[Music] Just this past year, President Obama announced that the Alaskan mountain named after McKinley, Mount McKinley, would be renamed Denali, its original Native American name. And not really—as we’ve seen in the case of some other monuments and memorials—not really because of any failings or controversies that had come to light about President McKinley, but just really because it had seemed inappropriate and insensitive to many, in the first place, that we had written over a part of Alaskans' heritage to commemorate a president from Ohio who had no connection to this mountain and who had never even seen Alaska. So today there is no more Mount McKinley, and there are very few other cultural nods to McKinley today either.
So other than his assassination, what else is a presidential podcast episode on McKinley supposed to focus on? Well, you’re gonna find out. I’m Lillian Cunningham, and this is the 24th episode of Presidential [Music].
"I’ll resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. " "A date which will live in infamy" [Music]. There are actually quite a few directions that I thought about taking this McKinley episode in.
We could have looked at the rise of American imperialism, which would have been really interesting, by talking about the Spanish-American War. McKinley had reluctantly entered that war, and in it, the U. S.
helped free Cuba from Spanish rule. The U. S.
also ended up gaining control over Guam, Puerto Rico, and bought the Philippines. So there’s that. I also thought about potentially digging really deeply into the debates over the gold standard, but I ended up deciding that for this episode we’re actually gonna mostly skip over McKinley’s time in the White House itself, and we’re going to examine two other transformations that were brought on by McKinley.
Now, one is that his assassination in 1901 prompted sort of the birth of the modern Secret Service, so we’re gonna talk about that at the end of the episode with my Washington Post colleague, Carolyn Inc. And the other thing, which we’re going to look at for the bulk of the episode, is why Karl Rove, who was the architect of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns and served as his chief of staff, thinks McKinley’s election in 1896 was one of the most important and transformational elections in American history.
He feels so strongly about that that he recently wrote a book all about McKinley’s election and the lessons he thinks American political campaigns today can take away from it. So, okay, here we go: William McKinley, born in 1843, president from 1897 until 1901. McKinley’s first vice president was Garret Hobart, and his second was Theodore Roosevelt.
And now, let’s see McKinley through the eyes of Karl Rove. I mostly want to talk to you about the 1896 election, but before we do that, just to make sure that everyone who listens to this podcast has a real image of McKinley in their head: Say I’m about to go on a blind date with him, and you know him and I don’t. Can you describe this man for me?
“Well, William McKinley is the unknown president of the United States. The 25th president is mainly remembered for having been assassinated and then followed in office by Theodore Roosevelt, but he is a much different figure when you get to examine his life. He’s a self-made man.
He came from a large family that lived in Northeast Ohio. His father ran an iron smelter; his mother was a deeply religious woman—Mother McKinley, they called her. He was born in Niles, Ohio, but his parents, believing in the importance of education, moved to Poland, Ohio, where there was a good school.
At the age of 18, in April of 1861, McKinley, encouraged by Lincoln’s call, enlisted and became the 23rd Ohio. McKinley began the war as a private; he ended the war four years later as a major, having received three battlefield commissions for unbelievable valor. " So this is of course the Civil War, and he’s fighting on the Union side.
And while you mentioned his bravery, in a particular instance he rode straight across the open battlefield all by himself to carry a message to other Union troops. Right? A tent mate said it was a suicide mission.
At one point, a cannon shell goes off right next to him, and his tent mate, Russell Hastings, says, “We thought he was gone. ” Hmm, but he wrote later, “Out of the crack, the cloud of gray smoke came a small brown horse with the erect horseman. ” Somehow or another, McKinley once again makes it through just in the nick of time.
He rides back, walks into the command tent, and his brigade commander turns around and is startled to see him. His brigade commander, Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, a future president, says, “My God, never expected to see you in this life again.
” The rest of his life, he was a congressman, governor of Ohio, and president of the United States. The title he preferred to be called above all others was “Major. ” He said, “I don’t know about those others, but I know I earned that one.
” So he has this reputation for bravery, but what were some of the other hallmarks of his character? One of the few things that Republicans and Democrats could agree upon was the sterling character and personal charm of William McKinley. Thomas Brackett Reed, the future Speaker of the House, said, “My adversaries go in the House, go at me tooth and nail, but they feel obliged to apologize to William before they call him names.
” Enormous personal charm; he was completely devoted to his wife. They lost two daughters: one as an infant and one at the age of five. They never had any other children.
His wife spiraled into. . .
A life of depression and seizures; she probably had epilepsy that came on from a fall during one of her pregnancies. McKinley was totally devoted to her, and he was a man of enormous compassion for the working man as well. As a young lawyer during his first race for Congress, he was asked to take on the defense of 22 miners who were accused of acts of violence against the mine owners.
No one would defend them, and he took them on, got all but one of them off, and then refused to take a fee for it because he felt that the money would be better spent to care for and feed the families of the miners who were out on strike. So he was an enormously popular and appealing figure. When we look at his political rise from congressman to governor to presidential candidate, among the traits you've mentioned and others you haven't yet mentioned, what do you think were some of the key ones to his rise?
First of all, he was very hardworking; he was not a show horse, he was a workhorse. For example, in his first term in Congress, he did not immediately speak; he waited months before he made his first address. When he did, he was thoroughly well-prepared, and he was a good orator.
He knew how to make an argument. As governor, he became governor after he was defeated for reelection when the Republicans were wiped out in the 1890 elections. He was elected governor in large part because of the support of working folks, you know, of miners and factory workers who admired his leadership on economic issues and understood that he had a natural sympathy for them.
In his race for the presidency, he ran the first modern presidential campaign, both the first modern presidential primary campaign and the first modern presidential campaign. A big focus of it was on the interests of working folks. I mean, there’s a letter from one of his cousins who writes him saying, "I reminded the Executive Committee of what you've often told us: it is with the interests of the working man that we must be concerned.
Capital can take care of itself. " So this natural empathy for working-class folks shone through in everything that he did. His election was in 1896, which is essentially the height of the Gilded Age.
Some people today look back and see many parallels between our time and then, one of those being the idea that working people in the country were angry at the time, particularly about the widening income inequality. Well, I think they were less worried about income inequality than about having a job and having an income themselves. As we approached the 1896 campaign, we were in the midst of what was the greatest depression the country had ever suffered, or would suffer until the Great Depression itself.
It was brought on by a lot of different factors, some of which were out of the control of ordinary folks. We were becoming part of a global economy, but we were also going through a very disruptive period of innovation, where an artisan who used to make a tin plate by hand and sell it for a quarter now had to compete with a machine that turned out those plates with a speed he couldn't keep up with, in a uniformity he could not match, and at a price that was well below his. This was happening in every part of the economy.
Remember, this is a period during which the electric light bulb is invented, and electrical engines, and the automobile, and the refrigerated rail car, and the telephone—all kinds of things are roiling the economy. It was also a period that looks sort of like ours when it comes to politics—only worse. We had five presidential elections in a row leading up to the 1896 election where no one received a majority of the popular vote; nobody got 50%.
We had two presidents elected during that period who had a majority in the electoral college but lost the popular vote. One of those involved a five-month long dispute about the electoral college votes of Florida, and the political parties were at each other’s throats. The politics contained a bitterness that’s hard for us to understand because not only did the two parties deeply disagree, but they were also still fighting the Civil War.
They didn’t get anything done—in fact, that’s one of the things that is emblematic of the period: very little got done because the two parties couldn’t reach an agreement. This is why the 1896 election is so important. Political scientists have studied it for years as one of the great five realigning elections in America.
We talk about Jefferson and the emergence of the Democratic-Republicans in 1800, we talk about Andrew Jackson and the emergence of the modern political system with the Democratic Party in 1828, and Abraham Lincoln in the emergence of the Republicans in 1860, and FDR and the creation of the New Deal coalition in 1932. But in 1896, we ignore McKinley, who ends this era of broken politics and ushers in a 36-year period where Republicans dominate the landscape. All right, we're ready to dive into why it is that this 1896 campaign was ultimately so transformative.
To set the stage, the two presidential candidates ended up being McKinley, of course, for the Republicans, and then William Jennings Bryan for the Democrats. Now, if anything about this election sounds vaguely familiar, it's probably Bryan's famous speech at the Democratic convention. Where he says, "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold," you could take Bernie Sanders and say, and take what he says, and you would find many of those phrases echoed in what William Jennings Bryan says.
He is focused on defeating the money power; he is attacking the eastern financial interests, the money grubbers of Wall Street and Lombard Street. The bridge—Wall Street, you know—he talks about the idol holders of capital, the joblessness. But at certain points during that depression, you know, one out of every five, one out of every six Americans was out of work, and McKinley takes a different approach.
McKinley is talking about, "We're all in this together; neither capital nor labor can be prosperous unless the other is prosperous. " During the campaigns, one of the policy debates that is front and center is this question over whether the currency should be on the gold standard or whether silver can serve as the basis. McKinley is for gold; Bryan is for silver.
Maybe you can just explain why people at the time cared so passionately about this debate and what in it today is still interesting or informative for us. It is hard for us today to grasp what this is all about. The advocates of silver were essentially calling for an inflationary currency, and this was essentially the cry of the agrarian South and West: mortgage holders and people who were on the crop lien system, people who owed money to either distant financial companies that held their mortgages or who owed money to local merchants.
The idea of a silver currency was the idea of, "We're going to free ourselves from the money power and be able to discharge our debts in money that's worth, you know, half as much. " The idea of a gold currency was that money ought to be worth something, and we ought not to devalue and debase the currency. But what's interesting to me is that at the heart of this was an old argument that they were even fighting today.
In Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, he says this quote: "There are two ideas of government. Republicans believe if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, then their prosperity will leak through to those below" (end quote). Democrats believe, quote, "if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it" (end quote).
So it's an old argument; it's an argument that we're familiar with. It was just being fought over a different set of policies, what kind of a currency, what should money be, right? And so these monetary policy debates are really, I mean, in many ways a proxy adjust for the larger question of how do you grow an economy that ensures all Americans at all rungs of the income ladder, you know, reap some benefit from its growth.
Yeah, and Bryan answered by saying, "We must tear down the money power. We must break the power of Wall Street. We must have a silver currency that takes away the power the gold has upon us.
" He made this argument in an extraordinary whistle-stop campaign—the first such whistle-stop campaign in America's history. He traveled 18,000 miles by rail, made hundreds upon hundreds of speeches, and took to excoriating his opponent. Yes, I'd love to talk with you a bit more about the campaign tactics that really made this sort of the first modern presidential election and campaign.
I mean, it is really striking; you know, we've been moving in this podcast chronologically through the presidency, and really up until this point, it's been kind of the standard that a presidential candidate doesn't actually go out and campaign for himself. What we see in 1896 is just a very different approach than we've seen up until this point, right? As you say, prior to 1896, presidential candidates "left their fate in the hands of friends.
" They remained quiet; they had people who sort of helped organize their home state and to find some allies in adjoining states. You showed up at the convention, and your hope was to cut deals with other people. You'd basically make promises with regard to patronage, control of patronage, and cabinet posts, and hope to cobble together enough votes that you became the nominee of the party.
McKinley set out to do it differently. McKinley set out to walk into the convention in St. Louis in June of 1896 with a majority of the delegates committed to him—not through promises of boodle and patronage and cabinet posts, but instead bound to him by a belief that he was the right man for the job.
He did so in a typical, methodical way. In 1894, he traveled the country during the midterm elections, basically making friends, telling people what he's thinking about running, and beginning to organize around the country. In January of 1895, Marcus Alonzo Hanna, a longtime friend and political associate, leaves his family business and begins to work full-time to organize the primary campaign.
One of the most important and early things that they did is they went south; a quarter of the delegates to the National Convention came from the region that was where half the delegates necessary for the nomination itself came from. And normally, I mean, most of the people in the South who voted Republican were Black and poor. He produced a particularly powerful moment on this trip to the South: he became the first candidate of either party to appear before a Black audience during the primary and ask for their support.
This happens in Jacksonville, Florida. He then. .
. And this is the first time anything like this has ever happened. The next day, in Savannah, Georgia, he speaks in front of a Black audience at a church in Savannah; it’s the first time this has ever happened, and this is a powerful message that gets spread across the South.
McKinley is a man who, if he was from an abolitionist family, had abolitionist sentiments. One of the great motivations for him in the Civil War was not only to save the Union but also to end slavery. In fact, at the end of the war in 1865, his former brigade commander, Rutherford B.
Hayes, runs for governor, and he throws himself into the campaign. However, he spends almost as much time and energy fighting for a constitutional amendment to guarantee Black suffrage in Ohio. So this moment, where he meets with Black Republicans in the South, is a powerful symbol of the changing nature of his primary campaign.
McKinley does this all across the country, methodically organizing so that when he shows up in St. Louis, an absolute majority of the delegates are already committed to him. As a result, the outcome is foretold and happens on the first ballot of the first convention since 1872, and the re-nomination of Ulysses S.
Grant in which somebody is nominated on the first ballot. There’s also, I mean obviously, toward the end of the 1800s, an enormous influx of immigrants. What is McKinley’s approach to all of these immigrant communities?
Well, McKinley understood that the Republican Party was in danger of losing any chance at the White House unless it stopped being, in the North, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant party. Throughout his entire career, he had shown an openness to working people, many of whom were Catholics and immigrants. Remember, we’d always been a country of immigrants, but starting in the 1870s, there was relatively less immigration from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Germany, and increasing immigration from Ukrainians, Bohemians, Poles, Czechs, Spaniards, and Italians.
These were not the places where immigration had previously come from, and many of them were Catholic. The largest pressure group in America was the American Protective Association, a virulently anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant group, and McKinley took them on. In fact, at the convention, in order to demonstrate that he was in command of the Republican Party and not the American Protective Association, McKinley chose, as the indicator on the first day of the convention, not a Protestant minister but a Jewish rabbi—the first rabbi ever to give the invocation at a major party convention.
This happens in 1896. On the second day, McKinley has a Protestant give it, but it is at the bishop of the AME Church in Ohio, who is a close personal friend. When he holds his famous front porch campaign, he invites to Ohio groups of Bohemian bear makers and Croatian miners and Portuguese sponge fishermen.
This has never happened in a Republican campaign. It is rewarded by, in early October, the endorsement of the Bishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, the Catholic Bishop, Bishop Ireland.
It is the first time a Republican presidential candidate has been endorsed by a member of the Catholic hierarchy. This is an enormous change, and it helps the Republicans over the next 36 years, in large part because McKinley has created this robust, frothy coalition of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant traditional Republicans plus Catholic immigrants. So, what do you see as some of the big takeaways and lessons today for the Republican Party, or for both parties, in how they move forward?
McKinley won because he conducted a campaign based on big issues: sound money and protection. He didn't want to talk about sound money, but he was forced to, and he found the right voice on it. McKinley was not comfortable; he had a speckled record on it at best.
One of his first votes in Congress was for a free silver measure. So, he wanted to avoid the issue, as he thought it would split the Republican Party, and as a result, in July and August and early September, he was losing the campaign. But by September, he realizes he’s got to address the issue, and he comes out full-throated, wholeheartedly for gold and tries to find the right language to explain to people why they ought to support the gold standard.
Ultimately, he found that language. His whole message was that we're all in this together, and the only way that we’re going to be prosperous as a nation is if we care about the prosperity of every single American. And the way to shared prosperity is a stable currency that has value and the restoration of prosperity through a program of protective tariffs.
Voters were interested in both these big questions, and he found a way to describe his vision. He took on Bryan’s strengths—the advocacy of free silver—and turned it into a negative, making it a weakness for him. He undermined his opponent's party, and he did so by reaching out to groups that typically were not Republican.
He brought the electoral battlefield to the last two where McKinley ran as a unifier. He campaigned in a way that demonstrated his commitment to national unity. He is the first Republican president to have ever campaigned in front of a group of Confederate veterans.
He gives an emotional, deeply personal, and very short speech. He says sectionalism was surrendered at Appomattox, not the Confederacy. He says sectionalism, the idea of a divided country, leads to conflict.
He says, “If we're ever forced to fight again, and God forbid that we do, we shall fight together as brothers under a common flag. ” McKinley. This was his message on the economy, on the country, on future prosperity, and in the future direction of the country: "We're all in this together.
" Finally, he ran the first modern presidential campaign. It was bigger, stronger, and better organized than any effort in history. Ironically enough, the actual campaign was run by a 31-year-old kid in Chicago, Illinois, where the headquarters was located, who organized it so that 750,000 people got on trains and went to Canton, Ohio, day after day after day to see McKinley.
He produced 250 million pieces of literature—18 pieces for every voter. He organized a list of five million targeted households who needed to receive special assistance. Every week in the fall, they got a packet of material.
He supervised a gigantic surrogate campaign with 1,400 surrogates traveling around the country on behalf of McKinley. And this kid, with red hair parted in the middle who smoked a corncob pipe that was sometimes turned sideways—constantly having burning ash on him when he swore to Hellfire and Maria—was an accomplished, methodical, thoughtful, energetic young man. When McKinley was elected president at the age of 32, Charles G.
Dawes became the Comptroller of the Currency, in charge of the nation's banking system. He later became the first director of the very first Bureau of the Budget under Warren G. Harding, the vice president under Calvin Coolidge, the first ambassador to Great Britain, the first head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and the fourth American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
But in 1895, when McKinley put him in charge of his campaign in Illinois, Charles G. Dawes was a nobody. However, McKinley saw he was a great picker of talent, and he recognized that this young man had great potential.
The fundraising for the campaign was also pretty incredible—they raised millions of dollars, which was kind of unheard of in campaigns up until that time. A large measure of this goes to Hanna, who was the fundraiser. Dawes was a very meticulous guy; he was in charge of the money, so we actually know how much they spent and how they spent it.
The Chicago headquarters, the main headquarters, spent $1,962,326, and the New York office spent another $1. 6 million. So it was a $3.
5 million, nearly $3. 6 million campaign. The Democrats raised $300,000.
The interesting thing, though, is that most of this $3. 6 million came in during the last six weeks of the campaign. You mentioned how McKinley had a knack for spotting talent.
Once he's in the White House, what would you tell me about his leadership style and how he operated—what were his strengths and weaknesses? Well, he was careful; he wasn't an impulsive guy. He had deeply felt convictions about things, but you got the sense that he understood the importance of keeping an open mind.
He listened to people, took their opinions, sought their counsel, and then made decisions. He didn't like to be pushed. There was one man who played an active role in his campaigns.
Remember the Republican National Executive Committee member Henry Payne of Wisconsin? He came and asked McKinley for something—clearly a big post in the government—and McKinley refused him. Why?
Because McKinley was worried about him; he was a lobbyist and an influence peddler in Wisconsin, and McKinley was concerned about his morals. McKinley did not like the Gilded Age politicians. He had served in Congress during that era and saw what was happening in politics at the time, which is why he tended to gravitate toward young men like Charles G.
Dawes—he was trying to inspire the rising generation. That's why he makes Theodore Roosevelt’s future possible—not because he liked him; he didn't trust him. But he recognized the talent that the young man had and saw the ability he would bring to the job.
So when Roosevelt's boosters said to McKinley after the election, "Look, we know you don't like him, but he gave you good advice during the campaign, he worked hard, and he is fit for this job. He actually understands what needs to be done about the Navy," McKinley said to him, “Okay, I’ll consider it, but I do not trust your young man Roosevelt; he’s too pugnacious. ” Despite these misgivings, he literally created Theodore Roosevelt’s future.
Without this appointment, we would not know Theodore Roosevelt. He couldn't resign in a blaze of glory and organize the Rough Riders; he couldn't charge up Kettle Hill at San Juan Hill, be recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor, get mustered out of the military in September of 1898, and be elected governor of New York. He couldn't be made vice president and then succeed McKinley when McKinley was assassinated in September of 1901.
Now, this wouldn’t have happened unless McKinley said, “You know what, he’s not my cup of tea, but he is a rising young leader, he’s capable of doing this job, and he deserves a shot. ” Given how transformative you’ve talked about McKinley’s campaign being, as well as his presidency, why do you think he isn't remembered more today by Americans? Well, I'd argue that he did create a new governing coalition that dominated American politics, and he restored the country’s confidence in its prosperity.
He laid the groundwork to take on the trusts and some of the worst aspects of. . .
The growing industrial era he presides over, a short but popular war, and these are all exemplary things. However, I think the reason that he is not better thought of and more widely recognized for what he is is that history is written by historians, and a generation that follows McKinley are the first progressive historians. They found more in the message of Bryant and more in the actions of Roosevelt that they admired, so they gloss over McKinley.
When he's assassinated by a terrorist, the country grieves like it had not grieved since Abraham Lincoln and would not grieve again until JFK. He's enormously popular, but these people were not the ones who, in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s, wrote the history of the era. In September of 1901, six months into his second term in the White House, McKinley went to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
The White House had already, for quite some time, been receiving various death threats toward McKinley, but McKinley insisted on being able to greet citizens in a receiving line at the Temple of Music on the fairgrounds. You see where this is going: there was a man named Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, who waited in the line to meet the president, and when he got to the very front, he shot McKinley twice in the stomach. Joining me in the studio now is my Washington Post colleague, Carol Lennick.
She won the Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the Secret Service. Carol, you're now working on a book about the history of the Secret Service, which is fitting for this McKinley episode because it was actually McKinley's assassination that really prompted the birth, I guess you would say, of the modern Secret Service as we know it today. Right, that's right.
President McKinley was the third U. S. president killed, and that finally prompted Congress to give one law enforcement agency the responsibility for the president's security.
Before that, presidents either had no protection at all, or in the case of McKinley, security was sort of handled informally by bodyguards who were kind of doing it on the side, right? Because the Secret Service did already exist as an organization; it was just an agency that originally had a very different mission. That is actually really fascinating when you look back to the person who created—officially or agreed to create—the Secret Service; that was President Lincoln.
By the way, it was created in 1865 really to protect our currency and to deal with what was then considered a menace: the amazing proliferation of counterfeit bills in the wake of the Civil War. So, the day that Lincoln is assassinated, he has a cabinet meeting that morning with his Treasury Secretary and a few other members, and that is where he agrees that they need to create a special entity that will just be responsible for fighting currency fraud. I will admit that before I started doing some research for this podcast, I actually didn't realize that the Secret Service was initially established for fighting currency fraud, and I also didn't know that that's actually still part of its mission today.
Yes, it was created for this reason. At the time that it was created, anywhere from a third to half of the currency in people's cash registers and purses was fake, so it was really quite a problem. So how did an organization with that mission end up being the one—after McKinley's assassination—that Congress put in charge of protecting the president?
Just hearing them said out loud—fighting counterfeiting and then protecting the president—really don't seem to have a lot in common. It was, like many things in Washington, an odd set of coincidences and evolutions of federal bureaucracy. It happened that there were some Secret Service officers who had been protecting the president in an ad hoc way, and that's kind of how it morphed into a full-time job.
In 2003, the Secret Service moved from being underneath the Treasury to under the Department of Homeland Security. Did that have any meaningful effect on its mission or its ability to address various types of threats? Sure, that was supposed to be… you know, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was envisioned by Congress after the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, as a potential savior—a way to consolidate all of our terrorism-fighting and domestic security operations under one roof.
Unfortunately for the Secret Service, it was becoming the smallest, redheaded stepchild in a behemoth and poorly run agency. So, whether it was a good idea or not, it did not have a good result for the Secret Service. It wasn't the only challenge, but it wasn't a particularly good omen for it.
So I imagine that, you know, there's always been this tension between how much protection a president needs and how much is too much, because it has been something of the premise of the American presidency right from even George Washington—that this is a different kind of leader and that there’s a certain amount of access that American citizens should be able to have, even with the person in the very highest position in the country. Absolutely. I mean, lawmakers since the founding of the country had found that a trapping of royalty, a palace guard… you know, Jefferson talked about the “people's house.
” Even today, after someone jumped over the White House fence and got inside the executive mansion, running past the steps that lead up to the president's private quarters, there are still people in Congress and around the country saying, “You can't wall off our ability to both see…” The White House and to know that that's a property of the U. S. public, not the president per se.
So this idea of the royalism and the palace guard really is a stumbling block for our country even today. We couldn't accept then that we should have these kings protected, and we struggle now with the idea of our access to the president. Now, Lincoln—like many presidents after him and some before him—chafed at the idea of people being responsible for his safety.
The same was true for McKinley; he also bristled at the idea that he couldn't have a receiving line at the World Fair, which is where he was shot. At the Library of Congress, they have a letter from Robert Todd Lincoln that he sent to Theodore Roosevelt shortly after Roosevelt was sworn in as president upon McKinley's death. Robert had been at his father's deathbed after Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre in 1865.
He had also been at the train station when President Garfield was shot in 1881, and now he had been at the exposition in Buffalo when President McKinley was shot in 1901. That means he had been present, or nearly present, at all three presidential assassinations in American history until this point. In his letter to Teddy Roosevelt, Robert Todd Lincoln wrote, “I do not congratulate you, for I have seen too much of the seamy side of the presidential robe to think of it as an enviable garment.
But I do hope that you will have the strength and courage to carry you through a successful administration. ” Many thanks to this week's guests, Karl Rove and Carolyn Egg. Original music for the podcast is by Dave Lesnar, and next week we will reach the energetic wild presidency of TR.
