Assassination Vacation (25 page)

I think Roosevelt’s soft spot for the underdog in Washington was the influence of New York City — his aristocratic upbringing here and its resultant noblesse oblige. Unlike the ruthless nouveau riches like Standard Oil’s self-made John D. Rockefeller, Roosevelt had the easygoing morals of someone who was born rich. But also, back during his days as police commissioner in Manhattan, Roosevelt used to tramp around at night in the company of photographer and reporter Jacob Riis. If you want a clear picture of the gulf between the rich and the poor of Roosevelt’s era, go to the Museum of the City of New York, where you can look at a Riis photograph of a cobbler on Ludlow Street sitting down to a Sabbath dinner in the filthy coal cellar he calls home, and then take the elevator up to the installations of rooms from Rockefeller’s house, with his stupid solid gold fireplace poker and the cartoonish safe he kept right next to his bed.

The way Riis remembered making Roosevelt’s acquaintance in the first place is a likable anecdote. After reading Riis’s 1890 book
How the Other Half Lives,
about the poverty and squalor endured by immigrants on the Lower East Side, Roosevelt sent Riis a note that simply said, “How can I help?”

“I was still ignorant of the extent to which big men of great wealth played a mischievous part in our industrial and social life,” Roosevelt later wrote in his autobiography about the effect of reading and meeting Riis. “But I was well awake to the need of making ours in good faith both an economic and an industrial as well as a political democracy.” Of course, Roosevelt published that in 1913. And he wasn’t a Republican anymore.

I
phoned my friend Matt. “Remember last summer when you asked me to go hiking in the Adirondacks and I told you that one of the reasons I moved away from Montana was so that I wouldn’t get asked to do outdoorsy stuff like that anymore?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, do you still want to go hiking in the damn Adirondacks? Have you heard of something called Mount Marcy?”

He does and he has. Marcy is the highest peak in the range. Luckily, Matt’s goal to climb every peak in the Adirondacks overlaps with my goal of McKinley assassination pilgrimage.

As President McKinley lay dying, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt wasn’t sitting in some office somewhere when the cabinet summoned him to Buffalo to take the presidential oath. Nope, he was up enjoying a “bully good tramp” at the highest point in the state of New York. And the story of how he got to Buffalo is like a lot of Roosevelt stories — swashbuckling, death-defying, and hard to believe. Even though he is the only president who was born and raised in New York City, that’s not how we think of him. Even here, in his hometown memorial at the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History, the statue of Roosevelt rides a horse. Chiseled into the front of the building are all the many words that describe him — “ranchman, scholar, explorer, scientist, conservationist, naturalist, statesman, author, historian, humanitarian, soldier, patriot,” all of which add up to the unspoken “better than you.”

Matt, an urbanite with the woods in his heart, is the most Theodore Roosevelt–like friend I have. That probably isn’t saying much, as I spend most of my free time indoors around people who talk about politics and entertainment, sprinkling conversations about action movies with insights such as “It wasn’t subversive the way
Starship Troopers
was subversive” or debating which founding father can be equated with which founding father of rock ’n’ roll — Thomas Paine = Chuck Berry, Ben Franklin = the Big Bopper, etc. (Though Bill Haley = Thomas Jefferson? As if.)

Matt lives next door to a police station around the corner from me in Chelsea. I call his apartment “the cabin,” an outpost of old-fashioned piney woodsyness nestled behind a forest of cop cars. I quizzed him once about his roughhewn interior decorating, and he wasn’t sure why he was drawn to musty quilts and things made out of logs. “Do I just like nineteenth-century America, or is it just a past I can’t have? If it were 1901 right now would I be gaga over tricornered hats and you would come into my apartment and tell me, ‘This is so colonial’?”

Recently, he bought an actual cabin, a fixer-upper in Maine. A native of the not particularly rustic Quad Cities of Illinois, Matt claims New York City brought out the backwoodsman in him. “Within six months of moving here, I wanted to buy a car and strap a canoe on top.”

Even though Matt is the sort of person who will mention his new rated-to-twenty-degrees-below-zero sleeping bag, the call of the wild is simply one of his many callings. He’s learning Spanish. He reads. He shops. On our last road trip together, I noticed that he is the sort of guy who will sing along with “Born to Be Wild” on the car radio while driving to an outlet mall from the FDR Presidential Library.

So one Friday night in November, I meet him after he gets off work and we drive toward the Adirondacks. We get as far as a hotel in Lake George. I go to bed early, resting up for the dreaded hike. At breakfast the next morning, I ask him, “What did you do last night?”

“I went to a bar. I ate a burger and drank a beer and read a book about string theory.” Just like Roosevelt on his North Dakota ranch, rustling steers by day, reading Poe after dark.

I have already reneged on the Mount Marcy climb. I looked it up and it’s a twenty-mile round-trip hike. Nearby Rooster Comb, five miles from the parking lot and back, is more my speed, though daunting nevertheless. Plus, I argue, we can’t see the top of Mount Marcy
from
the top of Mount Marcy. The smaller, shorter peak is supposed to have a great view of it, offering perspective on Roosevelt and perspective is why we’re here, right?

When McKinley was attacked, Roosevelt rushed from Lake Champlain to McKinley’s bedside in Buffalo. When the president appeared to be on the mend, McKinley’s advisors shooed Roosevelt out of town, thinking that the vice president’s removal sent a message of recovery and hope. So Roosevelt came to the Adirondacks, joining his wife and children who were already staying at a lodge called the Tahawus Club. When he got there, he was pleased to learn that his son, Theodore Jr., had just bagged his very first deer.

Roosevelt, a guide, and a few other Tahawus guests climbed Mount Marcy on September 13, 1901. It was raining. Today, it’s sunny but cold. There are patches of snow here and there up the trail, the very steep trail. There are plenty of switchbacks, and it’s beautiful, all forest and boulders and cliffs, but did I mention how steep it is? I love walking. Walking might be my favorite pastime. It’s one of the reasons I moved to the pedestrian paradise that is New York City. It’s hiking I try to avoid. To pace myself, I decide to pretend I’m walking in Manhattan, asking Matt to measure out the two and a half miles up the mountain that way. “Like, say I’m starting at Fourteenth Street, at Union Square, and I’m walking north. What street is the summit?”

“The top of Times Square? Maybe Broadway and Fifty-fourth?”

So that’s what I do to cheer myself on. At the halfway point — those Korean restaurants on Thirty-second — I know I’ll make it to the top. When Roosevelt reached the summit of Mount Marcy, he kept exclaiming, “Beautiful country! Beautiful country!” Me, I just wheeze.

“I wore the wrong gear,” Matt says. “I made the mistake of not wearing a wicking layer.” He looks around at the view, remembering why we’re here. “Teddy Roosevelt probably didn’t have a wicking layer, and I bet he wasn’t complaining.”

On Marcy, Roosevelt and his party stopped for a lunch at Lake Tear-in-the-Clouds, then thought to be the source of the Hudson River. Roosevelt happily dug in to a tin of ox tongue. (Matt’s mountain climbing reward is an organic cookie.) Roosevelt then spotted a man coming toward him. He later remembered that he “was looking forward to dinner with the interest only an appetite worked up in the woods gives you.” And how. I’m staring at one of the grandest views in the Northeast and all I can see is steak. Roosevelt continued, “When I saw the runner I instinctively knew he had bad news — the worst news in the world.” He was right. It was a telegram:

THE PRESIDENT IS CRITICALLY ILL

HIS CONDITION IS GRAVE

OXYGEN IS BEING GIVEN

ABSOLUTELY NO HOPE

Roosevelt, much to the dismay of the guy who sprinted uphill for twelve miles to deliver the telegram, sat back down and finished his lunch. After that, finally, he started the climb down from the mountaintop toward the trailhead that was the White House.

At the Tahawus Club, another bossier telegram, along with supper, was waiting for him:

THE PRESIDENT APPEARS TO BE DYING AND MEMBERS OF THE CABINET IN BUFFALO THINK YOU SHOULD LOSE NO TIME COMING

The Tahawus Club is still here. It’s very well kept, freshly painted yellow. Rocking chairs on the porch rock in the wind. When Roosevelt and his wife, Edith, were staying here, the other guests referred to their deer-slaying children as “the little Indians.” One of them, Archibald, remembered that on that 1901 trip he overheard women in the rocking chairs talking about how “Mr. McKinley had been shot in the abdomen. I remember puzzling over this word for quite a while and finally asking what it was. I was much disappointed when I found out that ‘abdomen’ was nothing but a stomach.”

It was almost midnight when Archibald Roosevelt’s father climbed into a buggy to ride down the mountain in the dark to the train station at North Creek, thirty-five miles away. Nowadays that road, 28N, is paved. It is named in his honor, the Roosevelt-Marcy Byway. Even with the asphalt, even in the daylight and in a car, it’s a tricky drive, narrow and curving, a corridor of trees.

On 28N, near Newcomb, a rock monument erected in 1908 marks the approximate spot where Roosevelt became president at 2:15
A.M.
on September 14, 1901, McKinley’s time of death. It’s kind of shaped like a hug, listing the names of David Hunter, Orrin Kellogg, and Michael Cronin, the brave local relay drivers who were kind and/or demented enough to get the new president to his train.

Around three-thirty that morning, Kellogg dropped off Roosevelt at Aiden Lair, Cronin’s hunting lodge. The place still stands, but barely. Once, it must have been inviting and cozy, its tall rock chimney spitting smoke from the fireplace. Now, it sags. It’s falling in, falling down. The windows that weren’t boarded up are broken. “Looks like we can trespass readily,” says Matt, getting out of the car. Around back, there’s a lovely little brook, but also a better view into the lodge’s ripped-up insides — glass shards poking out everywhere, insulation oozing out of the ceiling, a crusty old pair of underwear wadded up next to a rusty beer can on top of what used to be the floor.

When Roosevelt arrived, Mike Cronin knew McKinley was already dead, but he kept the news from Roosevelt, thinking the trip itself was going to be worrisome enough. “It was the darkest night I ever saw,” Cronin remembered later, adding, “Mr. Roosevelt was one of the nerviest men I ever saw and I am not easily scared myself. At one place, while we were going down a slippery hill, one of the horses stumbled. It was a ticklish bit of road and I was beginning to get somewhat uneasy and began holding the team back, but Mr. Roosevelt said, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter. Push ahead!’ ”

Driving down that road, Matt says, “I guess they must have had lanterns at the front of the buggy.”

“They had one lantern,” I say, “and Roosevelt was holding it.”

“How terrifying this must have looked at three
A.M.
,” Matt says, passing a sign that warns
ROUGH ROAD.

At dawn, Cronin’s horses Frank and Dick clickety-clomped into North Creek. Roosevelt’s secretary was waiting for him at the train station, handing him another telegram from Secretary of State John Hay. “The president died at two-fifteen this morning,” it said.

That depot, a cute wooden building built in 1875, was once the northern terminus of the Adirondack railroad. It’s now a museum in Roosevelt’s honor, his “night ride to the presidency” being the biggest thing that ever happened around here. The museum is closed when Matt and I arrive, but there’s a whole exhibit about Roosevelt outside — a kiosk of photos (Cronin with Frank and Dick, Roosevelt at various ages) and text (the telegrams about McKinley, an endorsement from Governor Pataki, a believable quote in which Roosevelt brags, “No man has had a happier life than I have had, a happier life in every way”).

“There’s something Olympian about him,” Matt says. “Or Paul Revere. He’s Paul Revere riding down Mount Olympus, climbing the mountain by day, holding the lantern on a buggy on his way to becoming president and running the United States. That is a singular definition of power.”

The September 22, 1901, edition of the
New York Herald
headlined its Roosevelt - in - the - Adirondacks article thus: “That Wild Ride Down the Mountain Side. Leading a Charge of Troopers at San Juan Less Hazardous Than Spinning Through Darkness Along the Edge of Great Precipices.”