The Admiral and the Ambassador (39 page)

Similarly, there were competing claims on the body itself. Official Washington presumed space—and a memorial—would be made for Jones at the National Cemetery in Arlington. Even before Porter had found the body, speculative claims were being laid from different slices of Jones's past. Officials and boosters in Fredericksburg, Virginia, argued that Jones should be buried there, since that was as close to a home as the admiral had on American soil. Jones's brother had been a contributing member of the city in the 1700s, and Jones had lived at the house as caretaker after the brother's death. Had Jones not left to sail under the American flag against the British, they argued, he likely would have stayed there, and Jones's descendants would be living among them.

Philadelphia, too, argued that Jones's most significant time of residence was there, where he received his commission to the Continental navy and where the directives for the early days of his American naval career had been issued. New York City boosters made a case as well, given that part of
Jones's story—the discovery of some of his letters—took place in the city. Perhaps they also felt that Porter's role in finding the body would give them an edge. And while the State Department was eyeing burial at Arlington, the Department of the Navy began making noise that Jones's body belonged at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, arguing that Jones had been among the first to advocate that the United States create a place to train and groom officers for service at sea.

Proponents of the different final resting places sent telegrams to Porter, as the man who had found the body, seeking his recommendation. “I reply that all such questions should be left to the national government for decision,” he told Francis Loomis, the assistant secretary of state. Porter, in fact, didn't have a preference. He just wanted a commitment and a timeframe from Washington so he could arrange for the pageantry that would surround the transfer of the body to the United States.

Porter was also trying to finalize his own plans for moving home. As of May 1, new ambassador Robert McCormick would be in charge of the embassy and Porter would be just another American in Paris. “Mr. McCormick takes charge of the Embassy tomorrow morning,” Porter wired to Loomis on April 30. “I shall have my furniture packed up during this month and will ship most of it during the month of June, of which you will be advised. I beg that you will see that the necessary instructions are given for its free entry at the port of New York.”
⁹

Porter's spring exchanges with Washington were with Loomis instead of John Hay because the secretary of state was no longer in Washington. The rigors of public life had begun to eat away at the sixty-six-year-old Hay's stamina, and his health was fading. He had intended to resign as secretary of state at the end of Roosevelt's term in March, but the president urged him to stay on. He agreed but then immediately took a prolonged vacation at his doctor's urging, leaving Loomis in charge of the department.

On the morning of March 18, Hay and his wife, Clara, arrived at the sprawling White Star docks in Manhattan to board the steamship
Cretic
en route to Genoa, Italy, from which they would travel by land to other spots in
Europe. The Hays' son, Clarence, their daughter, Alice, and her husband, John W. Wadsworth, were there to help the couple get aboard, and Henry White, the recently appointed ambassador to Italy, came along to see his new boss off on the trip. The secretary had tried to leave the country quietly, without being noticed by the newspapers. Reporters were on hand at the White Star docks to record the comings and goings of the steamships—the travels of the wealthy and the powerful made for good copy—and Hay was noticed, in part because of his deteriorated physical condition. He had lost weight, his face gaunt beneath his whitening beard, and he walked unsteadily along the pier.

Passengers boarding departing ships had to climb three flights of stairs to the deck-level portion of the White Star terminal. Hay had trouble making it up the stairs without help, and he paused for a minute at the top to catch his wind before starting the 150-foot walk across the gangplank to the ship. As he moved, Hay's steps slowed until he suddenly leaned over and collapsed onto a pile of burlap stacked at the side. His family and White quickly surrounded him and the ship's doctor was summoned. Hay said he was fine, just overtired, and a wheelchair was rounded up to roll the secretary onto the ship and to his suite, No. 55, on the promenade deck. The ship's medic, a Dr. Green, told reporters that Hay was not suffering from any serious ailments and would regain his strength once at sea. Skepticism slipped into the coverage. “It was said by one of the friends who went to the pier with the secretary that no one in Washington except his family and possibly his cabinet associates realized how ill he was,” the
New York Times
reported. The friend, presumably, was White.
¹⁰

Hay tried to stay out of sight during the trip, but without much luck. Reporters met the
Cretic
in the Azores, Gibraltar, and again at Algiers, and from each spot wired to America that Hay reported he'd had a good passage and his health was recovering. After a few days in Italy, Hay and his wife went to the spas near Wiesbaden in Germany for five weeks, where Hay chafed over the inactivity. He also slowly regained strength. Heads of European states sent queries about visits, but he rejected them all, saying he needed to focus on his health. King Leopold of Belgium simply showed up, and Hay entertained him briefly and unofficially, but that was one of the few bits of work that managed to crash the walls Hay had erected. He joked
about his health and his recovery in letters to friends. “My doctor here says there is nothing the matter with me except old age, the Senate, and two or three other mortal maladies, and so I am going to Nauheim to be cured of them all,” he wrote to the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens from Nervi, Italy, shortly after arriving in Europe. The Hays spent a few days in Paris in late May with his old friend Henry Adams, the writer, then on June 2 moved on to London. Hay had a quiet half-hour meeting with King Edward at Buckingham Palace but otherwise stayed out of sight, meeting with friends like painter Edwin Abbey rather than political figures. On June 7, the Hays boarded the White Star line's two-year-old steamship the
Baltic
in Liverpool for an uneventful passage to Manhattan, arriving on the evening of June 15.
¹¹

Hay looked much stronger and healthier when he landed than when he had left three months earlier. But his physical appearance masked what was the continued deterioration of a man who had been the confidante of four presidents—Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and now Roosevelt—as well as artists and writers, and who had helped form American foreign policy as the United States rose to the world stage.

Nine days after landing in Manhattan, Hay left Washington for his summer residence in Newbury, New Hampshire. On June 27, he fell ill with uremia—kidney failure—though he was quickly pronounced much improved after a visit from a local doctor. Near midnight of June 30, doctors were again summoned to the lakeside estate, where, shortly after retiring for the evening, Hay suddenly had trouble breathing. The descent was rapid and unstoppable. He died a short time later, at 12:25 AM on July 1, of a pulmonary embolism, ending one of the most intriguing lives of the era.
¹²

S
YMBOLISM CAN BE A
powerful tool, and Porter and his colleagues at the State Department were eager to surround the transfer of Jones's body to America with as much fanfare as they could muster. Porter urged that a fleet of US Navy ships be dispatched to arrive in France by early June, allowing time for ceremonies and celebrations in Paris, and at the port of Cherbourg, before the ships began the journey west, timing the delivery of Jones's body on American soil with the Fourth of July. “When the body is borne through the city of Paris, we can count upon the French government to provide a military escort commensurate with his rank and to take every possible measure to do honor to his memory,” Porter wrote to Assistant Secretary of State Loomis. But delays could cause problems. “Parliament generally adjourns the first week in July and after July 14th, the French Independence Day, official persons and the people generally begin to leave the city for their summer vacations.” Porter sought a quick decision, but Washington had other ideas, and the decision lagged, much to Porter's frustration.
¹

On May 1, McCormick formally took control of the US Embassy in France, which had once again moved, this time to 12 Quai de Billy, along the Right Bank of the Seine just east of the Exposition Universelle fairgrounds. It was about four blocks from the embassy Porter had established on Avenue Kleber when he arrived in Paris. Where Porter's embassy was a functional space, the new embassy was a step toward the ostentatious; it had more in common with Porter's rented mansion than his diplomatic offices. The vestibule was walled with white and green marble and decorated with Louis XV tapestries. A grand marble staircase in the center of the room carried visitors to a bank of rooms overlooking the Seine, each decorated with ebony and gold, the ceilings covered with frescoes of Venus on a chariot and other classical depictions. The dining hall was warmed by a large fireplace, and the sixty-square-foot “festival Salon” was adorned with tapestries and frescoes as well as selections from McCormick's private collection of portraits of Napoleon, Washington, and other heralded leaders and statesmen of the past.
²

Through the first couple of weeks of May, McCormick slipped into the ambassador's harness with the formal presentation of his credentials to President Loubet and endless meetings with high French officials and fellow diplomats. Porter, formal duties done, hit the dinner circuit, taking a seat at the head table of a series of banquets organized in his honor. He was alone in Paris and busied himself with the mundane details of packing up his possessions and arranging to have them shipped home. He and McCormick also continued to press Washington for a decision on when and how to move Jones's body. Porter, in fact, was becoming anxious over what he saw as an unnecessary delay in coming to a decision; French law, he informed Assistant Secretary of State Loomis, forbade storing a human body above ground for a protracted length of time, and he feared testing the French authorities' patience. Yet he also said that he felt he could squeeze an extension from the French, which suggests that he was using the French laws as a goad to get an answer from Washington.
³

The decision ultimately was made by Roosevelt, reflecting his keen interest in Porter's project. On May 12, during a cabinet meeting at the White House, the president ordered that a special squadron under Rear Admiral Charles Sigsbee, who had been in command of the USS
Maine
when it blew apart and sank off Havana, be sent to France to reclaim Jones's body and return it to the United States. Loomis was planning to be in Europe in July to meet with foreign ministers in several countries, and it was decided he would be named a special ambassador to France with a single assignment: to receive the body, which eventually would be interred at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. Which meant that the navy had won the fight over who would get the body.

Porter began making arrangements in earnest. Then he received another telegram from Washington telling him to hold off—there was a new wrinkle. Porter's frustration seeped through in his cable back to Loomis: “I would strongly recommend that if the squadron can possibly get here in time, the Fourth should be named.” Porter said he had discussed the plans with President Loubet, the French minister of foreign affairs, and the heads of the French army and navy, who all “considered that day a very convenient and most fitting one for France to pay her homage to the memory of our admiral and [were] anxious to arrange imposing ceremonies if notified a reasonable time in advance, consisting of a military and a naval escort and the participation of her public men.”