The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt

by Burt Solomon

  “Yes, we all admire your ignorance, Henry,” I said.

  “More, my dear Mr. Adams?” said Clara, nodding at his half-empty porcelain teacup.

  Henry shook his head. “I wouldn’t make it home.”

  He was rising from the wing chair when another perfunctory knock produced the butler. “Pardon me, suh. Just came.”

  “More and more, James, the world is like that,” I said, reaching for the dagger. “Any bets on who?”

  “Whom,” Henry said.

  “No, who,” I replied, a little too pleased with myself.

  The telegram, from Oyster Bay, New York, consisted of a single word.

  “NOW.”

  * * *

  The State, War, and Navy Building was experiencing its customary dearth of activity at five forty-five on a weekday afternoon. Alvey Adee, however, was at his rolltop desk—he was always at his desk. The top was crowded with medicine vials, ink bottles, and an orderly stack of paper two feet high. He was writing on a long pad in his meticulous hand—he regarded typewriters as the enemy of thought—while puffing on a corncob pipe. The tobacco smelled sweeter than his habitual blend.

  “Adee!” I shouted.

  No response.

  The steel-nib pen was scratching, and I waited until it paused before stepping to his right ear and shouting again, “Adee, I need you!”

  “My four favorite words.” Adee looked up. His vast forehead and lush beard lent him a scholarly look, but the sky-blue eyes behind the pince-nez showed a sparkle inside. His face would come alive whenever his attention turned to something that interested him, which was nearly everything. Born deaf, he had been mute as a boy, before gaining a modicum of hearing as a young man. I never figured out how much of that faculty he had, for he was skilled at using his deafness to ignore what he preferred not to hear, an advantage in negotiating with foreigners—and with Americans. I had known him since soon after the war (the real war, not the splendid little one against Spain), when he took my place as the secretary of legation in Madrid. Since the ’eighties, as the second assistant secretary of state, he had learned everything about everything and everyone. My indispensable aide.

  “The maharajah has returned.” Adee’s speech was soft on consonants, elusive on Rs, and nasal on vowels, as from a mouth stuffed with gauze. Most people had trouble understanding him, but I never did. His lack of embarrassment about his lack of hearing has always charmed me.

  “And will be leaving right away,” I said. “For Sagamore Hill. I’ve been … summoned.” Adee’s eyes widened, but he knew not to inquire. “So, what do we have on the boil?”

  “The usual pleasantries,” Adee said. He reported on the overnight wires from London, from Paris—and the one from Vienna. “Seems it wasn’t the Austrian prince of Braganza who was arrested in London without all of his clothes, allegedly in the company of other men, but rather the emperor’s heir apparent himself, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.”

  I couldn’t resist a giggle. “Well, live and let live,” I said.

  As Adee described the kaiser’s latest complaint about Venezuela as a deadbeat on German loans, Margaret Hanna slipped into the room and stood behind him. She was a big-boned woman in her early thirties—my guess—with mannish features and dark French braids that reached the small of her back. She was Adee’s able assistant and, while Spencer Eddy was away, mine as well. She was unrelated to the odious senator, although most people assumed otherwise, which I found annoying. No sign Adee did. Or Margaret.

  “And here she is,” Adee announced—“our Miss Riflery of 1902. The Labor Day tourney, she was the victor. At one hundred yards.” Margaret blushed. “And speaking of Venezuela, I would like to extend her correspondence duties to include Central and South America—the entire hemisphere. If that suits you. She has really been doing it already.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “And allow me to reply to the kaiser’s note wishing the president a full and speedy recovery. Every word of it a lie.”

  “The task has found its master,” I said. “But on this, let him be a liar. We have our hands full with him as it is. Anything in the Philippines?”

  “Nothing for us. Let the fat man handle it.” Taft, the governor-general of the distant islands, had mostly but not entirely quelled the insurrection by Filipinos who had been foolish enough to believe that America’s conquest of imperial Spain would bring them independence. Little had they counted on the newest world power’s feeling so full of itself. (I mean us.)

  “And the Roumanian Jews?” I reminded him.

  “I’ll have a draft on your desk by the time you return, Hay. And when, if I may ask, might that be?”

  I shrugged. The answer was not up to me.

  * * *

  The Pennsylvania Railroad Station always gives me the willies, especially at night. Not because of anything physical. The building itself, the square brick tower and the crenellated facade, had a startling elegance. Its location was beyond compare, at the corner of Sixth and B streets northwest, amid the trees and winding carriageways of the National Mall. The problem for me was its history. The bronze star in particular. It decorated the floor in the ladies’ waiting room on the exact spot where President Garfield had collapsed after an office-seeker of shaky sanity shot him in the back. (I had interviewed Guiteau once myself. He was as nutty as a pecan pie.) I had stood by Garfield’s bier. By Lincoln’s and McKinley’s, too. I wondered if the common denominator was me.

  The high-ceilinged station was dimly lit. My footsteps echoed. A few passengers sat, mostly by themselves, in the waiting room pews. I gave the bronze star a wide berth as I rushed through to the platform and onto the train.

  My compartment was in the third car, and I left my valise (I took a perverse pride in not needing a porter) and went in search of the club car. It was unoccupied save for two elderly men with high collars and pinched cheeks—bankers, was my guess—and a dapper young chap with a distracted, melancholic air. I chose a high-backed upholstered chair in the far corner and gazed at the arched ceiling with light fixtures shaped like hard-nippled breasts. I ordered a Dewar & Sons whisky, a double.

  An Evening Star was splayed across the low marble table. I tidied up the pages and glanced across the front. A prediction by Pennsylvania’s vile senators that the anthracite coal strike would be settled within a week—how quickly they would be proved wrong. The missing troop ship from Manila had arrived in San Francisco—Adee had told me that. An unfunny cartoon about the war games off the New England coast. The new limit on automobiles’ speed through Rock Creek Park, of twelve miles per hour—so as not to scare the deer, I supposed. (The limit in Baltimore was half that.) I feared that these clattering, smoky machines were here to stay—the gasoline-powered ones, I mean. Or who knows? Maybe the quieter, electrical ones would win the day.

  I read that last item twice, scanning for a reason to hope, and only then turned to the leftmost column on the page.

  PRESIDENT INJURED

  Narrowly Escaped Death in Collision.

  CAR STRUCK HIS COACH

  One of His Companions Killed

  DRIVER WILL RECOVER

  MR. ROOSEVELT ONLY SLIGHTLY HURT.

  Others of the Party Severely Shaken Up and Bruised—Wild Rumors Started.

  Wild rumors! That was my bailiwick. Or the president’s.

  “… when near the Country Club”—a most avid reader was I—“an electric trolley on the Pittsfield and Lenox street railway was noticed coming at a terrific rate of speed. Mr. Craig signaled for the motorman to stop, but he apparently paid no attention to the warning and the car came plunging on. The President’s carriage was literally smashed to pieces. A witness of the accident stated that the motorman was speeding his car in order to reach the club…”

  I fished Theodore’s telegrams from my pocket: “COLLISION NO ACCIDENT.”

  The whisky arrived just in time.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1902

&nb
sp; Even past midnight, the terminal in Jersey City was noisy. Yawning passengers jostled past me, straggling the hundred yards from the railroad depot to the ferry, jabbering in a dozen tongues, wearing every conceivable garment—yarmulkes and caftans, silk hats and velvet-lapelled overcoats. Too many whiskies, not a wink of sleep, whiffs of the Orient and the Bronx—I could be forgiven a passing acquaintance with nausea. I took a spot in the ferry’s prow, where the cold, sharp wind cleared me like penance. I stood by the railing beneath a sliver of a moon and watched the Hudson River and its whitecaps.

  What I saw beyond the whitecaps astonished me. Lights. Above the ground. From the skyscrapers—what a poetic word! Not skypiercers or skypunchers, but skyscrapers. I envied the man who coined it. Eight stories, twelve stories, eighteen stories, even thirty stories high. Their lights floated like low-hanging stars, just shy of the clouds, arrayed along Manhattan’s—another delightful new word—skyline.

  A line of poetry came to me.

  A tinkle of bells in the light,

  Not bad.

  A call to the wild in the night …

  Not wild. This was civilization, or what passed for it. Tame? No.

  A crashing of bells in the light.

  A clashing of minds in the night.

  Hmm, maybe. It came perilously close to meaning something. I was extracting my calfskin notepad from the inside pocket of my frock coat when cold water sprayed over the side, splashing my overcoat and drenching my valise. My three changes of clothes were no longer dry. Nor was I.

  Hearing metal screech against metal was a relief; we had arrived at the Twenty-third street pier.

  Climbing back onto land improved my spirits, not nearly as much as seeing at the end of the pier a strapping man with a square face and a drooping mustache. Theodore!

  “Mr. Hay,” the man called as I drew near. It wasn’t Theodore. His voice was huskier. “The colonel sent me,” he said, reaching for my valise. He introduced himself as the coachman. “Franklyn, with a Y. Franklyn Hall.”

  “Hello, Franklyn with a Y,” I said. “Mr. Hall, the pleasure is most definitely mine.”

  * * *

  The surrey jolted along the country roads and kept me awake. I wrapped myself in carriage blankets and stayed warm enough to think. And so I thought. About Theodore, mainly, with varying degrees of lucidity.

  Among my foggier notions was the fear that he had summoned me to Long Island in order to fire me. Maybe almost dying had persuaded him that somebody else should stand next in line to the presidency. I couldn’t blame him. He and I got along just fine. Not that we were bosom buddies; Theodore didn’t really have any, other than that prig Henry Cabot Lodge. But I had known him well for at least a dozen years now and considered him a friend. I had made acquaintance with his daddy many years before that. Hadn’t Theodore Sr. attended the Lincolns’ ball the night in ’sixty-two that young Willie took ill? Later he introduced me to his older boy during a Hudson Valley rainstorm. Not that our personal history would matter much, if the younger Theodore was intent on letting me go. Still, I doubted that he was. For all of his flaws, he was neither coy nor cagey nor in any way a namby-pamby. If he wanted me gone, he would say so.

  Then, let us assume (never assume, my old friend Nicolay used to say) that Theodore had summoned me for the reason he gave. The collision was no accident. The president believed it. Why did he believe it? I expected an earful on that. Did he have evidence beyond his pique? The man was operating on emotion—that seemed pretty clear, and understandable. And not to be pooh-poohed. Emotion, combined with discipline, had gotten Theodore far in life—and quickly. At the age of—what?—forty-three he had already accomplished more than any three men might in a lifetime. Merely thinking about it tuckered me out. Charging up San Juan Hill in his Brooks Brothers uniform put to shame anything I’ve ever done. (I spent my war shuffling papers for Lincoln and wooing Kate Chase.) Into one daunting job after another—as New York’s police commissioner, as governor, now as the leader of a turbulent land—Theodore felt deeply about things and, unembarrassed and unrestrained, acted. He worked on instinct; he was rarely in doubt. Lord knows, his judgment was not always right. But more often than not—even Henry would concede the point—it was. In less than a year, Theodore had proved to be a damn good president—bold, unafraid—even in the absence of an economic panic or a war.

  I reached into my pocket and fingered his telegrams. I couldn’t read them in the dark, but I knew what they said.

  COLLISION NO ACCIDENT. COME HERE TO SAGAMORE HILL.

  NOW.

  “Franklyn,” I said. We shared the surrey’s soft front seat. “How did you know when I was coming?” I had never specified a time, figuring to hire a hack.

  “Been waiting awhile, sir.”

  “How long?”

  “Before sundown, sir. As soon as the colonel told me, I left.”

  The carriage curved past a thin woodland. The darkness beyond the trees must be Long Island Sound.

  Another question kept recurring: Why was he summoning me?

  About that, I had a sneaking suspicion: Willie Lincoln. Somehow, Roosevelt had learned of my experiences in solving the unlikeliest of murders. Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son was only the first. I never spoke to anyone about my occasional forays as a detective (better, I must say, than my record in the ring), but Theodore had his own means of learning what he needed to know.

  The surrey took a fork to the right off Cove Neck road. We passed the tennis court in the hollow and ascended the steep, sweeping lane to Sagamore Hill. Even in the scant moonlight, the three-story house loomed high on the hill. It was a grandmotherly sort of house, of a leisurely design, with a wraparound porch and more gables than Hawthorne could count. Lights flickered in the windows.

  The carriage drifted to a halt beneath the porte cochere. On the porch, a ghost shimmered in the gaslight. Teeth flashed; a white shirtfront glistened. I climbed down from the surrey and saw the president, still dressed for dinner in a black cutaway, a pearl-gray tie, and a white waistcoat that strained at the buttons. His face was calm, resolute—serene. It was a young face of a young man who took himself seriously, indeed, as I hope any president would. He had a bull neck, a square chin, a muscleman’s shoulders, and nary a line in his brow. His girth had grown on the job; he reminded me of a walrus in formal wear. A silk ribbon dangled from his pince-nez. His mustache was assertive but trimmed and under control. The slight smile on his lips suggested he was gazing into a future that nobody else could see.

  He leaned down as I mounted the four steps to the porch. His handshake was as strong and enveloping as ever, as if to say, Nothing is wrong with me. I noticed his right eye had swollen shut and his cheek was the size of a late summer peach.

  “Dee-lighted to see you,” he said. “Just the very man I wanted to see.”

  “You look terrible, Theodore,” I exclaimed. Only people who didn’t know him called him Teddy (he had disliked the nickname since his first wife died, for she had called him that), and I hadn’t earned the privilege of addressing him as Roosevelt.

  “Don’t I look as if I have the mumps?” He snapped his teeth as he spoke, and clamped his jaw. His vitality bowled me over, given his injuries and his usual four or five hours of sleep. “Come in, come in.”

  The front hall was an altar to the outdoors, paneled in oak and ornamented with the heads of animals unlucky enough to have crossed Theodore’s path. The fireplace was ablaze. Theodore led me into the library, on the right. He limped.

  The room was dignified yet warm, with its bear rugs and a paneled wall of paintings of the men he admired—Lincoln, of course, and Grant, and at the center, his truest hero, the man whose name he carried. (When his adored father died, he dropped the Junior and insisted that his family call him Theodore instead of Teedie.) Now he was the nation’s twenty-sixth president, its youngest ever, rocking at his desk. The gaslight showed the cuts on his chin and the coal-black bruises across the upper right side of his face.
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  He was oblivious to my stare. “Thank you … for coming … at this … hour.” His teeth clacked, every syllable distinct. He pulled the bell cord and offered nourishment, alcoholic if I wished. I knew better than to ask if he would join me. I requested coffee, both for survival and to curry his favor, in case I was too optimistic about his intentions. “And what did you think of my New England tour?”

  “A triumph, by all accounts,” I replied. The flattery was harmless enough and, by Washington standards, truthful.

  He grinned, revealing acres of enamel. “It was, wasn’t it?”

  “Especially the last day.” I nodded at his leg. “Staring death in the face.”

  “Facedown, I would say,” Theodore cackled. “Really, I am not at all badly hurt. In my salad days, I suffered worse injuries at football and polo. I would have been ashamed then to acknowledge that I felt hurt. I wouldn’t care a snap of my fingers for what happened, if not for the death of poor Craig.”

  “How about your boys?” I knew that the two youngest, Archie and Quentin, worshiped the glorious Craig. “Have you told them?”

  A portly woman with thin silvery hair entered with a tray of coffee and crumpets. I was sorry to have disturbed the servants from their sleep, but I consoled myself: this was not my doing.

  Once the servant withdrew, Theodore went on, “Not yet. Haven’t the heart.” I noticed a dampness on the president’s cheeks. “I hated having a man around me all the time, but after Buffalo it seemed I had no choice.” Two days short of a year earlier, an anarchist had entered the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition, draping a handkerchief over his gun. President McKinley took eight days to die. “Rarely have I known anyone like Big Bill Craig. Nothing weak about him. The most faithful man I ever knew. A Scotsman, in the Queen’s Grenadiers. Volunteered for the Sudanese war and saved a comrade—wouldn’t talk about it. He marched six hundred miles across the desert from Alexandria to Khartoum, in relief of the mahdi’s siege, and arrived to find Gordon murdered.” Theodore’s fist shook, as if he were there. “An expert horseman he is—was…” It tore from his throat. “And a boxer besides. And with a sword! Put an apple between your chin and your throat—not mine, mind you—he would split it in half. He would slice right through a sheep with a single stroke, or so I’ve heard—and not from him. He has been teaching me the broadsword.”