The Admiral and the Ambassador (31 page)

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 waiting 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 Presidency, 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.