by Gore Vidal
“You are morbid. You’re also lucky. You are—will be—rich. You’re not like me, dependent on a man who is—happiest alone.”
The man, happiest when alone, seemed delighted to be walking arm in arm with Martha, dark-browed, tall, heavy. They came from the house, whose old-fashioned frame porch—piazza they called it locally—was ablaze with potted hydrangeas, neatly regimented by Lizzie. Kiki abandoned Lizzie; and leapt into Martha’s arms, while the red-faced patriarch smiled upon this homely scene.
Don Cameron was now nearly seventy; nearly fat; nearly very rich, though a sudden fall in the stock market the previous month had obliged him, for some days, to drink for two. Now news from the outside world had shaken them all. History was at work, “overtime,” in Lizzie’s phrase.
“There are still no newspapers,” said Don, slowly, carefully, arranging his bulk on Lizzie’s blanket. Martha stood, holding Kiki in her arms—Virgin with canine god, thought Caroline.
“Anyway, we think we can pronounce the name,” said Martha, and she pronounced, “Leon Czolgosz,” with two shushing sounds. “He is Polish, it seems.”
“An anarchist!” Don growled. “They’re everywhere. They’re out to kill every ruler in the world, like the king of Italy last summer, and before him, what’s her name?”
“Elizabeth,” said Caroline, “empress of Austria. They also—whoever they are—killed the prime minister of Spain and the president of France.… She was so beautiful.” Caroline had always been told that her mother had been very like the Kaiserin, whose death from a knife through the heart, as she was getting aboard a ship, had appalled the world. It was, somehow, unnatural that a woman as beautiful as the Empress should be so gratuitously murdered.
“Funny thing,” said Cameron. “Hanna’s been worrying for more than a year now. ‘I want more guards,’ he kept telling the Secret Service. Then they find that list of those wops over in New Jersey, with the names of all the rulers they meant to kill, and Hanna was fit to be tied, because there was the Major’s name but the Major wasn’t interested; very fatalistic, the Major.”
“Very lucky, the Major,” added Lizzie, reclaiming the faithless Kiki from Martha’s arms. Martha now sat, cross-legged, on Caroline’s shawl. The four of them then proceeded to contemplate history.
A few minutes after four o’clock in the afternoon of September 6, 1901, in the Temple of Music of the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, New York, President McKinley stood before a large American flag, with potted plants to his left and right. An organ played Bach. The day was hot. The presidential collar had twice been changed. Mrs. McKinley was, as usual, ill; and bedded down in the International Hotel. The President was attended only by Cortelyou, and three agents of the Secret Service. Exposition police were also on hand, but when the President gave the order to throw open the doors, so that the people could come shake his hand, there was more than the usual confusion. For one thing, the line was not orderly and rapid, the way the President preferred: one citizen’s hand succeeded rapidly by another, one pair of eyes deeply, if briefly, transfixed by the President’s luminous stare. Instead, the citizens of the republic advanced slowly, hesitantly, singly, in couples, even in groups. There was no sorting them out.
A young, slight man approached the President with a bandaged right hand. Face to face, there was a moment of confusion. As McKinley’s right arm outstretched automatically, he was presented with a problem. Did one shake a bandaged hand? or would its owner offer him his left hand? The young man solved the problem. He darted forward, pushing to one side the President’s arm while, simultaneously, firing twice a pistol that he had been holding in the bandaged hand. The stunned President remained standing while guards threw the man to the floor; then, as they dragged him from the hall, a chair was brought for the President, who sat down and, dazedly, felt his waistcoat, where blood was oozing. But he seemed more interested in the assailant than in his wound, and he said to Cortelyou, most calmly, “Don’t let them hurt him.” Then, when he saw the blood on his fingers, he said, “Be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell my wife.”
Eleven minutes later, the President was on the operating table of the Exposition’s emergency hospital. One bullet had grazed his chest; the other had entered the vast paunch, and gone through the stomach. The surgeons were able to repair the points of entry and of exit; the bullet, however, was not found. Then the President was sewed up. No vital organs had been harmed; on the other hand, the wound was not drained, and there remained the possibility of infection, not to mention shock to a system that might not prove to be as strong as it appeared.
During the next few days, Vice-President, Cabinet, and Mark Hanna, as well as McKinley’s sisters and brother, came to Buffalo. But after a feverish weekend, the President’s temperature returned to normal; and he was pronounced out of danger. The Vice-President vanished into the Adirondacks, while the Cabinet dispersed. Meanwhile, Leon Czolgosz was closely questioned. When he confessed to an admiration for a leading anarchist named Emma Goldman, she was immediately arrested in Chicago; and declared the originator of the plot to kill the President.
But at Beverly Farms, news was slow in coming. Don Cameron relied on visitors to bring him day-old newspapers. As there was neither telephone nor telegraph office nearby, Caroline wondered if she should go back to Washington, to her command post at the Tribune. But Lizzie said, “There’s no one in the government left in town. What news there is is at Buffalo, and who wants to go there?”
Kiki began to bark; visitors had appeared on the piazza of the house. Brooks Adams and his wife, Daisy, waved to the group on the lawn. Then Brooks shouted, “Teddy!”
“Teddy what?” responded Cameron, getting first to his knees; then, laboriously, onto his feet.
“Teddy Roosevelt,” roared Brooks, as his wife, frowning, put her hands over her ears, “is president of the United States.”
“Oh, God,” murmured Cameron.
Caroline crossed herself. The poor good McKinley was now as vanished from the story as Del. Then to Kiki’s delight, everyone ran toward the house.
“When—how?” asked Lizzie.
“Yesterday evening. Friday the thirteenth. Gangrene set in. At two-fifteen this morning, he died. Teddy was off in the woods, somewhere. But he should be in Buffalo by now, being sworn in. The Cabinet’s all there except for Hay, who’s in Washington, holding together the government. No one knows the extent of the conspiracy. The Spanish-Cubans are thought to be behind it, out of revenge, for what McKinley did—and did not do—in Cuba.” Brooks spoke rapidly, without a pause for breath. Then, like a child, he began to jump up and down on the porch; and Kiki jumped alongside him. “Teddy’s got it all now! Do you realize that he occupies a place greater than Trajan’s at the high noon of the Roman empire?” Brooks, like his brother, never spoke when he could lecture. “There has never been so much power given a man at so propitious a time in history! He will have the opportunity—and the means—to subjugate all Asia, and so give America the hegemony of the earth, which is our destiny, written in stars! Also,” Brooks came to earth with a crash, “today is a day of great importance to Daisy and me. It is our wedding anniversary.”
“History does seem to have us by the throat,” said Lizzie mildly. “Come inside.”
“Champagne,” said Cameron, brightening. “For your anniversary …”
“And for Theodore the Great, whose reign has, at last, begun.”
“No period of mourning for Mr. McKinley?” asked Caroline, who felt, suddenly, an intense grief for Del, the Major and, not least, herself, bereft.
“The King is dead.” Brooks was cold. “Long live the King.”
– 2 –
IN THE brightly illuminated reception room of the Pennsylvania Station, John Hay sat in a gilded armchair. Adee stood beside him, while a half-dozen Secret Service men prowled about the small, ornate, musty room reserved for dignitaries. The train from Buffalo was due to arrive at eight-thirty; aboard was the new president, and the body of h
is predecessor. Hay had arranged for the White House ushers to escort Mrs. McKinley and Cortelyou to the mansion, where McKinley would lie in state, while his family helped Mrs. McKinley to pack her belongings, a melancholy task that Hay had twice before witnessed when the widows of Lincoln and Garfield had each been obliged to deal with a life’s end in the most humiliating and public way.
Once again, to Hay’s amazement, as there would be no vice-president for another four years, he was constitutional heir to the President. If only for this reason, he was confident that Roosevelt would replace him as secretary of state. The President—the youngest in history at forty-two—must not have as his potential successor a sixty-two-year-old wreck, which is how Hay thought of himself, literally a wreck in body—mind, too. The death of Del had shaken him; the death of McKinley had sunk him into a melancholy of a sort that he had never before experienced. “I am a harbinger of death,” he would say aloud, dramatically, when alone: he had yet to find the person with whom he could share his desolate vision of himself. In the nation’s history, only three presidents had been murdered in office, and each had been a close friend of John Hay. It was curious, too, how essentially benign the three murdered men had been; it was not as if they had been tyrants, tempting the gods. Although, and Hay began to redefine “tyrant,” many Filipinos and Spanish-Cubans did view McKinley as a tyrant. But, thus far, the Secret Service had been unable to link Czolgosz’s anarchists to those Spanish-Cubans who were supposedly eager to avenge wrongs done them by McKinley.
Although Roosevelt had announced in Buffalo that, as he was simply a continuation of McKinley, he would keep the Cabinet intact, Hay expected, after a decent interval, to be let go. On Sunday morning Hay had written Roosevelt a letter of commiseration and congratulation, all couched in a valetudinarian style: “My official life is at an end—my natural life will not be long extended, and so in the dawn of what I am sure will be a great and splendid future, I venture to give you the heartfelt benediction of the past.” Hay had wept when he wrote that line; now, recalling it, his eyes again filled with tears, for all the selves that he had been; and would be no more.
Suddenly, Hay heard the noise of a crowd outside the reception room. As he got to his feet, and started across the room, the station master flung open the door and said, “The President”; and disappeared.
Theodore Roosevelt, thick, sturdy, small, bounded across the room, and shook Hay’s hand. Teeth bared but not smiling, he spoke rapidly. “I’ve seen your letter. Of course you will stay on with me, to the end, or as long as you like. As for your talk of age, that’s affectation. You’re not old. It’s not your true nature to be old, any more than it’s mine.”
“Mr. President—” Hay began.
“Theodore, please. As I have always, disrespectfully, called you John, you must call me Theodore, as you’ve always done, except, of course, when people are about and we must both acknowledge the majesty of our estate …”
“You are too kind … Theodore.” Hay was amused at the Rooseveltian vehemence. Obviously, on the long train ride, he had been busy working out how protocol would affect his various personal relationships.
“I don’t want to cut myself off from old friends socially, the way the other presidents have tended to do. I want to be able to dine like any guest at your house, or Cabot’s, but, of course,” he became very grave, somber even with majesty, “I must preserve the prerogative of the initiative.” Before Hay could think of a response, Roosevelt was off on another tangent. “Root swore me in. It was very moving, all of us in that parlor. Root couldn’t say the oath of office for some ten minutes. Odd. I never think of him as being an emotional man. For the time, I want to keep the Philippines in his department. You don’t mind?”
“No, no. I have quite enough to do. Your wife and young Ted are here. They arrived this afternoon.”
“Good! Let’s join them.”
Theodore grabbed Hay’s arm, and marched him, rather too fast for Hay’s perfect comfort, into the main waiting room of the station, where a small crowd cheered the new president, who solemnly raised his hat, but did not, Hay was relieved to note, mar the occasion with the huge, toothy Roosevelt smile. A dozen policemen then made a ring about them, and escorted them outside.
In the distance, the dome of the Capitol was illuminated like a confectionery skull, thought Hay. Since Hay had ordered the White House to make no announcement, there was no crowd outside the station; the public did not expect the new president to arrive until the next day. Neither Roosevelt nor Hay chose to notice the huge ebony hearse, with its six black horses, ready to bear McKinley’s body to the White House. For a moment, Roosevelt paused on the sidewalk; started to speak; said nothing.
“You needn’t wait,” said Hay.
Roosevelt looked relieved; and sprang into the presidential carriage, followed by Hay. “Seventeen thirty-three N Street,” said Roosevelt, as if he were in a taxi-cab.
“They know,” said Hay, amused. “It’s their job.”
“Quite right. I must get used to that. I must get used to a lot of things now, like the White House. I want the stationery changed. I can’t stand ‘The Executive Mansion.’ From now on, we’ll just call it ‘The White House.’ Less pompous. How many bedrooms are there?”
“Five in the living quarters; and three of them are pretty small.”
“What’s on the third floor?”
“I haven’t been up there since Tad Lincoln mixed up all the bells in the mansion—house, that is—and I had to unmix them.”
“I suppose we can make extra rooms up there. Alice must have her own room now that she’s about to be eighteen.” Roosevelt stared at the post office, where an illuminated flag was at half-mast.
“All flags should be taken down at sunset. It’s depressing,” he added, uncharacteristically. “To come here as president, and everyone is mourning.”
“Murder is always depressing—and alarming.”
“Do we know who’s behind that anarchist?”
“The Secret Service wants to arrest everyone in sight. They remind me of Stanton after Lincoln was shot.”
“Let’s hope with better result. I wouldn’t mind being shot—like Lincoln, that is, not poor McKinley. Lincoln never knew what happened.”
Hay shuddered, involuntarily. “I’m not so sure. When we were writing his life, I read the autopsy report. Apparently the bullet entered not the back of his head but the left temple, which meant that he had heard Booth at the door to the box, and that he had turned around to see who it was …”
“And saw?”
“And saw, for an instant, the gun.”
“How grisly!” Roosevelt was plainly delighted by this macabre detail.
In front of the N Street house of Anna Roosevelt Cowles, two policemen stood guard. From a second-story window a huge American flag drooped at half-mast. “Why don’t they take down these flags?” Roosevelt was querulous; and, Hay suspected, somehow discomfited by the tribute to his predecessor.
In the downstairs parlor, Roosevelt greeted his wife, Edith; sister, Anna, whom he called Bamie; and son, Ted. The ladies wore mourning; they were in excellent spirits. The ladies made much of Hay, who was pleased to be treated like a piece of rare porcelain from an earlier time. He was helped into an armchair, and encouraged to smoke a cigar, which he refused. Meanwhile, the new president was prancing about the room, asking everyone questions to which he alone had the answers. During this display, the admirable Edith maintained her stately calm. Hay had always preferred her to the noisy—no other word—Theodore.
Edith Kermit Carow was descended from Huguenots who had intermarried with the family of Jonathan Edwards. She had known Theodore all her life. The Carow family had lived in New York’s Union Square next door to the house of Theodore’s grandfather. Edith had been a bookish girl, no great recommendation in their world, but a link to the high-strung asthmatic Theodore, who was not only bookish but, to compensate for physical weakness, doggedly athletic as well.
As Hay listened to this most unlikely of American presidents, he was reminded of the chilling prescience of Henry Adams’s letter from Stockholm, which had arrived on the day that the President was shot. “Teddy’s luck” was the letter’s theme; fate’s too, as it proved. Theodore was, Adams had proclaimed, “pure act,” like God: endless energy without design.
Finally, Roosevelt had returned from the West, poorer than when he had left but better-known to magazine readers. After losing an election for mayor of New York in the autumn of 1886, he and Edith Kermit Carow were married, most fashionably, at St. George’s in Hanover Square, London; the groomsman was Cecil Spring-Rice, the Hearts’ favorite British diplomat. Then the Roosevelts returned to the ugly comfortable house that he had built on Sagamore Hill at Oyster Bay, Long Island. Here he wrote the six-volume history Winning the West; filled the house with children; and plotted, with Henry Cabot Lodge, a political career that had been interrupted not only by personal tragedies but by a mistrust of the Republican Party’s leader James G. Blaine; fortunately, this dislike had not led to apostasy of the sort that had caused the truly virtuous to bolt the party and raise high the banner of Independence and Mugwumpery. Roosevelt and Lodge were too practical for this sort of idealistic gesture. They stayed with Blaine, who lost to Cleveland in 1884.