The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Read online

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  To Nancy,

  the source of life

  beyond the keyboard

  PROLOGUE

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1902

  Big Bill Craig, the president’s bodyguard, saw it first. Or heard it. The clanging was insistent, like a boxing gong. The Secret Service man spun in his seat and gazed up Howard’s Hill in horror. A trolley car was hurtling down toward them.

  On the thirteenth and final morning of Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign tour of New England, his horse-drawn carriage was leaving Pittsfield, at the western edge of Massachusetts. The city’s church bells had tolled; the factory whistles had rung; the schools and mills had shut down. The president had addressed two thousand admirers from a bunting-bedecked bandstand in Park Square, and his open-air landau was a mile and a half along South street, rolling toward Lenox.

  It was ten fifteen.

  “Oh, my God!” Craig cried. He reached an arm over President Roosevelt’s head. “Look out! Hold fast!”

  The sepulchral Governor Crane turned and leapt to his feet and waved his arms. The electric streetcar kept rushing downhill, along the center of South street. At the bottom of the hill the road narrowed and the tracks slanted to the right; this was where carriages ordinarily crossed. To-day the vantage point was crowded with Kodak enthusiasts.

  The landau’s two lead horses cleared the tracks. The two wheel horses did not. The trolley’s metal fender slammed into the nearer wheel horse and the left front wheel of the rig. The carriage toppled over, splintering its sides. Its occupants went flying. Wheels spun unfettered. Horses kicked at nothing. Their shrieks filled the air.

  Suddenly, silence.

  Governor Crane landed on his shoulder in the roadside twenty feet away, uninjured but white with shock. George Bruce Cortelyou, the president’s secretary, suffered cuts to his nose and the back of his head. The carriage driver lay still under the fallen horse. President Roosevelt was thrown thirty or forty feet, into a bank of soft earth, crumpling his silk hat, shattering his spectacles, ripping his frock coat at the elbows, crushing the red rose in his lapel, and covering his patent leather shoes with dust. His right cheek was swollen and blood flowed from a cut on his lip. His bronzed face was splattered with mud.

  His personal physician, Dr. Lung, in the nearest carriage, rushed to his side and probed the barrel chest for broken ribs.

  “I’m all right.” The growl came out as a squeak; the president pushed his doctor away. “Some of the others are badly hurt. Look after them.”

  Roosevelt jumped up in a rage. The trolley had rolled twenty feet down the track, and by the time he reached it his temper had calmed and his fists had loosened, if slightly. “Where is the motorman of this car?” he demanded.

  “Here, sir.”

  The respondent was a meek-looking man of indeterminate age, short and balding, with rounded features but a defiant crouch.

  “Did you lose control of the car?” Roosevelt’s high-pitched voice had grown husky.

  The motorman looked too frightened to answer.

  “If you did, that was one thing,” the president bore on. “If you didn’t, it was a goddamned outrage.”

  The passengers gasped.

  “You don’t suppose I tried to do it, do you?” the motorman managed at last.

  Roosevelt bit his puffy lip.

  “Well, I had the right-of-way, anyway,” Euclid Madden, for that was his name, continued. “You had a right to look out for yourselves.”

  Roosevelt looked like he wanted to punch the man. With a visible effort, he turned away.

  That was when he saw what remained of William Craig. The Secret Service man lay under the sharp metal wheels of the trolley. He had been dragged along the track, his mighty torso crushed, his skull split open.

  The president sank to his knees. “Oh, poor Craig, poor Craig, poor Craig,” he moaned. “Here, some of you, get a blanket and throw it over that body.”

  He bounced to his feet and stalked off. No one dared follow.

  CHAPTER ONE

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1902

  “You should have come, Henry,” I said. “You’d have hated it.”

  Henry Adams had the good grace to laugh. It was a merry sound, so different from the Brahmin breathiness of his chatter. “Labor Day is a silly idea to start with,” he said. “Mr. Cleveland’s sop to the unions. So, when is Capitalists’ Day, pray tell?”

  “Every day is Capitalists’ Day,” I replied.

  “You ought to know, Hay,” Henry jabbed. Then: “The lawyers lost, you say.”

  “Eight to two, on Georgetown College’s campus. The doctors hit the ball too damn hard. So did the lawyers, but right at someone.”

  “I find a certain pleasure in that, I must say, old boy.”

  Henry was well aware that I am a lawyer, though I have had the luck never to have practiced a day. “You don’t find pleasure in anything, Henry,” I said. “I’ve never known anyone who enjoyed his unhappiness more. Part of your charm.”

  “Only a part?”

  Our daily stroll usually began in Lafayette Square, in our topcoats and silk hats, around four o’clock in the afternoon. The walks had been Clara’s idea—what wasn’t?—and not only to keep me, at the venerable age of sixty-three, in (you should pardon the expression) boxing trim. Mainly it was to lure me away from my office, in that sand castle next to the White House, the State, War, and Navy Building, whose architect had killed himself a year after the final geegaw was squeezed on. Lately, the world had cooperated. It’s a pain in the arse to be a world power—how I’ve missed spending all summer in New Hampshire—but I shouldn’t complain. This summer was the quietest since the mid-’nineties, or certainly in the four years since McKinley had done me the dubious honor of making me his secretary of state. (Not that I played hard to get; I just made it look that way.) Theodore, probably against his better judgment, had kept me on.

  To-day Henry and I dispensed with our topcoats, for the afternoon was hot and humid—womb-like, in my way of thinking. Henry was wearing his starched frock coat, wing collar, and funereal cravat. He looked even paler than usual, his cheeks thinner. More hair seemed to have migrated from his scalp to his pointed, devilish beard; he looked like the oversize brain that he was. Yet I had never known a man so honest, in his intellect and in his morals.

  We glided to a stop, without conferring, along the western edge of the square, in front of 22 Jackson Place northwest. The sturdy brick town house with the pretentious Greek temple pediments over the windows was serving as the temporary White House. The real one was being renovated, cella
r to attic, adding a western wing for the president’s executive offices.

  “You know, Theodore is a stupid, blundering, bolting bull calf,” Henry was saying. The diamond stickpin in his cravat caught the afternoon light.

  “Tell me, Henry, what do you really think?”

  “And he might have arranged this accident by himself. He is capable of it, you know.”

  “That’s cynical, Henry, even for you.”

  “But plausible. For a president, you know, character is destiny.”

  “Why on earth would you ever think that?” I teased. Henry’s grandfather and great-grandfather had been presidents, of which he never tired of reminding me. But, as usual, Henry had a point. Too often, I made the mistake of judging presidents as people—idiotic, I know, for a secretary of state, but I had befriended enough of them since Lincoln not to be cowed. And in this regard, I had to admit that Theodore came up a little short. (Not that I was pure.) Yes, he had the noblest traits—intelligence, fidelity, passion, sincerity, honesty, a grasp of history, a good heart, not to mention gobs of courage, physical and moral. His undeniable virtues were entangled, however, with a fixation on himself and a belief in his own rightness that scared me. He was warm to his friends (his thank-you notes were sonatas in paper and ink) but quick to belittle his political opponents as aunties or eunuchs. You didn’t want him at your dinner table if anyone else had a desire to talk. Here was a man of substance and probity who was still in many ways a child; you had to remember, as his best man said, that Theodore was about six years old. I liked him, I did—I made allowances for youth. Maybe he was stuffed fuller with talents than any mortal could handle with grace.

  Cortelyou’s wire had come before noon, telling of the collision and the two arrests. The president was “considerably bruised” but not injured seriously, and Governor Crane had escaped without a scratch. But (from Cortelyou, it was probably an afterthought) William Craig was dead. No explanation.

  Not Craig! Even now it was hard to believe. What a horror! Nothing like Del, of course, our late and intensely lamented son, but still. What a man Craig was! The man any man wanted to be. An accomplished boxer, wrestler, and swordsman; a war hero, muscled but modest; an invincible man. Yet his pectorals couldn’t protect him. And if his couldn’t, whose could?

  “He loves the drama.” Henry was harping on Theodore. “He adores being the center of attention.”

  “To the point of almost killing himself?”

  “Especially then. For a grand exit. But he didn’t, did he? A narcissist—that is what that sex-crazed doctor in Vienna would call our well-bred Mr. Roosevelt.”

  “Henry, I shall never take you seriously again.”

  “No need to, old boy. I take myself seriously enough for both of us.” And at that, Henry squirmed—rather a rarity. A famed historian in his own right, he thought right well of himself. But didn’t we all? (Most Washingtonians, you should remember, are self-selected.) But this time, apparently, his discomfort was not about pride. “There is something I need to show you,” he said.

  Henry bolted across Jackson Place and into Lafayette Park. This was the true center of the nation and more and more, therefore, of the civilized world. The iron fence was gone, a victim of democracy run amok—as Henry would rail—but the maples and elms were still in full leaf. Good ol’ Andy Jackson faced us on his rearing horse—the “tippy-toe statue,” as Tad Lincoln used to call it. How Henry hated looking from his bedroom window at his grandpappy’s rival—twice—for the presidency! Along the east and west sides of the park, in the Federalist-style brick town houses, resided ghosts from the past—of Seward and Sumner, of Webster and Blaine, of Decatur and McClellan. On the third side, to the north, Henry and I had built our houses side by side. (I hesitate to call mine a mansion, but others do.) From my bedroom I could see across the park to the White House, to the second-story room where I had slept in Lincoln’s day. Yet the park remained as tranquil as ever. The bowers of trees, the curves of gravel paths, the dawdling civil servants, the benches with courting couples—the place felt removed from the world yet surrounded by it, pressed in by it, like the eye of a hurricane. Beyond Lafayette Square, Henry liked to say, the country began.

  I scrambled to keep up. It was rare that Henry outpaced me. I knew where he was going before he got there.

  Marcus Alonzo Hanna was living there now, next to the ugly new opera house. The cream-colored brick house had a turret-shaped foyer and a second-floor balcony with a wrought iron railing. The senator from Ohio was the industrialist who had purchased the White House for William McKinley in ’ninety-six, and Roosevelt feared him as a rival for the Republican nomination in ’aught-four. But Hanna wasn’t the lure—not for Henry. Of that I was certain. Henry was drawn by a ghost, although not a ghost from the past. Lizzie’s ghost. A living ghost, as I understood all too well. Henry had loved her once; now it was my turn. But was it love or infatuation? I had spent far too much effort debating the subject and hating myself for it.

  * * *

  “Electric cars are the enemies of humanity,” Henry Adams pronounced. “So sayeth the kaiser.”

  “Then it must be true,” Clara said, pouring the tea. She knew how to handle Henry—with gentle mockery. My wife’s empathy was absolute, so she was rarely if ever disappointed in Henry, or in anyone else, including me. Her advantage was low expectations—the secret to happiness in life. I admired that in her. Envied it, in fact. Tried to emulate it and usually fell short. (But what else was new?) She had only the highest expectations for herself.

  “Did you hear about the electric streetcar that rammed the rear of a train?” Henry said. “A couple of months ago—you were at the Fells.” That was our lake house in New Hampshire. “Happened in the city here, on Four-and-a-half street southwest. Threw the trolley from its tracks and tossed the passengers from their seats. Scared the poor devils half to death. And just the other day, the frightened horse on Wisconsin avenue that collided with one of those steam-spewing automobiles. Only by some miracle was nobody—”

  “We are living in an age of miracles,” I pointed out, watching the cream in my tea coalesce into the shape of Luzon.

  “And those miracles will murder us all,” Henry said. “I should prefer the twelfth century over the twentieth any day of the week. Less brutal, for one thing. And grander in conception. The finest epoch in Christian civilization, as the construction of Chartres and of Mont-Saint-Michel will attest.” Henry’s forearm swept close to the teapot, alluding (although never admitting) to his current opus. I happened to know, by way of Lizzie, that he was just finishing the first draft. “And compared to what, may I ask? The Kodak, naphtha lamps, rubber tires?”

  “How about the dentistry?” Clara cooed.

  We were taking tea, as we ordinarily did, in my library. I loved this room, more than any I had ever called my own. It had plush chairs and mahogany woodwork and Oriental rugs and a pair of stuffed white cranes perched near the ceiling, above the carved settees. The fireplace was a yellow marble, the hearth a reddish rock. Books overflowing the shelves piled up on the floor. Clara (and Henry, of course) thought the room overfurnished, but I found the clutter a comfort. It swaddled me, and besides, I knew where everything was. I was sitting in my maroon leather armchair.

  “Did he have a family, John?” Clara said. She was still thinking about Craig.

  “He was to get married next month,” I replied. “At the White House. To a lovely girl.”

  The conversation turned to the price of anthracite coal, quadrupled since the miners had walked out last spring, thence to the unending mess in the Philippines, before settling on an issue that mattered more: Should lilies rather than roses decorate the tables at our younger daughter’s wedding? Alice was marrying a congressman’s son (not exactly a recommendation) at month’s end at the Fells. The nuptials promised to be less fancy—and less expensive—than Helen’s were (to a Whitney!) last winter. Yet Del, our wise and smiling son, would be absent again.


  Clara said, “What do you think, Uncle Henry?” That’s what our children called our next-door neighbor and dearest friend.

  “I think that Alice will look so beautiful,” he replied, “that no one would notice, lily or rose.”

  Clara beamed. She, too, was beautiful—to me, at least. Her features were blunter than Venus de Milo’s; her body, sturdier. The candor of her gaze told you she was nobody’s fool. Yet kindness was written all over her face; her deep brown eyes gave root to laugh lines. The bloom in her cheeks made my knees weak. When Clara smiled, she lit up a room. I liked being in that room—loved it, really. Still do. That’s what made whatever I was feeling for Lizzie that much worse.

  Henry was holding forth on the autumnal troubles of daisies when a perfunctory knock brought James gliding in, a silver tray in his hand. The butler was a slight man with cappuccino-colored skin and a fringe of white hair. “Fer you, suh,” he said.

  The yellow envelope rested on a silver tray. Few people knew where to reach me in the late afternoon. I used the ivory-handled dagger, a gift from the Abyssinian emperor, to slit open the envelope with a savagery that surprised myself. From Cortelyou, was my guess.

  Wrong.

  “HAY,” the telegram began. Cortelyou would have said “MR. SECRETARY”—or nothing, to save a few cents. “COLLISION NO ACCIDENT. COME HERE TO SAGAMORE HILL.”

  Cortelyou would have omitted “HERE.”

  Only one of my correspondents would be so peremptory.

  “THEODORE.”

  I read the wire aloud. “First train in the morning,” I announced.

  Henry seemed shaken, uncharacteristically groping for words. “I told you,” he declared. “He arranged it.”

  I described Henry’s surmise to Clara.

  “That is nonsense, Henry,” she said, “and you know it.”

  “I know nothing of the sort,” Henry replied, his stubbornness engaged. “Indeed, I know nothing about nothing. That is part of my charm.”