Fatal (20 page)

•   •   •

The President’s three-car Special arrived in Buffalo at precisely 5:00
P.M.
on Tuesday, September 3. No sooner had it pulled into the Terrace Railroad Station overlooking Lake Erie than Cortelyou’s worst fears about Anarchist violence appeared to be confirmed. As the locomotive clanked to a halt, the station was rocked by a thunderous explosion. Smoke billowed—the train shook as if torpedoed—passengers were hurled to the floor—glass flew through the cars as windows were blown out by the force of the blast.

Among the crowd of spectators who had turned out to welcome the President confusion reigned. An outraged cry went up: “Anarchists! Anarchists! They’ve wrecked the train!” Spotting a short, swarthy man standing near the tracks, the inflamed crowd advanced on him, convinced he was the culprit. Only the timely intervention of a well-dressed bystander, who had observed the incident from a nearby carriage, saved the fellow from injury—or worse. Leaping from his vehicle, the man interposed himself between the mob and their scapegoat and, raising his hands, shouted: “There’s nothing wrong, gentlemen! This man had nothing to do with the blast! It was caused by the cannons! Dynamite would have blown off the wheels of the car!”

The name of this Samaritan has gone unrecorded by history, but he was, in fact, correct. The incident was the result not of Anarchistic terrorism, but of official incompetence—specifically, of the carelessness of a
Coast Guard captain named Leonard Wisser, in charge of providing the President with a twenty-one-gun salute. In his zeal to make this greeting as spectacular as possible, Wisser had laid his artillery dangerously close to the tracks, and it was the detonation of one of the cannons that had rocked the cars carrying McKinley and his retinue.

Eventually, calm was restored. The First Lady—whose nerves were easily unstrung—required the immediate attention of her traveling physician. Otherwise, no serious damage was done, and the incident was quickly forgotten.

Only in hindsight did it assume a sinister aspect—an omen of the disaster to come.

•   •   •

McKinley was slated to spend two days in Buffalo. Wednesday, September 5—President’s Day at the Exposition—went exactly as planned. At noon, McKinley delivered an eloquent speech to an enthusiastic crowd of more than 50,000 listeners, crammed into the Esplanade under a sweltering sun. Afterward, he spent a full afternoon seeing the grounds, touring the buildings and exhibits, attending receptions, and greeting assorted dignitaries and well-wishers. In the evening—after a brief rest at the mansion of his host—he and Ida returned to the Exposition to enjoy a concert by John Philip Sousa and watch a dazzling display of fireworks, whose highlights included a line of twenty-two pyrotechnic battleships, a fiery representation of Niagara Falls, and a blazing portrait of McKinley himself, accompanied by the legend: “Welcome President McKinley, Chief of Our Nation and Our Empire.”

Thursday was scheduled to be McKinley’s “restful day.” It began with a morning of sightseeing. Accompanied
by Ida and a party of distinguished guests, he traveled on a special train of parlor cars to Niagara Falls, where he walked along the gorge, hiked halfway across the suspension bridge, toured the powerhouse (“the marvel of the Electrical Age,” as he proclaimed it), and enjoyed a hearty lunch in the ballroom of the International Hotel. After capping off the meal with a cigar on the veranda, he reboarded the train with his wife and entourage and returned to Buffalo for his final appearance at the Exposition—the public reception that George Cortelyou had tried so hard to talk him out of.

•   •   •

The Temple of Music—whose pseudo-Byzantine design and garish color scheme had drawn the sneers of critics, even while delighting countless fairgoers—had been chosen as the site of the reception. From the moment the fairgrounds opened that morning, thousands of spectators had swarmed to the building, many standing on line for hours beneath a blazing sun. Finally, at precisely 4:00
P.M.,
the door was thrown open and the crowd began to make an orderly, single-file procession down the aisle toward the dais, where McKinley waited to shake their hands.

In accordance with Cortelyou’s instructions, extra precautions had been taken to ensure the President’s safety. In addition to the three Secret Service men who routinely watched over him, a squad of Exposition policemen had been stationed at the entrance and a contingent of Buffalo detectives posted in the aisle. Ten enlisted artillerymen and a corporal, all in full-dress uniform, had also been called in, with orders to prevent any suspicious-looking persons from approaching McKinley. Altogether, more than eighty guards were there to keep an eye on the crowd.

In spite of these heightened security measures, however, one cardinal rule for protecting the President was flagrantly disregarded. No visitor was supposed to get close to the Chief Executive unless both hands were plainly visible and completely empty. In those pre-air-conditioned days, however, the crammed reception hall was sweltering—at least ninety degrees. Sweat poured from every brow, and so many handkerchiefs were in evidence that the guards simply paid no attention to them.

At least, that was the only explanation ever given for what happened next. At 4:07
P.M.
—just a few minutes after the reception began—a short, slender, mild-looking young man reached the front of the line. Like so many other other people, he was clutching a big white handkerchief. Or so it appeared. In reality, the hankie was wrapped around his right hand, concealing a short-barreled .32-caliber revolver. As McKinley reached out to greet him, the young man—a self-professed Anarchist named Leon Czolgosz—lurched forward and fired twice into the President’s body.

A moment of stunned silence followed the shots. Then pandemonium erupted. While the President staggered back a few steps, Czolgosz was knocked to the floor by a bystander, then pounced on by the soldiers and guards, who began to beat him with rifle butts and billy clubs. “Go easy on him boys,” gasped McKinley, now seated in a chair, his face drained of color, a spreading red stain on his shirt-front.

While Czolgosz was hauled to his feet and dragged to an inner office, the Temple was cleared. A few minutes later, an ambulance clanged up to the entrance and the desperately wounded President was carried
out on a litter, loaded into the vehicle, and driven to the Exposition hospital.

•   •   •

Anyone looking into the history of the Toppan affair is bound to be struck by the shockingly primitive state of American medicine a century ago—a time when a dose of formaldehyde was the officially recommended treatment for the common cold, when drugstore shelves were stocked with “reinvigorating tonics” consisting largely of alcohol and opium, and when an entire middle-class family could be annihilated in the span of a few weeks under the very nose of their unsuspecting family physician. No one, no matter how eminent or powerful, was immune from the rampant medical incompetence of the age—as the case of the unfortunate William McKinley was about to prove.

Housed in a small, gray building a quarter-mile from the Temple of Music, the Exposition hospital was little more than an emergency first-aid station. Exactly eighteen minutes after the shooting, McKinley—fully conscious, though in severe shock—was carried into the rudimentary operating room and lain on the table.

As the nurses began to undress him, one of the bullets—which had glanced off his breastbone, causing only a scratch—fell from his underclothing. Even at a glance, however, it was clear that the other wound was far more serious, perhaps even fatal. It had torn through McKinley’s abdomen, approximately five inches below his left nipple.

The first and most urgent order of business was to round up the best physicians available. Dr. Roswell Park—the Exposition’s eminent medical director and a man with long experience in the treatment of gunshot
wounds—was the obvious choice to take charge. But Park was in Niagara Falls, operating on a lymphoma patient. Arrangements were quickly made to rush him back to Buffalo at the earliest possible moment. In the meantime, the President’s life was put into the hands of another prominent Buffalo physician, Dr. Matthew Mann.

A short, gray-bearded fifty-six-year-old, Mann had a worldwide reputation. He had trained in the United States and Europe, served on the staff of the Yale Medical School, and authored a standard textbook. His specialty, however, wasn’t abdominal surgery. It was gynecology. Nevertheless, he was deemed the most qualified surgeon available at that moment of extreme crisis.

Though the city of Buffalo had recently opened a new General Hospital with a well-equipped operating amphitheater, Mann, in consultation with the other doctors who had gathered at the scene, chose to operate without delay—the first of several highly questionable decisions he would later be accused of making. At 5:20
P.M.,
the life-and-death operation on the Chief Executive of the United States began under the least favorable conditions imaginable. Mann, who had arrived without his surgical case, had to work with borrowed instruments. No one wore a cap or a gauze mask. Though the fairgrounds blazed each evening with the brilliance of millions of incandescent bulbs, there were no electric lights in the operating room. As the daylight waned, the doctors were reduced to using a mirror to reflect the rays of the setting sun onto the incision in McKinley’s abdominal wall.

Exploring the President’s wound, Mann discovered that the bullet had gone straight through the stomach,
puncturing both the front and rear walls. He couldn’t find the bullet itself, though. An X-ray machine was on display at the fair, but Mann declined to use it. He also chose not to drain the wound. The two holes in the stomach were sutured, the abdominal cavity was flushed with saline solution, and McKinley was stitched back up with the missing bullet still inside him. At 7:30
P.M.
—two hours after the operation began—the groaning, corpse-pale President was taken from the hospital and transported back to the mansion of his Buffalo host.

If the operation revealed the deplorable state of American medicine in 1901, its aftermath was equally grim. Over the course of the next week, the public was reassured by a steady stream of rosy communiqués from Buffalo. On Friday, September 6, the doctors reported that McKinley was “rallying satisfactorily and resting comfortably.” On Saturday, a bulletin described his condition as “quite encouraging.” On Sunday, one of his physicians, Dr. Herman Mynter, described the President as “first rate.” The official word on Monday was that his “condition [was] becoming more and more satisfactory.” By Tuesday, newspapers throughout the country were proclaiming that the President was “on the high road to recovery.”

Not everyone was quite so optimistic, however. Concerned about the bullet that remained lost somewhere inside McKinley, his ever-faithful secretary, George Cortelyou, urged the doctors to search for it. At Cortelyou’s request, Thomas Edison himself shipped his most sophisticated X-ray machine to Buffalo, along with a trained operator. But the doctors refused to reexamine the wound.

Their official prognoses grew more cheerful by the
day. On Wednesday, September 11, Dr. Charles McBurney, a prominent New York surgeon, paid lavish tribute to his colleague, Matthew Mann, telling reporters that “the judgment of Dr. Mann in operating as he did within an hour of the shooting in all probability saved the life of the President.”

But the President’s life had not been saved. Once again, Cortelyou—who had tried so hard to keep McKinley from attending the reception in the first place—saw his worst fears come true. At 5:00
P.M.
on Friday the 13th, his venerated leader suffered a heart attack.

Nine hours later—his stomach, pancreas, and one kidney poisoned by the gangrene that had spread along the path of the unfound bullet—William McKinley was dead.

They say that I do not like men, that I am a sour old maid and man hater. But it isn’t so. I like them and I like to nurse them.

—F
ROM THE CONFESSION OF
J
ANE
T
OPPAN

I
N COMPARISON TO OUR OWN TIME—WHEN YEARS OF
legal maneuvering typically elapse between the commission of a capital crime and the ultimate punishment of its perpetrator—justice moved swiftly in the old days. On Tuesday, October 29, 1901—less than two months after he murdered the President of the United States—Leon Czolgosz was put to death at the state prison in Auburn, New York. Immediately after his electrocution, the top of his skull was sawed off and his brain examined for signs of mental impairment. His corpse was then stuck in a black-stained pine box, doused with sulfuric acid (to obliterate its identity), and buried in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery.

The utter ignominy of the assassin’s death and disposal was reflected in the meager news coverage accorded the event. The announcement of his death barely rated a headline in most papers (the
New York Times
relegated the story to page five)—as though the end of so contemptible a creature deserved nothing more than a passing notice. This was particularly true in New England, where Czolgosz’s execution was
overshadowed by an event that happened on the very same day: the arrest of Nurse Jane Toppan in the case of the Davis family deaths.