When the Cheering Stopped

The poignant true story of an American president struck by tragedy at the height of his glory. This New York Times bestseller vividly chronicles the stunning decline in Woodrow Wilson’s fortunes after World War I and draws back the curtain on one of the strangest episodes in the history of the American presidency.   Author Gene Smith brilliantly captures the drama and excitement of Wilson’s efforts at the Paris Peace Conference to forge a lasting concord between enemies, and his remarkable coast-to-coast tour to sway national opinion in favor of the League of Nations. During this grueling jaunt across 8,000 miles in less than a month, Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke that left him an invalid and a recluse, shrouding his final years in office in shadow and mystery.   In graceful and dramatic prose, Smith portrays a White House mired in secrets, with a commander in chief kept behind closed doors, unseen by anyone except his doctor and his devoted second wife, Edith Galt Wilson, a woman of strong will with less than an elementary school education who, for all intents and purposes, led the government of the most powerful nation in the world for two years.  When the Cheering Stopped is a gripping true story of duty, courage, and deceit, and an unforgettable portrait of a visionary leader whose valiant struggle and tragic fall changed the course of world history.  

“One of the most remarkable—and frightening—stories on American politics and personalities I have ever read.” —Theodore H. White, author of The Making of the President   “Reads like a thriller . . . A hair-raising chronicle.” —Houston Chronicle   “One of the strangest periods in the history of the US Presidency . . . Dramatic and deeply moving.” —New York Herald Tribune   “A tragedy, brilliantly told.” —Life   “All the elements of a Greek tragedy.” —TheChristian Science Monitor   “Brilliant. With this book we see Wilson as much more than one of the great American presidents. He becomes real as a human being.” —Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey   “A bold, sensitive picture of one of history’s most enigmatic figures.” —Chicago American   “The most interesting history since Winston Churchill.” —Dwight MacDonald   “Remarkable . . . A pageant restoring a time long ago as if it were yesterday.” —Book-of-the-Month Club News   “A skillful, and well documented, report on a unique, terrible and confused moment in history which centers on the death agonies of a dream of world peace and the man who dedicated his life to it.” —Kirkus Reviews   “[Smith’s] book has penetrated the curtain of silence that obscured Woodrow Wilson’s last years and has produced a human being.” —Chicago Tribune  

Gene Smith (1929–2012) was an acclaimed historian and biographer and the author of When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson (1964), a poignant portrait of the president’s final months in the White House that spent fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Born in Manhattan and educated at the University of Wisconsin, Smith was drafted into the army and served in Germany in the early 1950s. He began his career at Newsweek and reported for the Newark Star-Ledger and the New York Post before leaving journalism to write full-time. His popular biographies include The Shattered Dream: Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression (1970), Lee and Grant: A Dual Biography (1984), and American Gothic: The Story of America’s Legendary Theatrical Family—Junius, Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth (1992). For many years, Smith and his wife and daughter lived in a house built by a Revolutionary War veteran in Pine Plains, New York, and raised thoroughbred horses.