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Mr. H. PAUL JEFFERS (Author, "An Honest President: The Life and
Presidencies of Grover Cleveland): Because that's what he was. When
he was running for president in 1884, Joseph Pulitzer wrote an
editorial endorsing him, and he gave four reasons for wanting
Cleveland to be erected--elected. He said, `One, he's an honest man;
two, he's an honest man; three, he's an honest man; four, he's an
honest man.'

LAMB: Where was he born?

Mr. JEFFERS: He was born in Caldwell, New Jersey.

LAMB: Why there?

Mr. JEFFERS: His father was a minister--Presbyterian minister
assigned there, and I think Grover spent about four years there, and
then his father, Richard Cleveland, was transferred to New York state,
and that's how Grover wound up as a New York politician.

LAMB: What were the jobs that he had in his life--all the political
jobs?

Mr. JEFFERS: His first political job was as a--an alderman. He ran
for alderman, and then he was appointed assistant district attorney in
Erie County, served for two years; ran for district attorney and lost;
and then some years later, by default because no one else would run
for the office, he ran for mayor of Buffalo and was elected, a
Democrat elected in a Republican city. And he made such as impact
there as--his--his nickname was `The Veto Mayor' because he vetoed any
bill that he thought was a blatant raid on the public treasury. And
in 1884--I'm so--sorry, 1882, the Democrats in New York were looking
for someone to run for governor, and they said, `Why not this
governor--this mayor of Buffalo?' And he got nominated and won in a
landslide.

LAMB: How'd he get to be sheriff up there in--near Erie?

Mr. JEFFERS: He--he...

LAMB: Or down near Buffalo.

Mr. JEFFERS: He ran for the office and was elected and served two
years, I think. And he's the only president of the United States who
personally hanged two men--two men--two murderers. But he wa--as
sheriff, he was so concerned that somebody else on the sheriff's staff
would do--ha--was assigned to hang people. He asked his mother
whether or not it was morally right for him to let someone else do
this terrible task, and she said, `Yeah, it's fine,' but he just
couldn't bring himself to do it, so he hanged the two guys himself.

LAMB: What impact did that have on his political career?

Mr. JEFFERS: None. None. You know, it was not unusual for--in the
19th century, for people to be hanged. And I think the fact that he
did it himself probably enhanced his--his reputation. However,
hangings, of course, were public, and huge crowds came to see these
hangings, but Grover had canvassed barricades set up so the public
couldn't see it. They were there and they knew what happened, but
they weren't able to watch the two guys drop.

LAMB: Why a book on Grover Cleveland at this time?

Mr. JEFFERS: Well, first, there hadn't been one full--real full
biography of him since Allan Nevins did one in the 1930s.

LAMB: By the way, how old is he in this picture?

Mr. JEFFERS: He's, I think, in his--he's in his 20s, perhaps 20.
Considerably slimmer there than he was when he was president of the
United States. He liked to eat, and he very, very quickly put on
weight.

So I had done two books on Theodore Roosevelt, and an editor at Avon
Books, Steven Power, happened to read them and liked them, and he
happened to be a Grover Cleveland fan and got in touch with my agent,
asked whether or not I'd be interested in doing Grover Cleveland, and
I said, `Why not?' Because I'd k--kept running into Cleveland when I
was doing my Theodore Roosevelt books anyway, and, of course, they're
the same time period. So that's how the--how the book came about.

LAMB: What were the terms that he served? What were the dates? And,
also, tell us a little bit about what was going on in that time?

Mr. JEFFERS: OK. He was--he was elected--in 1884, he was then the
governor of New York; had been governor for less than a year--for
about a year and a half. So he was elected first time in 1884, was
defeated for re-election by Benjamin Harrison in 1888. It was the
Electoral College thing. Grover had the--had the popular vote, and
Harrison had the electoral vote. So he's the only non--president to
serve non-consecutive terms. And he--he came back and ran again
in--in 1892 and got elected again.

LAMB: Is there anything new in this book?

Mr. JEFFERS: I don't think so. I think the difference between this
and other books is that I--I wanted to put the emphasis on Grover
Cleveland, the man, and less on the--on the politics and--and the
analysis of policy and so forth that had been the subject of--of--of a
couple of books that came out in the 1950s and '60s. But I wanted to
find out, as I'm sure you--you learned when you were in school--so did
I--there--there were certain things you knew about Grover Cleveland:
He was fat; he was the 22nd and 24th president of the United States;
he got married in the White House; he had a daughter named baby Ruth,
he had a child born in the White House and that was about it.

And it had been so, so long since anybody'd done him, I--I just--I
just fell in love with the guy as I--as I started getting into this
because it turns out--I mean, if you look at his pictures, I mean,
he's just this huge man, and he's got this walrus mustache. He's
ve--looks--he looks very stern and off-putting. But he was quite a
warm and even funny guy when--when you got to know him. Quite a wry
sense of humor.

LAMB: Here's a photograph of him in 1884. What was he doing then?

Mr. JEFFERS: 188--that's when he--he was governor of New York, and
that's when he ran for president of the United States as a Democrat.

LAMB: If you were around him, what kind of a person would he have
been?

Mr. JEFFERS: Well, if you were around him--it depends when you were
around him. If you were with him in Buffalo, when he was a young man
and a--an attorney, prior to him becoming mayor, and even when he was
mayor, you would have spent a lot of nights in saloons and in German
beer halls. You would have eaten a lot of sausage and sauerkraut, and
you would have played cards throughout most of the night, and there
would have been a lot of bawdy jokes, and--and there would have been
hunting and fishing expeditions in the Buffalo area.

When he became mayor, there was less of that because he was--he was
busy, and he spent long nights working as mayor. So he w--he wasn't
out carousing quite as much. When he got to be governor of New York,
he ha--suddenly had a whole new cadre of friends. The politicians he
met in Albany were a lot different than the ones he met in Buffalo.
In Buffalo, you worried about water treatment and whether the
sidewalks were broken and--and that sort of thing. In Albany,
suddenly you're talking about taxes and--and the--the place of New
York state as the primary state in the--in the Union. So there was a
lot less carousing.

He was not a--a big social guy. He went to ve--for instance, in
Buffalo, went to very, very few dances, or cotillions as they called
them. And he wrote a letter to his brother, when--when he become
ele--he became elected governor, worrying about the requirements that
were going to be imposed upon him for socializing, and he did as
little of that as possible. And then that--of course, that became
even more exacerbated be--when he became president of the United
States, with a lot of formal dining for ambassadors and ministers and
so forth. And he was a bachelor; there was no first lady. That's him
when he be--first became president of the United States in 18--he took
office in 1885.

LAMB: What year did he get married?

Mr. JEFFERS: 1886.

LAMB: So first term in the White House.

Mr. JEFFERS: Yes. Yes.

LAMB: How old was he?

Mr. JEFFERS: He would have been--he was born in 1837, so he would
have been--What?--40...

LAMB: Forty-nine?

Mr. JEFFERS: Forty-nine, yeah.

LAMB: Who did he marry?

Mr. JEFFERS: Oh, that's a story. He married Frances Folsom. Her
nickname was Frank. Frances Folsom was born to Grover's friend and
law partner, Oscar Folsom, in Buffalo in 1864, so Grover was
considerably older than her. Oscar Folsom was killed in a--thrown
from a--from a wagon and killed. Grover became the executor of his
estate and the ward to Frances Folsom: bought her her first baby doll
carriage; let--let her help write out some of the th--the papers that
he was working on when he was in his political off--political offices
and, basically, raised her.

And everybody thought when he--when he finally came to Washington, as
president of the United States, that ultimately he would marry Emma
Folsom, Oscar's widow. And--and Grover said to his sister one day,
`Why does everyone keep trying to--trying to f--marry me off to old
women? Why don't they think that I might be interested in marrying
the daughter?' And, in fact, that's what he did.

LAMB: Here's a picture of her in 1887.

Mr. JEFFERS: Right.

LAMB: How old was she when she...

Mr. JEFFERS: She was 20 when--tw--20, 21 when--when they married.
She had just gotten out of college.

LAMB: Do you have any sense of how it happened?

Mr. JEFFERS: He had im--proposed to her in a letter the year before
that. She was in--visiting friends in Scranton, and he wrote a letter
proposing--proposing marriage. But very early on, when--when--when he
was still in Buffalo and people were asking him, `Well, when are you
going to get married?' his usual answer was, `I don't think I'll get
married at all.' But somebody asked him one day, `Grover, when are you
going to get married?' And Frances was in the room, and he looked at
her and he said, `Well, I--maybe I'm waiting just for my bride to grow
up.'

So I think he was--you know, he fell in love with her at some point
and--and stayed in love with her, and they got married. And they had
a very, very successful marriage, had five children, and she turned
out to be a--really, a dazzling first lady, although he didn't want
her--he didn't like the idea--idea of her being called first lady of
the nation. He just wanted her to be Mrs. Cleveland. But she took
Washington by storm, pretty much the way Jacqueline Kennedy did in the
1960s.

LAMB: Did you go back and look at any of the newspapers in that era?

Mr. JEFFERS: Quite a lot, yeah, yeah.

LAMB: What--what'd you see?

Mr. JEFFERS: Well, I'm an old journalist, and I love--I love going
into the old newspapers and--and--and not--not just for the material
I'm--that I'm writing about, but--but the sidebars and the other
stories. And newspapers, I think, are a magnificent window into the
past.

LAMB: Well, what did they make of him marrying a 21-year-old?

Mr. JEFFERS: Everyone, of course, was surprised. Some weren't.
Some thought that it was in the cards. But whatever they may have
thought of it, she just charmed everybody--just charmed everyone.
There were a lot of rumors that went around that he was--he was a
brute to women and that--mostly circulated by his political
enemies--and that he beat her regularly and so forth. But she wrote
letters to people excoriating people who--who spread those stories.
He was very--very tender and--and loving towards her. In fact, when
they were--when they were married, he changed her marriage vow and
took out the word `obey' and put in `honor.' So all this stuff about
Cleveland having been not very nice to women, I think, was just--just
wasn't true. But he certainly loved her.

LAMB: Did they live anywhere else outside the White House?

Mr. JEFFERS: Yes. He--he was very concerned about the publicity she
was getting. He was furious whenever her picture would appear in a
newspaper. So he bought a property northeast--far--far north in
Washington in what is now Cleveland Circle, I guess it's called,
in--in Washington, up near the Washington Cathedral. They bought
a--an old--a house and had it renovated and--and turned it into a farm
called Oak View and had a red roof, and the newspapermen called it Red
Top. And that's where they spent--whenever they could get out of the
White House, that's where they went.

But in--and then--then later, he--he was invited to a--visit a friend
in Buzzard--Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. Cleveland was a great
fisherman, and there's great fishing up there. He fell in love with
that, and he bought a--bought some land to build a house, and that
became basically his--his summer White House in--mostly in the second
term. But they spent as little time in the White House as possible.

LAMB: Wh...

Mr. JEFFERS: The White House then, you know, was not like it is
today. I mean, Cleveland--Cleveland's office was on the second floor,
which is where the living quarters were. And when he decided to
marry, he took one of the rooms that had belonged to his steward and
had it made into a sitting room for Frances so that she would be--she
would have something to do during the daytime. But once they got Oak
View, they spent a lot of time there because--largely, because he
wanted to get away from the press, which he hated.

LAMB: You have a chapter called Ma, Ma, where's my Pa.

Mr. JEFFERS: Right.

LAMB: What's that about?

Mr. JEFFERS: That's the famous campaign of 1884 when Gro--governor
was--Grover ran for president. A political enemy of his in Buffalo,
who happened to be a minister, Reverend Ball, wrote a--a piece for one
of the Buffalo newspapers revealing the fact--and it was a fact--that
10 years earlier, in 1874, a woman named Maria Halpin gave birth to a
son, whom she named Oscar Folsom Cleveland, and she claimed that
Grover Cleveland was the father.

LAMB: Why'd she put Folsom in the middle name?

Mr. JEFFERS: Well, that's very interesting because Oscar Folsom was
Grover's best friend. Now, Maria Halpin was a widow, had come
from--to Buffalo from New Jersey, and to put it delicately, she was a
very friendly lady, and she knew a lot of the gentlemen of Buffalo,
including Grover, who was a bachelor, of course; Oscar Folsom, who was
married, and a number of other of Cleveland's friends. There is--was
a lot of speculation that, in fact, the child was Oscar Folsom's child
and that Grover, being a bachelor, and Oscar Folsom, being his great
friend and married, basically, stepped up to the plate and said, `The
child is mine.' The other story is that Maria Halpin really wanted to
marry Grover and used the child as a--hoped to use the child as a--as
a way of coer--coercing him into marrying her.

So, at any rate, all that happened in 1974, and--and nothing was said
about it, or the issue was never raised and--any--anytime when
Gro--when Grover was mayor of Buffalo or when he was governor of New
York. But when he ran for president, the story broke, and it was a
big scandal. And the question was whether or not it would keep him
from being elected president of the United States. And when his--his
political advisers came to him and said, `What--what--what's this all
about? What's going on here?' he said, `Well, yes, it's true. And
whatever you do, tell the truth.' So there was no attempt at cover-up,
no evading it. He said, `Yes, I was the father of the child. But in
all these 10 years, I've been paying for its upkeep.'

So some Cleveland supporters went to Buffalo, sort of an investigating
committee, self-appointed, to look into this story and--and--and to
prove certain aspects of--of the allegations were not true, namely
that Grover had promised to marry her and then reneged on it. They
dug all that--all that information up, and they got the Reverend Ball,
who first broke this story, to retract almost all of it. So, in the
end, while it caused quite a sensation, it really had no effect on
Grover being elected president of the United States.

LAMB: Did he ever really admit having s--fathered the child?

Mr. JEFFERS: Yes, he did. He--he said--now a--another friend of
his, who was an editor of a newspaper in Buffalo, broached the idea
that, actually, Grover claimed parentage in order to save the
reputation of Oscar Folsom. Grover rejected that out of hand. But
there's--you--you can look at it even--you can look at two ways:
either wa--either he was the father, or he--he--he accepted the
re--the responsibility in order to save the reputation of his dead
friend of whose--whose daughter he was the ward.

LAMB: What ever happened to Oscar Folsom Cleveland?

Mr. JEFFERS: He was, for a period of time, put in various
orphanages, and he was ultimately adopted by another family, changed
his name and went on to live his own life. And Maria Halpin just sort
of vanished into the myths of history.

LAMB: You often, in your book, call him Grover by name--first name.

Mr. JEFFERS: Yeah, I do. All through, as a matter of fact. Matter
of fact, my--the original title--the title that I wanted for this book
was, "Grover, the Good," which was the nickname applied to him when he
was governor of New York. But the original editor, Steve Power, liked
"An Honest President," and more importantly, the--the salesmen, the
sales staff, at the--the publisher said, `Well, we think we can
probably have m--have more luck selling the book with "An Honest
President" than "Grover, the Good,"' which they thought maybe sounded
a little too--too flip or something like that.

But another--a re--one of the reasons I wanted--I--I called him
Grover, not Cleveland, throughout is I wanted to bring him to life and
to personalize him, and--and I don't think you can do that by--by
calling somebody throughout by their last name. And I--I thought I
got to know him so well that he was just sort of Grover to me. Now
what most people don't know is that Grover was his middle name.
Most--all growing up, until he was in his 20s, he was known as Stephen
Cleveland, Steve. His nickname was Big Steve, and all his Buffalo
friends called him that. But, for some reason, which I wasn't able to
find out, maybe because he was getting more serious in terms of his
political life, he decided he wanted to be called Grover, and that's
what it was thereafter.

LAMB: He ran...

Mr. JEFFERS: He also--he also had a beard prior to that, which he
cut off.

LAMB: He ran three times.

Mr. JEFFERS: Three times for president...

LAMB: Did he...

Mr. JEFFERS: ...in '84, '88 and '92.

LAMB: Did he win the plurality ever in those...

Mr. JEFFERS: Basically, he won all three elections.

LAMB: He did?

Mr. JEFFERS: Yeah, in the p--in the popular vote. He lost to
Harrison because he lost the state of New York, his own state, which
threw it, in the Electoral College, to Harrison.

LAMB: How could he lose his own state?

Mr. JEFFERS: Well, he was never a--a party machine man and, in fact,
had been greatly opposed throughout his career when he ran for
governor and as governor by Tammany Hall, the New York p--City
political machine. He was never friends with them. They never liked
him, and they wanted him defeated. And a--another reason why he lost
New York in--in--when he was running for re-election had to do
with--with positions he'd taken as president on--on the gold standard
and particularly on--on t--the tariff questions, which were important
to--to New York, and they voted against him.

LAMB: Could...

Mr. JEFFERS: He lost narrowly, but he lost.

LAMB: Could he be a Republican today?

Mr. JEFFERS: He would v--he loved the Democratic Party, and he
considered himself a Democrat, and I don't know whether he could
ever--he could ever give up that label. But what he stood for, as
president of the United States, is--is 180 degrees from what we think
of the Democratic Party for today. I mean, particularly social
welfare programs and so forth.

In his first term, he was--he was asked to sign a bill called the
Texas seed bill. There'd been a drought in Texas, and a lot of the
farmers down there got wiped out, and Congress was--enacted what we
today would call a bail-out, legislation to--to buy seed for them so
they could get back in business. Grover vetoed it. He said, `The
people support the government. The government does not support the
people.' And he vetoed it also because he said it was not the
responsibility of the federal government to aid individuals when those
individuals had, basically, nothing to do with the--the welfare or
future of the United States government.' So he was not a welfare man,
so it would him very hard today, I think, to be a Democrat and maybe
even a Republican, in some instances. He might be a Lib--Libertarian.
I don't know.

LAMB: You say that he did not accept blacks as equal to whites.

Mr. JEFFERS: No, but very few people in the 18--white people in the
1890s did.

LAMB: How did you find out that he didn't accept them? What...

Mr. JEFFERS: Oh, it's--it's in his--it's in his own letters and in
his--it's in--in--they're--you know, they're written public record.
He--he was against slavery. He--well, he wasn't--he wasn't--he was
just a child, really, when the Civil War occurred, but he thought that
once blacks were emancipated and given citizenship, that act in itself
gave them all that the federal government was entitled to give to
them, namely citizenship, and how they got on in their lives was up to
them. But he looked around and he--and from his own experience, he
viewed blacks as lazy and shiftless and not motivated and
un--unambitious and--and was very un--unwilling to admit that blacks
could ever find equal footing with whites because, A, blacks were
incapable of it, and, B, whites didn't want it.

He had the same view on Chinese. There was--there was a bill on
Chinese immigration, and a lot of Chinese had come to this country,
particularly in the West, to build railroads. And Grover thought
that--and--and he was certainly woefully wrong on--not--on the black
issue as--and woefully wr--wrong on the Chinese. He said he didn't
see at any--any time when--when Chi--the Chinese could ever basically
assimilate into American society.

I live in New York City, where there's a Chinese restaurant on--on
every corner and--and Chinatown and Chinatown in San Francisco, and,
of course, they're--they're fully integrated into American society.
But he believed whites would never accept them.

LAMB: What book...

Mr. JEFFERS: But he was a man of his time. I mean, most white men
in the 1890s felt that way.

LAMB: What book is this for you?

Mr. JEFFERS: This is my 42nd book.

LAMB: How long have you been writing books?

Mr. JEFFERS: Since--well, I've been writing them--I've written a
lot--many more than were published, but I've always--always wanted to
be a writer and a journalist. So throughout my life, I was--there was
always a book of some kind that I was--that I was working on. My
agent, Jake Elwell, says I have to keep doing this until I get it
right.

LAMB: What was the first book that you ever wrote, published?

Mr. JEFFERS: First one published was for--for young adults in 1966.
It was called "Gallant Men," and it was stories from American history.
And the introductions were written by--by Senator Everett Dirksen, and
that happened because the year before that, I wrote and produced a
record album that Senator Dirksen made, which you and some of your
viewers may remember, called "Gallant Men."

LAMB: I remember it well.

Mr. JEFFERS: Everett Dirksen with an orchestra behind him and a
chorus, and it won a Grammy for best spoken-word record. And if you
pardon the pun, the book was a spinoff from the record. And that
led--then led to my second book, which was called "Gallant Women,"
which was stories about--way ahead of the women's movement, by the
way--of important and significant women in American history. And
Margaret Chase Smith wrote the introductions to that.

LAMB: Where'd you get the idea for "Gallant Men" and doing the
Everett Dirksen record?

Mr. JEFFERS: Well, you remem--you remember the--the great--well, he
was one of the--the last of the great orators and that great
mellifluous voice he had. He was--they called him `the--the wizard of
ooze.' He had this great voice, and a--and this was at the time of the
Vietnam turmoil, and--and patriotism was sort of out.

And I was working at ABC News at the time, and it seemed to me that
Everett Dirksen doing something patriotic on a record might be a good
idea. And I was working, at the time, with Ron Cochran, who you may
remember, who was an early anchorman and CB--CBS reporter, who was
then at ABC. And also in the same shop was Charlie Osgood, Charles
Osgood. Charles is a musician and a composer; most people don't know
that, but he writes song. And he had been doing some free-lance work
for the government, and he had a little money in the bank. And I
spoke to Ron. I said, `You know, I think it'd be great if--if Dirksen
made a record.' And--and Ron Cochran said, `Well, I know him. I'll
write--I'll write him a letter.'

He wrote a letter, and Dirksen responded affirmatively. And I came
down to Washington and met Dirksen. We shook hands. I went back to
New York. And here were Ron and I, we have Everett Dirksen under
contract, and no money, no recording company, nothing, no script.
Charlie said, `Let's go to lunch,' and we had a lunch. And he had
written with a collaborator of his, John Kacovis, a song called
"Gallant Men." And we put that in the album, and that little single of
"Gallant Men" with Dirksen with the band behind him and all got to be
number 13 on the top 40 records in 1966. So that's--that's how it
happened.

LAMB: How many albums did you sell?

Mr. JEFFERS: About a quarter of a million. It was unbelievable. We
said--Capital Records did it, and we said, `Don't bother advertising
this record because it'll sell itself.' And they said, `Oh, yeah.
Sure.' Well, when it came out--it was released just after Thanksgiving
in 1966--no one was in the Capitol. Lyndon Johnson was down on the
ranch. Ev called a news conference to introduce his record. Everyone
in the Washington media came; Roger Mudd in person. It was mentioned
five times in Time magazine, b--above the fold in The New York Times
Sun--Sunday News Review. Publicity was unbelievable. He was on "The
Tonight Show." He was on every talk show. E--he was on "What's My
Line?" Unbelievable amount of publicity, and it just sold like you
wouldn't believe. And Ev got the usual artist's royalty, 5 1/2
percent.

LAMB: What else on this list? And I know you've got things like
"Santa Claus."

Mr. JEFFERS: That's a book that's coming out in--in--in the fall,
written in association with the A&E "Biography" program. And
it's--it's written, again, for young adults, and it's the--the story
of how Santa Claus got to be Santa Claus, starting with St. Nicholas.

LAMB: "Corpus Christi."

Mr. JEFFERS: "Corpus Corpus" is a mystery.

LAMB: Oh, I'm sorry. I thought it said Christi.

Mr. JEFFERS: Yeah. It's a mystery.

LAMB: So...

Mr. JEFFERS: I also write mystery novels.

LAMB: ...how many of these 42 or 43 books are mysteries--I mean, are
novels?

Mr. JEFFERS: I think about 14 or 15.

LAMB: Which book has sold the most?

Mr. JEFFERS: The book that has sold the most is o--is one called
"The Good Cigar: The Art of Cigar Smoking." It came out just--it's
all about cigars: the history of them, how to smoke them, rating--I
smoke cigars every now and then--ratings and so forth, Cigar Smokers
Hall of Fame. And it came out at the very peak of the cigar revival
and went into five printings. There was a paperback of it. It just
took off like a--like--I could--I couldn't believe. Still out there
somewhere, although some of the material's out of date because there
are a whole bunch of new cigar brands that have been introduced.

LAMB: So have you made a living by just writing books?

Mr. JEFFERS: I have since 1988. Prior to that time, I was--I was in
broadcast journalism and writing books on the side. But in the past
12 years, I've pretty well managed, but one of the reasons is that I
just don't write one book a year. I spread my--you know, I spread
myself around. Fortunately, I'm able to work in various--various
genres. I've--can do history and--and biography, as this book attests
and the Roosevelt books; mystery novels.

And, basically, if someone--if I come up with or somebody comes up
with a good story and I'm interested in it, I do it. And having been
a broadcaster, as I'm sure you know, one thing in broadcasting:
You're always up against a deadline. You yearn--learn how to
assimilate information quickly and write fast, and for some reason, I
have both those capabilities.

LAMB: Where have you spent your broadcasting career?

Mr. JEFFERS: I started in a small station in Pennsylvania, which is
where I come from. I was a disc jockey back in the early 1950s. Then
I worked in Boston in radio and television, Channel 5 up there, and
came to New York. And in New York, I was with--initially with ABC,
then went to WYNS, the all-news station after the Dirksen record.
Then I went--I--I--I went to teach for a year in Syracuse and worked
at a television station there producing the news and came back to New
York and spent time with NBC and CBS. I'm the only guy who was ever
news director of both of New York's all-news radio stations; quit one
and got fired from the other, in reverse order.

LAMB: You dedicate your book to Stanley Gordon.

Mr. JEFFERS: Yes.

LAMB: Who is he?

Mr. JEFFERS: Stanley's the father of a friend of mine. He's a
gentleman of the old school, and he's a portrait painter and lives in
upstate New York. And he's a big fan of mine and a brilliant portrait
painter. He's done, I think, three portraits of President Bush, one
of which hangs in the--the Yale club in New York. He's just a great
old gentleman, veteran of the Second World War and so forth. And--and
since Grover's from upstate and a New Yorker, it seemed right. So I
dedicated it to Stan Gordon.

LAMB: In the two terms that he had as president, the 22nd and the
24th president, what was the--you know, there's the panic of 1893.

Mr. JEFFERS: '93.

LAMB: What was...

Mr. JEFFERS: His first term was, really, peace and prosperity in
the--the 1880s, the Gilded Age. Things were--things were fine.

LAMB: Who controlled the Congress?

Mr. JEFFERS: He wa--as a--Co--Congress, most of the time when he was
president, was either totally controlled or one house was controlled
by Republicans. I think there was--there was one brief period where
he had--he was fortunate enough to have Democrats in control of both
houses.

LAMB: He was the first Democratic president...

Mr. JEFFERS: Since Buchanan. First--first one since before the
Civil War, 24 years.

LAMB: ...since 1860.

Mr. JEFFERS: Yeah. Yeah.

LAMB: This was 1884.

Mr. JEFFERS: 1884. And even then, it was not sure that a Democrat
could be elected because the country, basically, blamed the Civil War
on the Democrats, on Buchanan and the policies that led up--that led
up to it. And so he got elected in--in 1884, and the first term was
pretty good. No problems. Second term, shortly after he took office
in 1893, the stock market crashed, took a nosedive, the panic of 1893,
and that led to a--what they call--called the Cleveland depression.
And the second term was--was bad. Part of the--a lot of the blame was
placed on him because of his position on maintaining the gold standard
and on reducing tariffs.

LAMB: What does it mean to maintain the gold standard?

Mr. JEFFERS: The Congress, in--in this period, had enacted laws that
required the federal government to buy and coin all the silver mined
in the United States and that the silver could then be redeemed for
gold. And there was another law that required the--the Treasury
Department--this is going to sound really crazy--to
maintain--considering the billion, trillion dollar budgets we have
today--to maintain $100 million in gold as the--the underpinning of
the American economy.

LAMB: We're not on the gold standard today.

Mr. JEFFERS: No. I think we went off--I'm not clear when we went
off it, but in this century. But it was the Big Deal in the 1880s and
'90s whether or not to have strictly gold or silver. So there were
the gold standard people, and there were people in the silver rights.
The problem was if you had silver, you could turn it in for gold, and
a lot of people started doing that, particularly from overseas. And
there was an outflow of gold, and the--the amount of gold in the US
Treasury slipped below $100 million. And at the same time, a major
manufacturer of rope, twines, the National Cordage Company in
Philadelphia, went bankrupt, and that caused a panic on Wall Street,
and the bottom dropped out of the economy in 1893.

LAMB: You say he was an honest president, but he did something in his
second term that he never owned up to, the cancer operation.

Mr. JEFFERS: Oh, right.

LAMB: I mean, w--how do you--how do you--how can you be honest
and--and then do this in secret and never tell anybody?

Mr. JEFFERS: Well, that's--that's a good question. The reason he
didn't want it made public was that the cancer was detected and the
operation performed at the very time that the panic of 1893 was going
and the bottom was dropping out of the economy.

LAMB: This is a picture here of him on the left and...

Mr. JEFFERS: Him on the left, his wife in the middle and--and a
friend of his, Commodore--I can't remember his name...

LAMB: Going out on the yacht Oneida.

Mr. JEFFERS: ...who owned a yacht--the yacht Oneida. What happened
was Grover woke up one morning, and he had a--felt a sore spot on the
roof of his mouth; thought maybe it was a bad tooth or something like
that. And it persisted, and finally a doctor looked at it and said,
`It's cancerous. If I were you, I'd have it out right away.' Well,
the country's in a state of panic. No one in the White House or
whatever you called it then, the President's House, the Executive
Mansion--didn't want to put on top of ec--an economic panic the fact
that the president had--had cancer.

So they arranged for an operation aboard the yacht Oneida as it sailed
from New York City, the East River. Operation was actually performed
on the East River. He was on his way to Buzzards Bay, presumably, for
his summer vacation. The operation was performed, the cancer was
removed. Portion of his jaw, a rubber prosthesis was put in. And
except for the fact that, shortly after that, he lost a little weight
and he looked a little wan every now and then, no one knew what was
going on. And the fact that he'd had this cancer operation was not
revealed for another 24 years. And--and, finally, it was finally
rev--revealed after he died by one of the doctors, I think, who
was--who was involved in it.

LAMB: I've never understood, though, how could you have this cancer
the size of--What did you say?--of a quarter or something like that
removed...

Mr. JEFFERS: Yeah.

LAMB: ...and how many teeth?

Mr. JEFFERS: Two or three, I think. Well, it was--it was--it wasn't
noticeable from the outside. It was in the roof of the mouth, the
palate. And there were no visible outward signs of it. The--the--he
boarded the yacht Oneida on--and spent the night on the yacht. The
next morning--I mean, people could see him from Pier A, sitting out
there on the boat, having his breakfast, smoking his cigar. Cigar's
the last thing you want to think of...

LAMB: Still smoking with the cancer in his mouth?

Mr. JEFFERS: Yeah, mm-hmm. And he con--continued to smoke after
that, so far as I know. And the boat took off, and at one point the
doctor said to the captain, `Captain, if you hit a rock, hit it hard
and take us all to the bottom.' But it came off; took about a half an
hour. They gave him--they tried nitrous oxide first--wouldn't put him
asleep; gave him ether. And when they got to Buzzards Bay, he walked
off the boat. He walked to his house.

LAMB: But they had to do it--they didn't--they didn't get it the
first time.

Mr. JEFFERS: They--a--a few days after, they--they took a look at
it, and they mov--removed a little more of the material from the top
of his mouth, but it never recurred.

LAMB: And they kept that quiet the whole time.

Mr. JEFFERS: Kept it quiet, yup.

LAMB: And didn't he have to speak right after that at a session of
Congress?

Mr. JEFFERS: No, he--well, not--not immediately. He didn't make
that many speeches, unless he was campaigning or something like that.
But, no, no one noticed.

LAMB: One of the interesting things you point out is that he did not
have a text; that is, inaugural speech.

Mr. JEFFERS: Astounding. He had this ability to memorize his
speeches. He never gave an inau--inaugural speech as governor or
president where he read from either a script or notes. Totally
memorized and flawlessly from the--from the--the--from the text, from
the script. And some of them were long speeches; one of them, I
think, runs like five printed pages in a book. Totally from memory.

LAMB: And all--and all from memory.

Mr. JEFFERS: Mm-hmm. Part of that's because he wrote them
him--wrote them himself.

LAMB: One of the things I also noticed you did in the book, and you
did it a lot, is you would quote directly in the text of your copy
other historians.

Mr. JEFFERS: Other biographers, right.

LAMB: Now was that a conscious decision?

Mr. JEFFERS: Yeah. Yeah.

LAMB: And, I mean, I wrote down Allan Nevins, who you spoke about
earlier, Professor Robert Mc--McElroy, Richard Welch, George Parker.

Mr. JEFFERS: Rexford Tugwell.

LAMB: OK, Rexford Guy Tugwell, Horace Samuel Merrill. I don't know
that I've ever seen it quite like that. What t--explain that...

Mr. JEFFERS: Here's my--here's my thinking on that. If you're
writing a biography of somebody, you're writing someone's life. The
life you're writing about, if--if--other people have written about
him, have written biographies, those biographies became part of that
life. And what other historians or biographers had to say about this
guy that I'm writing about I think is important and significant and
should be included in the book, what their assessments of him were.
And in a couple of instances--Allan Nevins, for instance. I mean, he
said some things far more eloquently than I ever could, so why should
I try to paraphrase him? Why not quote the guy? And that's what I
did.

I--I think it's what--how someone was viewed and--and how an historian
or a biographer has analyzed something that I'm writing about in my
book, I think, is relevant. And the reader ought to know. How many
people who--who want to know about Grover Cleveland are going to have
to--are going to go out and dig up Allen Nevins' book? It's very,
very hard to find. It's in the New York Public Library, but in the
reserved section, which means I couldn't take it out. I visioned
myself Xeroxing the 700-page book. But I found it on the Internet.
Now I have my own copy of it.

LAMB: Is--who's this fellow, George Parker?

Mr. JEFFERS: George Parker was a--a guy who just sort of attached
himself to Cleveland in the period between the two terms and became
sort of set up and ran the--the Clinton polit--the Cleveland political
machine in 1892 and eventually became, for want of a better word--he
may be the first one--a press secretary.

LAMB: But you say--you compared him to Edmund Morris.

Mr. JEFFERS: Yeah, in--in--in that Parker, when--when he had this
role of--of assisting Cleveland in the campaign of '92, had an office
in the White House and worked out of the White House just across the
room from Cleveland and--and had this up-close, personal experience
with him, which--and then, of course, he wrote a biography about him,
and--but nobody--no bio--biographer, I think, until Morris, had that
close of an exposure to a sitting, acting president.

LAMB: I don't know what the exact figure is, but between...

Mr. JEFFERS: Thank God he did because some of the--some of the
things that Park revealed were useful and illuminating, I thought.

LAMB: Starting to say that there's somewhere between two million and
three million people who work for the federal government today. You
say that when he came to Washington, there were 126,000.

Mr. JEFFERS: Yeah. And he had--he had to appoint like--something
like 100,000 of them.

LAMB: Well, the figure I have in--from your book was 16,000.

Mr. JEFFERS: Six--OK, right. Sorry. Sixteen thousand.

LAMB: And the reason I mentioned that is that today, I think, they
always say the president only has 2,000 or 3,000 real appointments
once he becomes president out of two--two million.

Mr. JEFFERS: Oh, yeah. Well, a lot--a lot of it has to do with some
of the things that--that Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt were
involved in, namely civil service reform, getting rid of the patronage
system and making government jobs professional rather than political.

LAMB: What was the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and Grover
Cleveland?

Mr. JEFFERS: Their relationship began when Grover became governor of
New York and Theodore, TR, was then a member of the Assembly. Grover,
a Democrat; TR, a Republican. And they formed an alliance on a--on a
bill called the f--the--the Five Cent Fare bill, which was a bill
pending in the New York Legislature, to force the transit companies in
New York City to reduce their fare from 10 cents to 5 cents. TR was
all for it because, you know, he--he regarded the--the guys that
ran--like Jay Gould, the people that ran the transit companies as
thieves and so forth. And he just wanted to stick it to them.

Grover read the--read the bill and decided that if--if it became law,
it was a violation of the US Constitution, and the fact--in fact, that
it was no business of the state of New York to get involved in--in
private contracts. So he vetoed it. And that just stunned everybody,
including Roosevelt, who rethought his own position and said, `You
know, the governor's right about this. I was acting out of spite and
not from, really, the best interests of government.' So TR threw his
weight behind upholding Cleveland's veto, and Roosevelt delivered
enough votes for the veto to be upheld.

Cleveland im--almost immediately called TR in for a meeting to talk
about other things that might be of interest, particularly civil
service reform, and they formed this amazing alliance. The prologue
of the book, as a matter of fact, is called The Big One and the Dude.
The Big One was the nickname for Grover Cleveland, and The Dude was
the nickname applied to a young Theodore Roosevelt when he landed in
Albany.

LAMB: When--when Grover Cleveland landed in Washington, first time
he'd ever been here?

Mr. JEFFERS: Yeah, he'd never been here.

LAMB: Elected president of the United States, never been in this
state.

Mr. JEFFERS: Never been here. Long--longest train ride he ever
took, and he'd only been to New York--well, he'd been to New York City
when he was a young man. He worked for a year with his brother at
a--an institution for--for the blind. But he was not a well-traveled
man.

LAMB: What was his relationship to his vice presidents?

Mr. JEFFERS: First one was Thoma--Thomas Hendricks, who died in
office soon after--less--in--in the first year.

LAMB: 1885.

Mr. JEFFERS: Right. So in his first term, he didn't have a vice
president, and then--when he--he ran for re-election, he--his vice
president was Allen Thurmond. Since they lost, he never became vice
president. And the second time was Adlai Stevenson.

LAMB: Was it his idea?

Mr. JEFFERS: No. Stevenson was--the vice president was chosen by
the--by the convention. President p--the president then did not pick
his running mate; the convention did. And, in fact, Stevenson was,
like, the polar opposite on almost every policy that Cleveland was
for, but Cleveland gave his OK. So Adlai Stevenson became vice
president. And he was--What?--the grandfather of--or the
great-grandfather, I forget which, of the Adlai Stevenson that ran
against Eisenhower twice.

LAMB: Now...

Mr. JEFFERS: But the vice president was then--you know, had no
input, no power, no influence.

LAMB: Did he campaign?

Mr. JEFFERS: No. The tradition then was pretty much that
presidential candidates stayed home. They might make a speech now and
then, but--and grant interviews, but most of the campaigning was done
by surrogates, and Grover made very few campaign speeches. He made
some, but there was no su--no whistle-stopping or anything like that.
I--that came in later.

LAMB: In 19--when 1896 rolled around, why didn't he run again?

Mr. JEFFERS: In '96?

LAMB: 1896.

Mr. JEFFERS: Oh, he--he--he was burnt out. He was basically fed up
with being president. He thought he was the most unpopular man in the
country because of the Cleveland depression. And he thought, `Two
terms is it for a president.'

LAMB: Where is this photo from?

Mr. JEFFERS: That's Cleveland's family. I think that was taken at
their home in Princeton, New Jersey, after he left office, after his
second term.

LAMB: What'd he do in Princeton?

Mr. JEFFERS: At first, he just retired, and then he was made a ma--a
trustee of Princeton University and was quite popular.

LAMB: So when he's out and he's at Princeton, he's how old?

Mr. JEFFERS: He would have been in his mid-60s...

LAMB: And his wife?

Mr. JEFFERS: Thirty-seven. She was 20 or 25 years younger than him.
She lived--outlived--outlived him a long time, married again.

LAMB: What's the story on his daughter, baby Ruth?

Mr. JEFFERS: Baby Ruth was born between the two terms, born in New
York City, and very popular; candy bar named after her, the Baby Ruth
candy bar. But when she was 12 years old and when Cleveland was
retired, she came down with diphtheria and died.

LAMB: What impact did that have?

Mr. JEFFERS: He was devastated. Some of his letters are very, very
touching. He--saying he--he--he writes about trying very hard to
envision Ruth in the arms of her savior in heaven, and all he could
think of is--of her is her body in the ground. He ultimately--he
ultimately recovered from it, but--and he didn't live that much beyond
her death. He died in 1908.

LAMB: What about the other kids? They make any marks?

Mr. JEFFERS: No, not really. No. E--Esther's claim to fame is that
she's the first child born in the White House.

LAMB: And when did he die, and what were the circumstances? Where
was he? Where is he buried?

Mr. JEFFERS: He died in 198--he was--he was retired, living in
Princeton, New Jersey. He'd been, I think, in Atlantic City
on--whether he was speaking there on business, I don't remember, but
he was ill. And he'd had--he had heart troubles, and he finally died
of gastrointestinal problems and kidney disease and a series of heart
attacks.

LAMB: What did his wife, Frances, go on to do, and how long did she
live?

Mr. JEFFERS: She lived quite a long time. I don't remember the year
she died, but it was well into the--into the 20th century.

LAMB: Did she remarry?

Mr. JEFFERS: She ma--remarried, right.

LAMB: And when he was still alive, in retirement, what--what did
people in the country think of him? How popular was he?

Mr. JEFFERS: He thought he was the most reviled and hated president
in American history. People kept asking him to write his memoirs, his
autobiography, and he would say, `Who would--who would read it? No
one cares,' until came the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St.
Louis, the St. Louis World's Fair. You know, `Meet me in St.
Louis.' He was invited to attend, and he went. And Theodore Roosevelt
was president at the time, and Grover thought he would get a
smattering of applause due to the--to an ex-president of the United
States, more for the office than for him.

When he was introduced, there was this unbelievable ovation. I mean,
it just dwarfed what Roosevelt got and sort of told him that he wasn't
the unpopular man he thought he was.

LAMB: So, again, what did he stand for, in your opinion?

Mr. JEFFERS: His political phrase, the one that sticks to him,
although it was writ--put together for him by his journalist, `Public
service is a public trust.' He believed that a--an executive, whether
it was governor, president of the United States, was exactly that, an
executive officer. And his job was to see that the organization was
run efficiently and that the stockholders' money, namely the
taxpayers, was not squandered or wasted. And he also believed, as--as
he said, `The people support the government. The government does not
support the people.'

LAMB: Was there a surplus in those days?

Mr. JEFFERS: There was, as a matter of fact. He--this is going to
sound funny in view of the surpluses they're talking about today, but
I think it was something like $94 million surplus. And
Governor--Grover immediately wanted taxes cut, namely the tariffs, so
that it--so that that surplus would--would diminish, in--in effect, be
given back to the people. He w--he wanted it returned to the
taxpayers, in some form or other, because he was afraid that if it
stayed there, Congress--this is going to sound familiar--would
squander it.

Well, he--he lost the election, and Harrison came in. And, in fact,
Congress squandered it. Se--Congress--the next Congress got the
nickname `the billion-dollar Congress' because of their rush to spend
the surplus.

LAMB: Did the fact that he had bought his way out of the Civil War
impact any of his political...

Mr. JEFFERS: The issue was raised in--in the campaign of 1884. What
happened was he was subject to conscription when--when--when the
conscription law was passed in 1863. His name, in fact, was--was
pulled on the very first day to--to be called up for service. But he
had two brothers serving in the Civil War, and he was directly
responsible and was financially supporting his mother and two younger
sisters. So he took advantage of an aspect of the law that allowed
you to--to pay a bounty of three hu--up to three hund--of $300 for
someone to go into the Army instead of you. He--he found a guy who
did it for 150 bucks, and so he didn't serve.

But it was perfectly legal. There was nothing wrong with it. A lot
of people did it. And he had a legitimate reason; he was supporting
his mother and two sisters. It was raised in the campaign of 1884,
but with--with very little effect because people understood that
that's--that's what happened. And, you know, the Civil War had been
20 years ago.

LAMB: There anything you didn't like about him?

Mr. JEFFERS: Well, his racism, I think, was not--not very appetizing
in view--I mean, in retrospect, 20/20 vision and hindsight and--and so
forth. That's probably the only thing. I found him a very likable
guy. I would have--I'm not a fisherman or a hunter, but I think it
would have been fun to be up--up in the Adirondacks with him fishing
and hunting and so forth.

LAMB: As you know, there's the home in Caldwell, New Jersey. Little
else, though.

Mr. JEFFERS: Yeah, that's right.

LAMB: Why?

Mr. JEFFERS: He's tended to be largely forgotten, overlooked,
underappreciated president. Basically, `Oh, yeah, that's the guy that
had the two terms with another president in between them,' and that's
basically it. Not a lot. So I--that's why I think this book was long
overdue.

LAMB: What did it mean to you that Douglas Brinkley and James
McGregor Burns endorsed your book?

Mr. JEFFERS: Oh, wow. When--when--when my editor sent me those
quotes, I just couldn't believe it. I mean, th--I just--astonished.

LAMB: James McGregor Burns, `A well-written and timely book.' Douglas
Brinkley, a--`What a pleasure it was to read "An Honest President," a
biography brimming with lively anecdotes.'

Mr. JEFFERS: Right. Mr. Brinkley particularly liked--in--in my
section on notes at the end, I--I refer to the fact that I don't use
footnotes, and I said, `The reason I don't do that is--is'--and I
quote Theodore Roosevelt, who complimented someone on not using
footnotes because TR thought footnotes interfered with the flow of the
narrator. Mr. Brinkley thought so much of that he has now put that
motto on the wall of his office.

LAMB: This is the cover of the book, "An Honest President." H. Paul
Jeffers is the author. What does the H stand for?

Mr. JEFFERS: Harry, but I've never been called that.

LAMB: We call you Paul?

Mr. JEFFERS: Paul.

LAMB: Thank you for joining us.

Mr. JEFFERS: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

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An Honest President: The Life & Presidencies of Grover Cleveland