The Devil's Gentleman (42 page)

79

P
resident McKinley’s visit to the Pan-American Exposition was originally scheduled for the second week of June 1901. The plan was put on hold, however, when his beloved wife, Ida, a chronic invalid who suffered from a host of maladies, including petit mal epilepsy, fell seriously ill in mid-May.

At his sprawling home in Buffalo, John G. Milburn, the McKinleys’ designated host, received the news with mixed feelings. Though distressed to learn of the first lady’s condition, he privately welcomed the postponement. Without the presidential party to attend to, he would be able to concentrate all his energies on a pressing legal matter.
¹

After nearly a year and a half of unprecedented delay, the Molineux case had finally been placed on the calendar of the Court of Appeals. Arguments would begin on Monday, June 17.

A crowd many times larger than the courtroom could accommodate packed the hallway that morning. Bailiffs barred the door, admitting only the “privileged few” by a private entrance. Accompanied by Bartow Weeks and George Gordon Battle, General Molineux made his way to the defense table, walking with a pronounced limp. He had arrived in Buffalo the previous night and had twisted his ankle so badly while alighting from the train that he had to be carried to a cab.
²

John Milburn entered a few minutes later alongside his opponent, David B. Hill. A former United States senator, ex-governor of New York, and a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 1892, Hill had been enlisted by the district attorney to argue the case for the state. Like prizefighters shaking hands before a bout, the two lawyers exchanged greetings at the doorway before taking their respective places.

At ten, the seven black-robed judges filed in and seated themselves at the bench. Preliminaries were quickly dispatched. Both Milburn and Hill requested—and were granted—extensions of the two-hour limit usually allotted for arguments. At 10:37
A.M.
, Milburn rose from his seat, and the “battle of giants”—as newspapers touted the event—was under way.
³

Milburn’s address would continue uninterruptedly until the 2:00
P.M.
adjournment and not conclude until the following day. After describing the key figures in the case (with special mention of General Molineux, “a gallant soldier who never fought a braver battle than this last fight he is making for the life of his son”), the famed Buffalo attorney spent nearly two and a half hours in an attempt to dismantle the arguments that James Osborne had made at the trial.

He ridiculed the notion that the “little club squabbles” between Molineux and Harry Cornish would have driven Roland to murder; denounced the letter box man, Nicholas Heckmann, as a mercenary fraud; disparaged the testimony of the handwriting experts; and even while insisting that he “was not seeking to indicate that any other person is guilty of this crime,” cast suspicion on Harry Cornish by suggesting that the athletic director had been conducting an illicit affair with Florence Rodgers and thus had a motive for wanting her mother, Mrs. Adams, out of the way. He also pointed out that, according to the sworn testimony of Emma Miller, Molineux had not been the purchaser of the silver holder and insisted that the embossed robin’s-egg-blue stationery to which the prosecution had attached so much significance was “in general use” and might have belonged to anybody.

Proceeding to the legal phase of the appeal, Milburn argued strenuously that Henry Barnet’s death should never have been brought up in the trial, the two cases having no connection. It was the admission of evidence relating to Blanche Molineux’s moral character, however, that drew Milburn’s bitterest words. His voice ringing with outrage, he excoriated Recorder Goff for allowing Rachel Greene, the former chambermaid at Mary Bell’s boardinghouse, to testify that Blanche and Roland had lived together as husband and wife months before their marriage.

“No incident in this trial,” he cried, “dealt such a blow to this defendant as this, which went straight at the woman he had married and blasted her reputation for the purposes of this case. On what ground was it admissible? This—this is on the verge of the horrible!

“This defendant,” said Milburn, “had not a fair trial.”
⁴

Altogether, Milburn would address the judges for slightly more than five hours. It was nearly noon on Tuesday, June 18, before ex-senator David Hill rose to speak.

Like Milburn, he began by acknowledging General Molineux’s presence in the courtroom. Instead of paying the usual tribute to the old soldier’s gallantry, however, Hill insisted that the father’s eminence should have no bearing on the case. “This court, we know, is a court of justice,” he said, “in which the meanest pauper in the land stands just as high and has just as many rights as the son of a general or the son of a judge.”

The thrust of Hill’s argument was that the conviction should not be overturned because of technicalities. The key issue was Molineux’s guilt, which had been established during the trial by “overwhelming evidence.” Even John Milburn had not claimed “that his client is innocent.” During the five hours he had addressed the court, “the word innocent never once passed his lips.”

Recognizing that the appeal would hinge, to a large extent, on the issue of the Barnet evidence, Hill insisted that the state “had a perfect legal right to show the facts connected with the death of Barnet. Here was a man who was a member of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, where Cornish was employed. The poison that killed him was sent through the mails, just as it was sent to Cornish. It was the same poison in both cases. All the circumstances were alike. The lives of both men were plotted against by the same assassin. Who was it who desired to destroy them? Someone who was jealous of them. Someone who had quarreled with them. And who was that man? This defendant. He was jealous of Barnet; he had quarreled with Cornish.”

As for the testimony related to Blanche that had elicited such outrage from Milburn, Hill declared that the state had every right to introduce it during the trial. In scathing tones, Hill read aloud the notorious letter Blanche had written to Barnet on his deathbed and declared it to be the communication of “a lover.” He then read portions of a note that Roland had sent to a friend shortly after Barnet’s death, announcing his engagement to Blanche. “It is all so sudden a romance,” Roland had written. “I am so happy.”

“
Romance,
” snorted Hill, tossing the letter onto the table. “It was no romance. It was a tragedy. His rival had been removed.”

At that moment, General Molineux abruptly rose from his seat. The relentless attack on his son’s character by a man as prominent as David Hill had shaken him badly. Tears streaming down his face, the old man made his way out of the courtroom.

Hill, however, was unmoved by the piteous spectacle. Addressing a question that Milburn had raised—why would Roland have tried to murder Cornish over some petty “club squabbles”?—Hill offered a psychological explanation, suggesting that Roland’s “malady,” sexual impotence, had driven him into a state of “melancholia” that had mentally unbalanced him.

Despite the defense’s efforts to “avert suspicion from their client” by casting it onto Cornish, there was no mistaking the true culprit.

“If it was not Molineux,” Hill declared, “it was nobody.”
⁵

Hill ended his argument at 1:35
P.M.
on Wednesday. After a fifteen-minute reply by Milburn, the appeal was formally submitted. The court’s decision would be handed down during its fall session.

Afterward, General Molineux—who refused to speak to ex-senator Hill when the two encountered each other as they were leaving the building—made a statement to the press. For the first time, there seemed to be a heartbreaking vulnerability about the old soldier, “whose loyalty to his son,” wrote one observer, “has been pathetic.”
⁶
“I must be patient,” said the General softly, as though addressing himself. “It will come out all right. I must get my boy back.”
⁷
A few minutes later, he boarded the train back to Manhattan, while John G. Milburn returned to his duties as president of the Pan-American Exposition, the great world’s fair designed to showcase Buffalo as one of the nation’s leading cities.

80

P
resident McKinley and his wife spent the summer of 1901 in their modest home in Canton, Ohio, where Ida enjoyed a steady recuperation, while her husband indulged in the simple relaxations of a placid Midwestern town—picnics, drives in the family buggy, excursions to nearby county fairs, and an occasional game of euchre. As the summer progressed and Ida continued to improve, his plans to visit Buffalo were renewed. By late August, newspapers around the country were announcing that President’s Day at the Pan-American Exposition had been officially rescheduled for Thursday, September 5.

At precisely 5:00
P.M.
on Tuesday, September, 3, the president’s three-car private train pulled into Buffalo’s Terrace Railroad Station overlooking Lake Erie. The following day, McKinley toured the fair then, after a brief rest at the Milburn mansion, attended an evening concert by John Philip Sousa’s band.

Thursday began with an early sightseeing trip to Niagara Falls. Following lunch, McKinley returned to Buffalo for his final appearance at the exposition—a public reception held in the Temple of Music, a gaudy, byzantine structure on the north side of the fairgrounds, where he would personally greet the well-wishers who had lined up by the thousand to shake him by the hand.

In accordance with instructions given by McKinley’s fiercely devoted personal secretary, George Cortelyou, 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 fifty guards were there to keep an eye on the crowd. For the handshaking, McKinley stood between Cortelyou and John Milburn. Four soldiers flanked them, two on each side.
¹

In spite of these heightened security measures, 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. It was an unusually warm and humid day, however, and 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 4:07
P.M.
—just a few minutes after the reception began—a slender, mild-looking young man reached the front of the line. Like so many 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 loaded .32-caliber Iver Johnson revolver. As McKinley reached out to greet him, the young man—a self-professed anarchist named Leon Czolgosz—lunged 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 into the arms of the men around him, Cszolgosz was pounced upon by the soldiers and guards, who knocked him to the floor and began to beat him with their rifle butts and fists. One tried to stab him with a bayonet.

“Go easy on him, boys,” cried McKinley, now seated in a chair, his face drained of color and a spreading red stain on his shirtfront.

While Cszolgosz 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.

Housed in a small gray building a quarter mile from the Temple of Music, the hospital was, in actuality, little more than an emergency first-aid center. Exactly eighteen minutes after the shooting, McKinley—fully conscious, though in severe shock—was carried into the rudimentary operating room and laid 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 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, John Milburn took command. Upon his orders, 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. Unfortunately, his specialty was gynecology, not abdominal surgery. Nevertheless, he was deemed the most qualified surgeon available at that moment of crisis.

Though the city of Buffalo had recently opened a state-of-the-art general hospital, Mann chose to operate without delay. At 5:20
P.M.
, the life-and-death procedure 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 gauze mask. Though the fairgrounds blazed each evening with the brilliance of countless 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 light 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. 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 7:20
P.M.
—two hours after the operation began—the groaning, corpse-pale president was taken from the hospital and transported back to John Milburn’s residence.

Over the course of the next week, a steady stream of increasingly hopeful communiqués issued 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 characterized the president as “first rate.” The official word on Monday was that his “condition was becoming more and more satisfactory.” By Tuesday, newspapers across the country were proclaiming that the president was “on the high road to recovery.” The following day, 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 President’s life.”

But the president’s life had not been saved. At 5:00
P.M.
on Friday, September 13, the 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 died in John Milburn’s home after gasping out his final words: “Good-bye all, good-bye. It is God’s way. His will be done.”
²