The Admiral and the Ambassador

by Scott Martelle

  What Porter didn’t mention was that McKinley’s reelection meant he would stay on in Paris for a few more years. That would give him more time to try to recover the body of John Paul Jones.

  13

  An Assassination

  AFTER THE SUCCESS OF the Spanish-American War and his resounding reelection to the White House, McKinley was ready to take a victory lap around the nation.1 He planned to travel by train for six weeks with an entourage of cabinet members, through the South, up the West Coast, and then back along the northern tier of the country to Buffalo for a speech at the Pan-American Exposition of 1901, the successor to the Parisian Exposition Universelle 1900.

  The trip began on April 29, and McKinley was greeted as a national hero at every stop, with brass bands, cheering crowds, and local politicians and businesspeople anxious to shake his hand, sing his praises, and get their names mentioned next to the president’s in their local newspapers. First Lady Ida McKinley, always frail, developed a painful and swollen finger from an infection as the tour hit the desert Southwest. When they reached Los Angeles, her doctor decided to lance the infection, which was attached to a bone. After the procedure, the tour continued on to San Francisco, but Ida’s health worsened. Instead of helping cure the infection, the lancing procedure had spread it through her blood stream, and she fell gravely ill. The tour was delayed as Ida’s fever spiked and wouldn’t relent; fears rose that she might die. She fought through it, however, and began to recover. The McKinleys headed east after deciding to cut the trip short and hole up for a three-month summer’s rest at their home in Canton, Ohio. McKinley postponed the speech at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo until the first week of September.

  McKinley had an odd personality for a political figure. Inherently a quiet man, he had learned over the years to keep his own counsel and could often be hard to read. In a crowd, he came across as cold and distant; but on a personal level, McKinley was warm and curious. He delighted in meeting and talking with people, often trying to draw from them perspectives on national issues. Even after winning elections to the US Congress, the governor’s mansion in Columbus, Ohio, and now, his second term as president of the United States, McKinley still enjoyed—and insisted on—meeting with the public. It was a regular point of contention with his closest advisors and his security detail as McKinley balanced out a sense of invulnerability and of drama. He couldn’t conceive of why anyone would wish him violence, despite his role leading the United States to war against Spain, the brutal US suppression of the Philippine insurrection, the always simmering anarchists, and the reality that a single person with a broken mind could trump the best efforts of bodyguards. Yet McKinley also had a sense of fatalism. He once told a friend that “if it were not for Ida, I would prefer to go as Lincoln went.”2 And so McKinley insisted that time be set aside during his trip to Buffalo for an open reception in which he could meet as many people as could shuffle through a receiving line.

  The summer in Canton was intentionally uneventful, and Ida slowly regained her health. The couple hosted some gatherings, and McKinley kept fairly regular office hours, meeting with a steady stream of official visitors while monitoring events in Washington by wire and press reports. He chatted with old friends and neighbors and oversaw renovations to the house and grounds. But mostly he and Ida relaxed and recharged, and toward the end of August they began preparing for the trip to Buffalo and then back to Washington.

  It was a relatively short ride on the presidential train from Canton to Buffalo, some two hundred miles to the northeast. The McKinleys made the trip on September 4, the day before the president’s speech. Throngs of people waited at stations and crossings in Ohio, northeast Pennsylvania, and western New York to wave at the president, strike up bands, and, in one ill-advised instance, fire off a salute of cannons, which shattered windows in one of the train cars and rattled Ida’s already taut nerves.

  The presidential train arrived at the Exposition terminal at about 6:20 PM. A horde of people greeted the president and his entourage, jostling and pressing forward in such a rush that a protective detachment of police had to push the crowd back. One man in particular was trying to push forward against the surge, trying so hard in fact, that he raised suspicions in one of the officers. But the moment passed in a mass of confusion and cheering and shouts. The man faded into the crowd, his face remembered but his mission unexplored. History might have progressed differently if the officer whose curiosity was raised had managed to reach the man, Leon Czolgosz, a mentally disturbed anarchist from Detroit with a gun in his pocket and a plan to murder the president.

  The next day, some fifty thousand people packed the exposition grounds to hear McKinley’s speech, delivered from an elevated stage. The president talked about peace and prosperity, and about the themes of such expositions—trade and technology—and their role in a shrinking world. “Modern inventions have brought into close relation widely separated peoples and made them better acquainted,” McKinley said, right hand in his pants pocket, the left holding his speech as he projected his unamplified voice out over the crowd.

  Geographic and political divisions will continue to exist, but distances have been effaced. Swift ships and fast trains are becoming cosmopolitan. They invade fields which a few years ago were impenetrable. The world’s products are exchanged as never before and with increasing transportation facilities come increasing knowledge and larger trade…. We travel greater distances in a shorter space of time and with more ease than was ever dreamed of by the Fathers. Isolation is no longer possible or desirable. The same important news is read, though in different languages, the same day in all Christendom. The telegraph keeps us advised of what is occurring everywhere, and the press foreshadows, with more or less accuracy, the plans and purposes of the nations.

  McKinley saw the merger of the inventor and the investor as the driving force behind the advances, a marriage of purpose that propelled nations. “So accustomed are we to safe and easy communication with distant lands that its temporary interruption, even in ordinary times, results in loss and inconvenience,” McKinley said. “God and man have linked the nations together. No nation can any longer be indifferent to any other. And as we are brought more and more in touch with each other, the less occasion is there for misunderstandings, and the stronger the disposition, when we have differences, to adjust them in the court of arbitration, which is the noblest forum for the settlement of international disputes.”

  With the aim of further shrinking the world and increasing trade, McKinley repeated his earlier support for building a canal across the Central American isthmus to “unite the two oceans and give a straight line of water communication with the western coasts of Central and South America and Mexico…. Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not conflict; and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war.”

  As McKinley spoke of peace, Czolgosz, near the front of the crowd, weighed his options for violence. He was too far away for a definitive killing shot, and as he thought about how to get closer, or whether he should take the chance from where he stood, McKinley abruptly finished the speech, waved to the cheering horde, and disappeared into a crowd of bodyguards and dignitaries for a short tour of the exposition grounds, followed by lunch and that evening a fireworks display. Czolgosz again melted away into the crowd.

  The next day, McKinley took an unannounced dawn walk, and then he and Ida boarded a train for a morning trip to Niagara Falls. Czolgosz read about the president’s plans and boarded a separate train to the tourist attraction. Discovering he would not be able to get anywhere near the president as he toured the falls, Czolgosz returned to Buffalo and made his way to the exposition grounds, where McKinley was scheduled to hold his public reception at the Temple of Music display. This would be Czolgosz’s last, best chance. And he made the most of it.

  By the time McKinley’s carriage arrived a few minutes before four o’clock, there was already a long line of well-wishers wa
iting to shake the president’s hand. Czolgosz was near the head of the line. He kept his right hand in his jacket pocket, where he clutched a small handgun wrapped inside a white handkerchief. The man in front of Czolgosz, a small and intense-looking Italian, drew the attention of the security force, especially when he grasped the president’s hand and wouldn’t let go. Apparently, the man was no anarchist; he was simply enthusiastic about meeting the president.

  McKinley finally freed his hand and turned to the next person in line, Czolgosz. The president smiled as he extended his hand; Czolgosz pulled his right hand from his pocket, lunged toward the president and fired two shots into McKinley’s abdomen before the next man in line punched him in the neck and grabbed for the gun as others piled on. McKinley, bleeding badly from his chest, told his protectors to not hurt Czolgosz, probably saving the gunman’s life. He then told George Cortelyou, his secretary, “My wife. Be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her.” McKinley was then whisked away to the house at which he had been staying during the visit, where doctors struggled to save his life.

  The technological advances McKinley had so thoroughly endorsed the previous day spread word of the shooting around the world. It’s unclear from whom Porter, in Paris, first heard of the assassination attempt, but it most likely came from news reports and then by telegram from Hay in Washington. It was a particularly painful moment for Hay, who was still trying to regain his emotional equilibrium from his own tragedy that June, when his twenty-four-year-old son, Del Hay, died after falling thirty feet from a window in New Haven, Connecticut. The younger Hay, a popular figure in the close personal circles of the McKinley White House, had been about to join the president’s staff as a secretary. “Every word of praise and affection which we hear of our dead boy but gives a keener edge to our grief,” Hay wrote to a friend in the days after his son’s death. “I must face the facts. My boy is gone, and the whole face of the world is changed in a moment…. Have you heard how it happened? The night was frightfully hot and close. He sat on the windowsill to get cool before turning in, and fell asleep.”3

  As word of the assassination attempt ricocheted through the Paris diplomatic corps and top levels of the French government, people anxious for news descended on the embassy, the consulate, and Porter’s home. Porter and Consul General Gowdy, who both counted McKinley as a personal friend, were stunned, as well as frustrated by the slow release of news from Buffalo and Washington. Porter’s wife, Sophie, was staying at the Townsend Hotel Kulm in Saint Moritz, and Porter fired off short telegrams to her as he received updates. “First ball not dangerous. Second passed through stomach thought not to have touched intestines. Severe but not necessarily fatal. President conscious and tranquil. Porter.”4 Crowds also gathered outside the Parisian news offices, gambling that the first and best details would come over their wires.

  For the French, the shooting of the American president was eerily reminiscent of the murder of French president Carnot seven years earlier, when Italian anarchist Caserio had leaped onto the presidential carriage as it left a speech in Lyons and plunged a knife deep into the president’s stomach, lacerating his liver. Carnot had died a few hours later. Caserio, in what had become the mark of the anarchist assassins, was cavalier about the killing. At his subsequent trial, the prosecutor told the court that Caserio wanted to kill the pope and the king of Italy. Caserio laughed and said he wouldn’t have killed them at the same time because the two men never traveled together.5

  Carnot’s murder was part of a spree of killings and attacks through the 1880s and ’90s during which Parisian high society lived in fear of annihilation. Scores of people were killed or maimed by terror bombs tossed into cafes, police stations, and salons, or detonated on the street, each a blow by anarchists against the state. Rarely were the motives personal, outside of vengeance attacks committed after convicted anarchist murderers were guillotined. Rather, the attacks were blows against the capitalist system, and they shook France—and the rest of Europe—to the core. By the turn of the century, the world had hoped that the spasm had passed. But in Buffalo, an anarchist had struck again. And the leaders of Europe ratcheted up their own security, not knowing who might be next.

  McKinley, though critically wounded, seemed to be on the mend. Surgeons removed one of Czolgosz’s two bullets, but, unable to find the other, speculated that it had lodged relatively harmlessly in the president’s back muscles. Still, the nation and the world tracked McKinley’s condition through terse regular reports, including the indelicate detail that McKinley had developed a fever of 102 degrees measured with a rectal thermometer. The doctors exuded caution, saying that there was still a high risk of complications from the wounds but that they felt he would recover.

  The worst fears of worried friends and supporters began dissipating as McKinley slowly seemed to overcome the wounds. Six days after the shooting, White House officials started thinking about how to move the healing president back to Washington; McKinley—still sequestered by his doctors—began complaining of boredom. The next day, McKinley had recovered sufficiently to eat, a step that was greeted as a harbinger of a full recovery. So when he fell ill later that night and quickly spiraled downward, it came as a shock, as did his death on the morning of September 14. An autopsy found that McKinley’s internal tissues along the paths of the bullets had turned gangrenous; he had been doomed from the moment the bullets had torn into him.

  In Paris, Porter was having health problems of his own. The details are murky—it was described delicately in the press as “a local problem” that required painful but not dangerous surgery. Porter had become distraught at word of McKinley’s relapse, and when the news flashed around the world that McKinley had died, Porter’s doctor kept it from him for several hours to let him rest. As a parade of officials and other dignitaries—including French president Loubet—began arriving at the ambassador’s residence, he had to be told.

  Porter, along with Gowdy, was devastated. Gowdy had already cabled the rest of the American consulates in France of the death and then shuttered the Paris consulate while issuing a statement to the press: “President McKinley was my true friend. Words cannot express my sorrow at his untimely death. He honored the manhood of the country by his nearly faultless life. His official record is stainless, and the marked integrity and honor of President McKinley will, I believe, equal that of Lincoln in the world’s appreciation. His administration stands out as our first introduction to the world as a force to be considered for all future.”

  Hay, still reeling from his son’s death, was staggered. Yet he found time to respond to personal telegrams of sympathy, including one from “Lady Jeune,” the British journalist and socialite Susan Mary Elizabeth Stewart-Mackenzie. Hay wrote within hours of McKinley’s death, “a day when my personal grief is overwhelmed in a public sorrow,” that McKinley had been fond of his own late son and was ready to take him under his wing when the young man died. “The president was one of the sweetest and gentlest natures I have ever known among public men. I can hear his voice and see his face as he said all the kind and consoling things a good heart could suggest. And now he too is gone and left the world far poorer by his absence. I wonder how much grief we can endure. It seems to me that I am full to the brim.”

  Then, in a note of poignancy, Hay, the one-time secretary to Lincoln and a close friend of James Garfield, traced the threads of public tragedy through his own life. “What a strange and tragic fate it has been of mine to stand by the bier of three of my dearest friends, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, three of the gentlest of men, all risen to the head of state, and all done to death by assassins.” Despite his close association with McKinley, Hay would skip the wake in Buffalo. Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1886, with the death of the president, the vice president assumed the presidency; if the vice president died, the job would go to the secretary of state—Hay. Vice president Roosevelt was on his way to Buffalo, where he would take the oath of office, and “as I am the next heir to the Preside
ncy, he did not want too many eggs in the same Pullman car.”6

  Porter didn’t have as close a relationship to McKinley as did Hay, but his grief was profound nonetheless. And he was, as it turned out, alone in Paris. His daughter Elsie was in the middle of an extended trip to New York City; Sophie was still in Saint Moritz. Even Porter’s friend General Winslow was out of town, vacationing in Italy. The ambassador sent them all the same terse telegram: “President died two fifteen this morning.” Then Porter made himself the face of official mourning in Paris, helping arrange a series of public memorials as an international act of catharsis, and hosted at least one wake at his residence.

  He also kept his focus on his job. On September 24, Porter wrote to the new occupant of the White House. After congratulating Roosevelt on his ascension, Porter added what can only be read as a note of fealty. “You know that no one has watched your onward career for more than fifteen years with greater pride and satisfaction than I, and I want to say to you now, man-fashion, what I am sure you already feel, that any energies which I possess will be devoted at all times loyally and faithfully to your support.”

  If Porter was trying to ensure Roosevelt didn’t ask for his resignation—a possibility with a change in administration—he need not have feared. Roosevelt viewed his immediate role as extending the goals and policies of the McKinley administration, and he didn’t plan significant personnel changes (though he quickly began putting his own stamp on public issues). So Porter stayed on in Paris, overcoming his shock and grief and recovering his own health—until death struck again, this time within his own family.

  As the McKinleys were taking their train tour of the United States, Porter’s wife, Sophie, was once again away from Paris. The months of receptions and crowds and entertaining she had endured during the Exposition Universelle 1900 had left her exhausted, and she failed to regain her health during the winter. With her chronic heart issues, she tired easily and seemed vulnerable to whatever cold or flu happened to make the rounds of Paris. Still, as the ambassador’s wife, she insisted on maintaining as much of a social schedule as she could, with Elsie filling in at her father’s elbow as needed. But the encounters drained her. The Porters also traveled often through Europe—they attended the wedding of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands in March 1901—and spent many evenings at dinners and receptions. Porter, for his part, was solicitous of his wife’s frailties and spent a significant amount of money for treatments, weeks of recuperative seclusion, and other potential cures.