get him to do this, maybe We don't have a lot of personal correspondence. So to the extent that she was sort of working her will to get him to do this, maybe we don't know. We just, we don't have

any record, but clearly she was not averse to it because she's thinking of it before they've even turned in the keys the first time. I mean, there are multiple stories about this with first ladies where they had such tremendous sway over the public, particularly women, that they were constantly being approached by publishers. Will you say that my book is good? Will you be photographed carrying my book or wearing this object or wearing my hat or my bustle or whatever it is? Because as the first lady went, so too went the rest of the women of the nation. It gets so extreme during the Cleveland administration. Her face is being put on everything.

There's no licensing agreements or anything like that. You can get a Francis Cleveland ashtray. You can get, I'm not making this up, Francis Cleveland arsenic. That Congress at one point considers legislation that would prohibit a woman's likeness from being used without authorization because there is this cottage industry throughout the country in France's Cleveland merchandise. By the way, no one cares about her husband nearly as much. We have newspaper accounts. He does a tour of the country during his first term, and a newspaper in Ohio writes there's 10,000 men in the country as qualified to be president as Grover, but there's only one person who could be first lady like Francis. That's so funny. It's a little, it's almost like the kind of merch that you see Queen Elizabeth's face on. Tea towels, you know, like a jewelry box. And we don't today have that same equivalent to the United States.

Nobody is like, let me get the Jill Biden ashtray. You know what I mean? Like that's the desire for merch is first lady merch. Maybe you'd want like a white house Christmas ornament or, you know, something along those lines, but the demand is just not there anymore. But if you think about sort of the British monarchy equivalent of Queen Elizabeth, her face being on everything, that seems very similar to what America was experiencing with Francis Cleveland. That's right. And it's kind of interesting too, Grover Cleveland hates this. He is very protective of his wife. And this is an era just early enough in American history. I mean, this drops off a cliff right afterwards where the president of

the United States can think and plausibly say, hey, I do a job. I'm not a celebrity. You don't need to know what's going on in my private life. You don't need to know about my wife and my kids. And so he actually becomes a sort of de facto commuter president. During both of his terms, they actually get housing elsewhere in Washington. And he spends part of the year at these homes, has his wife and his kids mostly in those homes, partially because they were having security issues. Remember, during this day and age, you can just walk onto the White House lawn. And Francis Cleveland going around out back with little Ruth and people come up and want to say hi to Ruth and they want to

hug her in a lot of cases. And you're only at this point, a decade or so removed from James Garfield getting shot at a train station in DC. So you can imagine the sort of creeping sense of the kind of danger that can come with that accessibility, which we now all take for granted. It was just starting to dawn on them at that time. So he sort of kept his family at a remove from that as often as he could because he found it so invasive. That's fascinating. It is true that, you know, when you look back on history and you read about how presidents and first ladies used to just have weekly open houses. People would just come on over and like, what do you want to talk about?

Well, I really want to chat about blah, blah, blah. That seems preposterous. Preposterous, yeah. Preposterous that you would just stop by the White House and expect to be admitted and have audience with the First Lady like, yeah, I chatted with Mary Todd Lincoln and she agrees with me. That seems preposterous today. I don't think we can let any discussion of Cleveland elapse without discussing his secret illness, which I have long been fascinated by. It's a really interesting story. I mean, so in 1893, this is the very start of Cleveland's second term. And it's worth knowing that the backdrop to this is that there is a major economic crisis going on as this happens. We're enduring the start of what we now call the panic

of 1893, but what the people in 1893 called the Great Depression. It was the biggest economic downturn in the country up to that point in time. Right as this is happening, Grover Cleveland discovers what at the time is described as an ulcer. It was a tumor on the roof of his mouth and is told by his doctors, if it was in my mouth, I would take it out immediately. Well, he can't take it out immediately because he's in the process of trying to navigate this economic crisis. He's about to call Congress into a special session, but he has an ace up his sleeve, at least by our modern standards. This seems like tremendous good luck, even though it wasn't that

unusual by the standards at the time. Congress is not normally in session during the summer, and it is not expected that you're going to see the president in the middle of the summer. Grover Cleveland had a home up in Cape Cod to which he would repair quite regularly to fish and hunt. And so the worry is amongst Cleveland and his staff, the president has to have a surgery, but we can't let the public know that he has to have a surgery for a couple of reasons. One is we had never up to this point had a president so much as go under anesthesia when they were in office. The other is even the hint of cancer. At this point in American history, cancer is almost never named. It is referred to usually by euphemism. And the country has a mental index for this because this is only a few years after Ulysses S. Grant has withered away from throat cancer and fallen mute and shrunk to 100 pounds before he dies.

So nobody needs an education on what the implications of this are. The reason that this is so particularly menacing for the Cleveland administration is that without going into too much detail about it, the economic crisis of the day was in large measure driven by uncertainty. Uncertainty whether the country was going to stick purely with the gold standard or bring silver in and introduce more inflation. We don't need to get into the details of that. All that's relevant to know is that Cleveland was on one side of the issue and his vice president was on the other. So if people think that there is a threat to the president's life, the policy could be 180 degrees different. So how do you handle this? Well, you have a secret surgery. Well, how on earth do you have a secret surgery for the president of the United States? Here's what they come up with, Sharon.

We're going to take the president to Manhattan. We're going to put him on a yacht owned by his friend, E.C. Benedict, who's a prominent banker and financier. And we're going to do the surgery at sea. Now, I don't know about you, but if I was having an invasive surgery in my mouth, I would prefer not to have it done below decks on a yacht and certainly not below decks on a yacht in the year 1893. But this is what they opt for. Grover Cleveland, by the way, seems unbothered by this. By the time that they get him to the yacht, the night before the surgery, which I remind you is to go up into his soft palate. What does Grover Cleveland do first thing when he gets on the boat? He lights a cigar. He's just that kind of guy. The next day, they leave New York. All the doctors have to hide

below deck so they won't be recognized when they go through the city because they're passing hospitals. And as they turn out into Long Island Sound, they have to put President Under in the gallery of this yacht. And by the way, I mean, we know how it turned out. So we have the luxury of knowing the story in total. These doctors and dentists were scared out of their minds because Grover Cleveland, as most people know, is a very large man. He's our second heaviest president. They were concerned that they put him under. He might have a stroke. One of the doctors had a patient that that had happened to previously.

They were also concerned, this turned out to be a correct concern, that they wouldn't put him under deep enough. Grover Cleveland starts to come to halfway through this operation, which is removing part of his jaw, removing several of his teeth, going up into his soft palate. You can imagine the horror of this. Luckily, they're able to get him back under. The surgery all in takes about 90 minutes and goes pretty well. But there's a couple of interesting things that happen afterwards.

One is the doctors record that they packed his mouth with gauze after this is over. And they say, when you hear him with the gauze, his speaking is sort of labored, but you can understand him. Then they record, when you take the gauze out, it sounds like the worst imaginable case of cleft palate that you can imagine. The president has lost the use of

his voice. He is unintelligible. So they deputize a dentist in New York who manages to come up with a prosthetic made out of vulcanized rubber, which sits in his mouth for the remainder of his life, gives the shape back to his face, gets his voice pretty close to normal. Nobody who didn't know about the surgery seems to know about it. His assistant said you could tell a little bit of a difference. But the biggest and most interesting consequence of this is that the story of what happened ends up leaking to the press. It ends up leaking to the press because one of the dentists who was on board, the dentist, I should say, there was only one, because one of the dentists who was on board, the dentist, I should say, there was only one, ends up, he's not allowed to leave the boat until later than he expected. So he misses a procedure he's supposed to perform in Connecticut. And he panics when he gets called on why he's late. What

does he do? He tells the entire story to the dentist he's supposed to be working with. It ends up in the press. And the only reason that nobody believes it is because by the time the story has broken, Cleveland has come back to Washington. Nothing looks different. They didn't have to remove his mustache because of the way that the procedure had gone. And also one of the stewards on board the boat said, no, the president was fine. The president walked around every day. The official line was he just had some dental work. And the last thing I'll mention on the story, just because I think it's an interesting reflection on how times have changed, when Cleveland finally arrives at his home in Massachusetts, he's obviously not seeing anybody. They can't let the press see him. But these rumors are circulating.

Did something happen or was it just the dental work? And one of his aides goes out to address the press corps, tries to tell them, look, you're just buying rumors and innuendo from his Republican opponents. There's nothing to see here. There's about a 50-50 split in the press corps as to whether they think the Cleveland administration is telling the truth or not. The reason that nothing comes out of this is because the press corps at the time operated on the principle that they all had to come to a decision collectively about how they were going to cover these stories. Essentially, it's not recorded that they explicitly put it to a vote, but it's something like that. And there was a small majority that said, well, they're probably telling the truth.

Cleveland's an honest guy. We know he's an honest guy. So with the exception of the one reporter who got the scoop, this is pretty much ignored. It ends up getting pushed off the front page by other stories shortly thereafter. And the poor reporter who got it right isn't vindicated until over 20 years later, once Grover Cleveland is dead. And one of the doctors involved comes forward and says, yeah, not only did he get the top line of it, right? He got almost all the details, right? So he ends up vindicated, but a little too late for professional purposes. Frances had to know though, right? She did. She was virtually the

only person, the medical crew that was on the boat obviously knew. And there was Cleveland Secretary of War who had been his personal assistant going back years. So they were very close. He knew. Francis was told, Francis is not there. And there's a brief passage in the book where I mentioned this, because I always think it's weird that Francis is overlooked in this story. And she is still a very young woman. She is, I think, late second, early third trimester of a pregnancy at that point. She is up at the house in Massachusetts. And given the communications and transportation constraints of the day, she is sitting up there alone with no idea what is

happening to her husband, other than knowing that he is on a boat somewhere. He may be alive. He may be dead. I can only imagine what she felt when the boat finally pulled up and he was able to come in. I just always think it's strange that people exclude that part of the story. And the first lady is in the worst possible position here of anybody short of Grover Cleveland, who's waking up halfway through a surgery, but she was in a tough position. He had a very rare and unusual form of cancer that was technically malignant, but was incapable of metastasizing. So actually, the threat to his health over the long term would have been the tumor just growing to a point where he couldn't breathe or swallow properly. But none of this was properly understood at the time. So he was much more concerned about

what it meant for his health long term. And there are a number of accounts, including a sort of understanding from him that he was never quite the same after the surgery. You can see him losing weight. You could see it sort of draining some of the energy from him. His staff says that he tends to be a little bit more irritable forever after this happens. Why did you call this book A Man of Iron? Well, it's sort of a paraphrase of, it's funny when you see the cover of it and you see this kind of firm jaw and this huge walrus mustache and some steely eyes. For whatever reason, well, I shouldn't say for whatever reason, it's quite obvious when you read about him and when you see what he looks like, everybody loved to use metal metaphors for Grover

Cleveland. H.L. Mencken at one point refers to him as a, I'm going to get this slightly wrong, but to paraphrase, I think a steel ship carrying monoliths of granite. Couldn't call it a man of steel, obviously. And since there are always references to his iron will, that's sort of where it came from. And we actually had the title before we had the cover. And when you see the photograph on the cover, it matches the title precisely. He is an imposing figure, particularly when you see these headshots. Although by all accounts, especially in his retirement, he was a tougher man to deal with when he was in office.

But he's actually something of a shy, gentle, introverted individual. He's very conscious of not having had a college education, so he's deferential towards people he feels like are smarter than he is. He can be a bulldog in his official capacity, but he's actually something of a modest, retiring guy in his private capacity. How long does it take for you to put together a project like this? Do you have a team that helps you? Do you research everything and then organize your notes and start writing? Or are you writing as you uncover new facts? Tell us about your writing and research process. It's such a good question. The way that I wrote this book is not the way that I would have set out to write a book like this. It was to some degree dictated by what I had to work with. You write a book like this and you really appreciate the modern presidential

library system where presidential papers are sort of collected under one roof and usually well indexed and kind of one-stop shopping. As I said earlier, Grover Cleveland, no such luck. He was very careless with his papers. He didn't really leave any behind-the-scenes recordings. They're not diary entries from his presidency, really, and things like that. So I was fortunate. This book was about three years in the making, and most of the work happened during the height of COVID. So I couldn't go to research libraries. And the Library of Congress in particular was very helpful in walking me through this material from a distance. And while I was writing the book, they finally digitized the entirety of their Cleveland collection. Digitized, but did not

index, which means you can't search for what's actually in there. So it is a bit of a needle in a haystack. So what I did, this is much easier with Grover Cleveland. One could not do this with Teddy Roosevelt or Abe Lincoln or George Washington. I got everything that had ever been written. There aren't that many books, certainly not good books. There is one terrific book that was written about 90 years ago that won a Pulitzer Prize that actually gives you more resources from Cleveland's contemporaries than Cleveland's own papers do. And then read through all of that, read through almost all of his papers, which I got to tell you, it was not the most pleasurable thing in the world because he is, I obviously have some affection for the man based on the

fact that I wrote the book, but he writes like a lawyer, which is not a compliment. And then you try to take that and distill it all down and think, what are the essentials? I mean, I operate on the assumption that there was nobody in the United States of America, apart from me, Troy Sinek, who is going to read more than one book on Grover Cleveland. So if you're only going to read one, what do I really need you to know? I love history like you. I'm a huge nerd for this stuff. But, and maybe this is just a function of my own shallowness, I find myself impatient sometimes with volumes of history that spend

six pages at a time telling me what the interior furnishings in the room look like, unless that's directly relevant to the story. So I took this mountain of material and then tried to shave it down with the idea of how would you write this? How would you pace it if it were a screenplay? I really didn't want people to feel like this was homework. I really didn't want people to feel like it was a burden. And I wanted to make them feel like they knew this man, like I could sort of bring him alive for them. Hopefully I've done that. And if I've failed, dear readers,

please know that I at least tried. If there was one thing that you would love all Americans to know about Grover Cleveland, what would it be? The biggest takeaway, to be slightly redundant of what I said earlier, this is not so much something I'd like them to know about Grover Cleveland. It's something I'd like for them to take from Grover Cleveland's life as a lesson. As I mentioned, there's this incorruptibility about him, which is not to say that he is blameless or flawless. He certainly isn't, and you will get that if you read the book. But there are just these moments of incredible character from him. And to give you but one

example, when he first runs for president in 1884, he is targeted in a massive sex scandal, for which he bears some culpability. I mean, these are not idle charges. And shortly thereafter, he is offered evidence of a sex scandal pertaining to his rival, James G. Blaine. He's offered to have this material sold to him, and he purchases the material, and then he lights it on fire and tells one of his staffers, we can let the other side have the monopoly on the dirt in this campaign. There are moments like that that punctuate his life. And so the thing that I would like people to take away from this, especially as I say, at a moment where I think people feel worried about American government and American politics

and feel like they can't have much faith in our institutions or the individuals that populate them. I think one should take some solace in the fact that the genius of the American system is that it tends to yield people like this in moments like that. It is really interesting when you look at the history of the presidency. It's a fun little exercise you can do sometime if you know just a little about them. You can see how everyone is almost is elected as a corrective to the last one. They have a thing that the last one didn't have. And boy, it's a wonderful system that can produce that. And I think we take it for granted sometimes.

So what I'd like people to take away from it is no matter how depressed or dire you feel about American politics at any given moment, don't assume that that moment's going to last too long because the system is really good at yielding correctives for it. I love that. And your book is called A Man of Iron, The Turbulent Life, An Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland. And where can people find you aside from in the pages of A Man of Iron? Where can they find you online? Where's your home address? No.

You can find me at Troy underscore Sinek, S-E-N-I-K on Twitter. But I'd also love for people to look at a totally different endeavor that I'm a part of at Kite and Key Media, which you have been kind enough to share with your followers, which is an institution that exists. Myself and a former colleague, both of whom were think tank executives, wanted to take the kind of stuff that happens in think tanks that we were talking about earlier and make it accessible to lay people, give you sort of easy six, seven minute explainers on the public policy issues that affect your life the most. So at chitonkeymedia or chitonkeymedia.com. We'd love to see that either one. Thank you so much for being here today. This was so interesting. And your writing is absolutely compelling.

I think people are really going to enjoy reading your book. Terrific. Thank you so much, Sharon. It's a real pleasure. I really appreciate what you're doing. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review or sharing a

link to it on your social media? All of those things help podcasters out so much. Here's Where It Gets Interesting is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson. Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. See you again soon.