The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Read online

“For one thing, I should hope he ranks second—or possibly third, Mr. Hay, after yourself?—on Mr. Cortelyou’s list of who would stand to benefit from Father’s … departure. The good senator desires nothing more in this world than to be president. He lusts for it. You can smell it on his cheap frock coats. Ask him,” Alice added, “about Northern Securities.”

  “Ask him what?” the president said.

  “Why does he own stock?”

  “In what?”

  “In Northern Securities.”

  “How in God’s creation do you know that?” Roosevelt said.

  “It is something I happen to know,” she replied, with a coy smile and a toss of her head. “Father, you are not the only member of this family who knows it all.”

  I, for one, did not doubt it.

  * * *

  The Treasury Department building, on the opposite side of the White House from the State, War, and Navy Building, was grandiose, but in a different way. Stolid was the best you could say of its imposing, pillared, Greek-aspiring bulk. More accurate was boring. Which, arguably, a treasury department ought to be.

  I used the entrance that faced the White House. This was the direct route, so I would run into fewer people who might want a minute of my time. I climbed the semicircular staircase. I liked this building. Other than the electric chandeliers and the elevators stuffed into the stairwells, nothing had changed inside since Lincoln’s day. The corridors went on forever, and the tiles in black and white diamond could give you double vision. But I found it comforting—familiar, anyway. I liked things that didn’t change. I knew what they were.

  John Wilkie’s office was on the third floor. It was a small, cocoonish, cantilevered room with low windows on three sides and a marble fireplace in the angled corner. Behind the desk sat the forty-two-year-old Secret Service chief, the youngest in history. He leaned back in his revolving chair and put a fresh match to his meerschaum pipe. Clouds of smoke sparkled in the sunlight.

  I took his coatless informality as a compliment. His pince-nez, his center-parted hair, his mustache curled to points, and his dandyish dress did not distinguish him from young men in every barbershop across America. But two things did. One was the depth of his gaze—not piercing, in the manner of a policeman on the prowl, but penetrating in a leisurely way, like a wide-eyed child’s. The other distinction was his demeanor—patient, controlled, almost serene, like neither the newspaperman he had been nor the sleuth he was now. I had known his daddy, a Civil War correspondent for The New York Times. The younger Wilkie had been a crime reporter and then the city editor of the Chicago Daily Tribune before he became the unconventional choice of the very conventional Treasury secretary, a fellow Chicagoan, Lyman Gage.

  But the match of man to job had succeeded. And why not? Both a newspaperman and a detective tried to get to the bottom of things, to ferret out the truth, to add two and two together and conjure up four, or maybe four and a half. Wilkie had been brilliant in rounding up counterfeiters, the Secret Service’s main chore (and also in making sure the public learned of his triumphs). Since the tragedy in Buffalo, the agency had taken on the responsibility of protecting a gregarious president who resisted having a nanny. It had just lost an agent while doing so.

  In a fog of a sweet-smelling smoke, Wilkie finished telling me about Agent Craig’s funeral in Chicago, which he had attended in Theodore’s place. “The president sent flowers,” Wilkie said. “Purple and white asters, hydrangeas, and I don’t know what all.”

  I could think of nothing to say, so I sipped my coffee.

  “It was a year to the day since President McKinley was shot,” Wilkie said. “One of the pallbearers was the agent who tackled Czolgosz after he fired.”

  Again, I kept silent. Losing a president was as sad as losing your father. How many could you stand to lose in a lifetime?

  “Do you have it with you?” Wilkie said.

  I had wired ahead. “I don’t go anywhere without it,” I replied.

  Wilkie’s laugh was easy and warm. He leaned across his spotless desk, his sinewy forearms flexed in anticipation.

  I had wrapped a folio beneath the cardboard that held the map. I explained that the motorman had denied looking inside at the map, and I asked how certain a match of fingerprints might be.

  “Better than Bertillon, that I can tell you. You can make a mistake with calipers but not—if you’re careful enough—with the loops and arches and whorls. And our men are careful.”

  “No one is careful all the time,” I said.

  “They’d better be.” Which did not mean they were. “And, frankly, it takes less skill to read a fingerprint correctly.”

  “Are they good enough to use in court?”

  “Soon enough.” In other words, no. “I will send this to the lab.”

  “And this.” I handed him the note fashioned from newspaper scraps.

  He read it and said, “Congratulations, Mr. Secretary. A genuine death threat. Your first?”

  “Yes, thank you. And frightfully overdue, I must say. A measure, perhaps, of my lack of—what?—provocation.”

  “Ah, I lost my virginity a few years ago, from a gang of counterfeiters we caught in Wichita. Beady-eyed promises they made. None of them, as you can see, kept.” He added, before I could, “Yet.”

  Wilkie examined the note, which he balanced on his delicate fingertips like a waiter’s at Delmonico’s. “We should be able to identify the fonts,” he said.

  “I’ve matched a couple of them, from The Berkshire Eagle.” I had brought copies of the local newspapers with me. “Though I’m not sure what that tells us, except that whoever sent it lives in Pittsfield or nearby. Which narrows it down to twenty-some thousand people.”

  “Only the ones who can read,” Wilkie said.

  * * *

  “It’s a derringer.” I pulled the silver-plated, rosewood-handled pistol from my waistcoat pocket and showed Alvey Adee. “A twenty-two caliber, American Arms Company double-barreled derringer, to be precise. Wilkie forced it on me.”

  “Cute,” Adee chuckled. “I fear for the fawns. Bullets, too?”

  “Oh yes, he trusted me that far. I must warn you, Adee, don’t get me mad. You can never tell what’s in the heart of a man.” I was at least half joking.

  “And a holster?”

  “No sir, a cowboy I shall be. Like the president.” Except that I was a westerner (an Illinoisan, anyway), born and bred at the edge of the frontier. “So, what’s on the boil here?”

  Adee was carrying his folders of he-must-sees and if-there’s-times. “The usual annoyances,” he said. “Yet another ultimatum from the kaiser about the Venezuelan debt—the man doesn’t know when to quit. An angry letter from Colombia’s senate president about the canal.”

  “That damn canal.” Dickering with Colombians for rights to dig across the Panama isthmus, which they owned—America wasn’t the hemisphere’s only imperialist power—was like grappling with a squid.

  “A request from Morocco for the use of a warship. That’s Abdelaziz, our favorite sultan.”

  “Why isn’t he asking Root?” As the war secretary, Elihu Root dispatched the warships.

  “He doesn’t like Root.”

  “So? Nobody does.”

  “It’s you the sultan loves.”

  “I am blessed. I will need to talk with Root and the president. What does he want it for, and for how long?”

  “To scare the pirates, as I understand it. The saber of big, bad imperial America. His letter and my typewritten transcriptions—well, Margaret’s, with my annotations—I’ll leave them with you.”

  “I can’t thank you enough. Anything else?”

  “The Mormon missionaries ousted from Prussia.”

  “Can’t say I blame Prussia.”

  “Even so.”

  “Yes, even so. Draft a letter to the foreign minister. Freedom of religion. American citizens. Et cetera, et cetera.”

  “And Italy’s new restrictions on importing Ameri
can bacon and lard.”

  I covered my face with my hands. “Another letter.”

  “And here’s another draft of the letter on Roumanian Jews. I…” Adee paused and peered at the ceiling.

  “If you have something to say, say it.”

  “This is none of our business, you know. We had nothing to do with that treaty.” The Berlin treaty of 1878, ending the Russo-Turkish War and creating the Balkan states, was the European powers’ handiwork. “There is a bloody good argument for staying out of it.”

  “I understand that. I do. But we shall make it our business. We are the big chaps on the block now, Adee. I’m not sure I like it, but reality is not to be trifled with. And what is the good of being a world power if you can’t have a little fun from time to time? What is the point of power other than to use it? I must say, there is something satisfying, if a little quaint, about doing what’s right.”

  I listened to my own last words and quivered inside. I tried to block Lizzie out of my mind, with my usual lack of success.

  * * *

  “No shortage of suspects, I should think,” Henry Adams said. He looked shriveled, like a gnome; his energy was cerebral. “Everyone loathes our dear president.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “You just won’t admit it, old boy.”

  “You’re incorrigible, Henry.”

  “One of my finer traits.”

  Ladies twirled their parasols in the late afternoon sun, while their servants trailed a step behind, juggling packages. Barouches clattered past. Connecticut avenue was the closest that Washington came to Paris—not quite a near miss, but a respectable attempt. The wide boulevard was newly paved with asphalt, sticky in the summer, slippery when wet, dusty when dry. It boasted the city’s smartest shops, the chic restaurants, the fashionable apartment houses. I was planning to build one of the latter myself, right where we were standing, on the southeastern corner of Connecticut and L.

  “Those,” I said, pointing to the low row houses along L street. “They’ll be gone. We’re going eight stories high, two hundred feet along L, a hundred sixty-four along Connecticut, almost to K. One of the biggest in the city. Curved cornices, balconies, the finest limestone, first-rate construction.”

  That I felt the need to boast was telling. It came from embarrassment—I understood myself enough to know that. No reason for it, I guess. Getting rich quickly and undeservedly, wasn’t that the American dream? The Klondike Gold Rush and all of that.

  We strolled north along Connecticut avenue. Buildings were going up everywhere. Merely looking at the construction felt exhausting. Henry had stopped paying attention. He was saying, “Too many people would want him … out of the way.”

  “Want who out of the way?” I said.

  “Him. The list of possible suspects, I would imagine, is endless. Besides you and his great rival Hanna and the anarchists and the socialists and a few million Filipinos. Any self-respecting southerner, for example, should hate him for dining at the White House with Booker T. Not even Lincoln broke bread with Frederick Douglass—or did he?”

  “I wish he had. McClellan might have defeated him in ’sixty-four and he’d have lived.”

  “And the southerners are just the beginning. The generals aren’t so fond of him, either. He’s certain he knows more than they do about war—and maybe he does. Nor does his own party adore him. The Wall street Republicans and the chamber of commerce patriots are stuck with a man who frightens them, and for good reason. Not to mention the anti-imperialists and the railroads and the coal owners. Oh yes, and the consumers of anthracite, too. Everyone has a reason to hate this man. Not to mention the people who actually know him.”

  “Henry, Henry, last time you said that whatever happened was his fault. Now it’s everyone else’s.”

  “And the trusts—God knows they hate him, though he claims not to hate them. These are the men his beloved daddy begged for donations to the charities he took credit for.”

  “Henry, now you’re just being vicious.”

  “Another of my virtues. What is vicious is pulling a gun on my dearest friend.” (How news spreads! I thought.) “My point is, how many sworn enemies can a president earn in less than a year? Our beloved Theodore outpaces even your beloved Lincoln. There’s no end of possible suspects. Assuming that anyone was to blame in the first place.”

  “Which I still don’t assume. As dear departed Nicolay used to—”

  “Yes, I know. Never assume.”

  Henry had a certain scorn for anyone else’s epigrams. As a scholar, however—as a judge of information—he was rigorous and fearless and obsessively fair.

  This gave me an idea.

  * * *

  “Did you ever consider becoming a lawyer?” I said, pouring the tea, spilling a little from too showy a height.

  “Did you?” Henry replied.

  I had to laugh. “The requirement of moral character is what stood in my way. Politics has no such barrier.”

  “Nor does Harvard.” Where Henry had taught.

  Clara listened with a faint air of amusement, as if she were watching a vaudeville skit with timeworn jokes.

  “But did you?” I persisted. “Ever want to be a lawyer, I mean? Because now is your opportunity.”

  “For a moment or two, once. The majesty of the law has too much structure for my tastes. I wouldn’t say you’ve taken to it yourself, dear boy.”

  “For a moment or two, once. Then Lincoln came calling—well, Nicolay. And for me, that was the end of the law. So I went into politics and then diplomacy and then journalism and then business and a bit of writing and then back to diplomacy and, voilà, here I be. Which is probably just as well. The law is built on logic. Diplomacy is built on illogic—like people are, or nations. More in line with my talents, such as they are. The reason I ask about the law is that I think you would be good at it.”

  “Is that a compliment?” Henry said.

  “Actually, more of a tactic.” I enjoyed his puzzlement. “Of persuasion. To get you to do what I want.”

  “Don’t I always, old boy?”

  “Often enough. I am hoping to snatch you away from your beloved twelfth century to spend a day or two or three in the twentieth. Could you withstand the shock?”

  “I don’t know,” he said gravely. I could not tell for sure if he was kidding, but I suspected he wasn’t. “All right,” he said at last. “I am listening.”

  I had drilled down to the seriousness beneath Henry’s cynical pose. I explained, in confidence, about Cortelyou’s hunch that Northern Securities wanted Roosevelt gone—such a nicer word than dead or murdered—and that a run-on sentence or a crumpled letter in the boxfuls of documents amassed for trial might betray the trust’s intentions. I needed an inquisitive—and, dare I say, lawyerly—mind to pore through it all. The trial was to take place in Saint Louis, but in the meantime the evidence was stored in the bowels of the Justice Department, on Pennsylvania avenue at Seventeenth street.

  Henry’s head tilted back, until his hairline disappeared. He was interested. “First thing in the morning,” he said.

  I consulted my watch. It was twelve minutes before five. “Gulp down your tea,” I replied.

  * * *

  A machine behind the seats hiccupped and growled and a shaky image shimmered across the screen. It was thrilling to watch the coronation ceremony of King Edward VII, in all of its pomp and glory. Naturally, it wasn’t the actual event (no monarch would allow a cumbersome motion picture camera to intrude) but a reenactment, in what looked like Westminster Abbey. Who needed color or sound? Even so, it was amazing. A theater devoted entirely to moving pictures had opened recently in Los Angeles, the nation’s thirty-sixth most populous city. Washington, two and a half times as big, had its Halls of the Ancients.

  This palace of entertainment, on New York avenue between Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets, had just reopened under new management. The Armat Motion Picture Company had kept the “halls” of reproduc
ed antiquities—the columns of Karnak, the Assyrian throne room, the Theban gate. But now, past the Roman atrium and before the Moorish palace, a new lecture hall had thirteen rows of seats for a cinematograph exhibition that ran five times a day.

  For the eight thirty show, Clara and I sat in the front row, where no ostrich-plumed hat could block the screen.

  “Look, look,” Clara burbled, as the archbishop of Canterbury, or someone in his garb, tottered toward the throne. She had relished my sixteen months as ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s, with all of the wigs-and-ermine silliness. “He’s going to trip,” she said.

  “We’d have heard,” I whispered back.

  Queen Victoria’s forever-patient eldest son (or his doppelgänger) was on bended knee on August 9, while the archbishop tapped with a sword and lowered the crown. Thus the age of Victoria ended and the new century truly began.

  This took four minutes, tops, before the screen went black.

  We stirred in our seats. “These moving pictures, or whatever you call them, might catch on,” I suggested—rather boldly, I thought.

  I turned and surveyed our fellow adventurers into the future. Women favored gowns of taffeta or velvet, often with evening cloaks of brocaded satin. Their hats were laden with lace, ribbons, flowers, fruit, and deceased birds. (I swore I saw a robin’s egg nestled in straw.) The men wore black. Everyone was dressed as for a ballet, not that Washington had any such ornament.

  “Mr. Secretary!”

  My breath caught, just hearing the seductive alto I knew too well. It issued from the sixth or seventh row, near the center.

  “Mrs. Cameron,” I called back, as nonchalantly as I could, across the too-attentive crowd.

  “Wait!” she said. It was more than a request.

  Lizzie pushed past the overfed doyennes entrapped by the plump-is-pretty ideals of the past. Lizzie was not plump and, strictly speaking, she was not pretty; her chin was thin, her nose too long, her mouth too squat, her face top-heavy. But she was stunning. In part it was because of her figure—a corseted hourglass, a sensation of the new Gibson Girl style. But more than that, it was because of her bearing. Regal was trite. But what else do you call a woman whose lustrous brown hair was piled high like a temple of an Eastern religion, whose neck was long and elegant, whose sparkle captured your attention, whose slate-blue eyes grabbed yours and let them go if and when they wished. Lizzie was beautiful—and, oh Lord, did she know it. She accepted the attentions of men as natural and inexhaustible—her due—and useful besides. Who was to say she was wrong?