The Admiral and the Ambassador (30 page)

And that posed a problem, for Hobart was also the vice president of the United States. And his boss, President McKinley, was expected to run for reelection in the fall of 1900. Discussions began about what the Republicans should do. At first, it was quiet talk framed in general terms of having a backup plan in case Hobart's health precluded him from running again.

In late October, the vice president's health failed rapidly, and he nearly died on Halloween night. The next day his family announced that while he was not resigning, Hobart had, in effect, retired from duty and would not return to Washington. Three weeks later, Hobart, surrounded by his family, died. “The saddest news I have received since I left home was the announcement of this death,” Porter wrote in a private letter to Secretary of State Hay. “Hobart and I for many years were personal, club, and political friends, and the news came to me with a touch of sadness that was akin to the sorrow of a personal bereavement.”
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By the time Hobart died, the jockeying to succeed him was already in full fury. To balance out the national ticket and mollify powerful political bosses, the expectation was that whoever replaced Hobart would be a New
Yorker and would have the support of McKinley's political enemy, Thomas Platt, the New York political boss.

Ambassador Porter's name came up in several places as a potential candidate. And his candidacy made sense. As a New Yorker, he would bring balance to the ticket. He had a decorated military record in the Civil War and was a living connection to President Grant, still a revered figure despite his scandal-scarred years in the White House. A tactful and polished orator, Porter also had significant connections with New York's financial powers, which he had tapped with such efficiency for McKinley's first presidential campaign. And he had developed a good reputation for his diplomatic work in France.

But Porter was not a Platt man. And, even more significantly, Porter wasn't interested, which he told any reporter who raised the question. While such denials are often more show than substance, it seems likely Porter was sincere. If the political battles that would have come with a cabinet position had dissuaded him from going to Washington in McKinley's first term, it seems unlikely that the stresses and pressures of a national campaign would have appealed to him the second time around.

Regardless, an offer never came. McKinley contemplated a few other men, such as war secretary Elihu Root and treasury secretary Cornelius Bliss, both friends of Porter, but McKinley either changed his mind or was turned down. (Bliss backed out after failing to get support from Platt, now a senator from New York.) After months of dithering, and fearing he'd be tarnished by an intramural Republican squabble if he made a selection, McKinley ultimately left the call to the attendees of the 1900 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. And the rank-and-file of the party already had their man: Theodore Roosevelt, who had won a two-year term as New York's governor in November 1898, just weeks after returning to civilian life from the war in Cuba.

Born on the cusp of the Civil War, in October 1858, Roosevelt was not even forty-two years old, but he was one of the best-known political figures in the country and something of a leader in a generational shift in politics. McKinley and most of his contemporaries—including Porter—had fought in the Civil War. Roosevelt was at the vanguard of the generation that came after, men for whom the Civil War was at most a childhood memory. An
author and historian of some note, he had entered politics as a New York State assemblyman in 1881, quickly earning a reputation as a reformer and an enemy of Tammany Hall and other political machines, including that of fellow Republican Platt. Roosevelt quit politics for a while after he was on the losing side of a floor fight during the 1884 Republican convention that made former Maine senator James G. Blaine the party's presidential candidate. (Blaine lost the November election to Democrat Grover Cleveland.) Roosevelt fled to the Dakota Badlands to be a rancher for a couple of years before returning to the East. He lost a bid for mayor of New York City but was later appointed police commissioner and began cementing his reputation as a reformer by ferreting out corruption, adding to the bad blood with Platt and his cronies. Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the navy under McKinley, a job he quit to go to war in Cuba. Back in New York, he won the governor's office and by the summer of 1900 was a respected author, celebrated war hero, and political reformer, which made him something of a populist political celebrity and a natural addition to the list of potential McKinley running mates.
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Yet McKinley—and Mark Hanna, McKinley's political guru—didn't like Roosevelt, either personally or politically. McKinley was at heart a conservative man; by contrast, Roosevelt was propelled by an overpowering personality. And at first, Roosevelt didn't want the post. He had his eyes set on the White House in 1904 and feared that serving as McKinley's understudy would put him out of the public eye and force him to defer to McKinley's policies rather than stake out his own public positions. Roosevelt figured he would have a better chance in 1904 if he stayed in Albany as governor, giving him a high-profile platform from which he could reach a national audience. But Platt's friends, who feared Roosevelt's reform agenda, wanted the former Rough Rider out of Albany. Thus, so did Platt. “I want to get rid of the bastard,” Platt confided to a political friend. “I don't want him raising hell in my state any longer. I want to bury him.” Ultimately, Roosevelt came around to the idea of the vice presidency and allowed himself to be drafted on the floor of the convention.
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The 1900 election was essentially a repeat of the 1896 showdown. The Democrats again nominated Bryan, and McKinley again did very little campaigning, letting Roosevelt be his stump surrogate. Bryan's oratorical
skills were by then old news. Roosevelt, on the other hand, was a fresh voice and a natural barnstormer. Often accompanied by former members of the Rough Riders—as if voters needed a reminder—Roosevelt gave some six hundred speeches while traveling some twenty thousand miles, mostly by train, and spoke before an estimated three million people. Come Election Day, McKinley and Roosevelt received 52 percent of the popular vote to 46 percent for Bryan and running mate Adlai Stevenson; McKinley won reelection with a nearly two-to-one margin in electoral votes, but Roosevelt was the talk of the nation.
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Given the distance and his role as ambassador, Porter stayed out of the race, though he was champing at the bit in Paris amid the hustle and bustle of the exposition. “One of the greatest disappointments that I ever experienced was not being able to leave my post here at such an important period and go home to take part in the electoral campaign, the first one in which I have not participated in thirty years,” he wrote to McKinley in a private post-election letter. “I felt like a hound struggling in the leash, and the homesickness from which we all suffer over here was largely increased every time I read of the activity that was taking place at ‘the front.'”
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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.

A
FTER 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.”
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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 P
M
. 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.