When Stanford President Ray Lyman Wilbur first heard that Ohioan newspaper publisher Warren Harding was to be the Republican nominee for president of the United States in 1920, he told friends he had a bad feeling about it. “He is not a well enough man to live through four years of the punishment that a president must take,” Wilbur observed that summer. “Just to look at him you can see that he has cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure!”
Sure enough, just three years later, President Harding fell gravely ill while touring the Pacific Northwest and Alaska with his wife, Florence, and several cabinet members, including Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. At the time, Wilbur was vacationing in the High Sierra. “I was awakened in the night by the proprietor of the Summit Hotel, who brought two telegrams [from the Hoovers] asking me to come with the best internist from the Stanford Hospital to the Palace Hotel in San Francisco,” Wilbur recalled.
President Harding turned out to be “a very sick man,” with an enlarged heart and rapid, shallow breathing. “The most striking fact about the illness,” Wilbur recalled, “was the almost total exhaustion.” Working closely with Harding’s attending physicians, Wilbur prescribed caffeine and digitalis to stabilize the president’s heart rhythm, and ordered complete bed rest. For a few days, Harding seemed to be on the mend. Then suddenly, on the evening of August 2, 1923, while Wilbur was preparing to dine at the hotel with the Hoovers, he was summoned back to the president’s room.
“Mrs. Harding had been reading to the President from a journal [when] a short quiver suddenly went through the frame of the President and without a groan he died instantly,” Wilbur wrote soon after the event. “It took nearly an hour before I could finally convince Mrs. Harding that the President was dead.”
Failing to secure permission for an autopsy, Wilbur concluded that the death was most likely the result of a stroke. It was his job to call the undertaker, prepare the death bulletin for the hovering press and care for Mrs. Harding until she got out of San Francisco safely. She later thanked the doctor for his kindness by sending him a black silk purse of her husband’s. Inside it was an old dollar bill. Harding had kept it for taxi fare.
