A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [79]
Nevertheless, it was a struggle from day one. The Telegraph’s first editor was Henry Little, brought in from Ohio, where he had been lured out of retirement after being laid up for a year with rheumatism. Little arrived in Buffalo vowing to “exterminate” the Evening News inside of ninety days. He lasted a year, and when he left, the Evening News was bigger than ever. Henry Griffin, a veteran of the Detroit newspaper wars, came next, followed by John A. Cresswell, the former managing editor of the Detroit News.
By the time Cresswell got to Buffalo, the Scripps brothers had poured $70,000 into the Evening Telegraph, and it was still in the red—the only newspaper in the Scripps chain to be hemorrhaging money. Cresswell was nonetheless confident that he could steer a path to profitability in the crowded Buffalo marketplace. He found a place to live on Delaware Avenue with his wife, Lief, and their six-year-old daughter; and in October 1883, Lief Cresswell gave birth to a son. Two weeks later, at the age of thirty-four, Lief died at their home from complications due to childbirth and diphtheria. A sorrow-stricken Cresswell buried his wife in her hometown of Grand Rapids, and then returned to Buffalo to resume his leadership of the Evening Telegraph and raise his two youngsters. The circulation of the Evening Telegraph was holding steady at 10,000, not a terrible failure but not yet a success.
Cresswell was thirty-four when the greatest story of his life landed on his desk.
A few days after the Democrats nominated Grover Cleveland for president, the Reverend George Ball asked Cresswell to come see him. Ball would later explain that he went with the Evening Telegraph rather than a more established newspaper because he knew Cresswell to be a churchgoing Christian and had high regard for the editor’s personal code of ethics. As Ball laid everything out, Cresswell took careful notes. There was a tremendous amount of material to go over, and he knew that every word reported by the Evening Telegraph would come under attack by Cleveland partisans. The reputation, and perhaps even the existence, of his newspaper would be on the line.
Another newspaperman had also gotten a whiff of the Maria Halpin scandal.
In mid-July, Zemro Smith, the forty-seven-year-old editor of the Boston Journal, got word that James Blaine wanted to see him. Smith boarded the first train out of Boston and got off in Augusta, Maine, on the banks of the Kennebec River. Blaine lived in a magnificent mansion that he had purchased in 1862 as a gift for his wife, Harriet. It was one of the finest estates in Augusta, just across the street from the Maine State House. Blaine’s favorite room was the study—his children called it Father’s Library, and next to this was the large octagonal Billiard Room, site of a grand ball held in 1873 for President Grant. Every room in the Blaine mansion had its fitting name. There was the Ash Room, named for the color of its painted walls; Alice’s Room, where Blaine’s daughter Alice slept; and Aunt Susan’s Room for Blaine’s sister-in-law, Susan Stanwood, who for a time lived with the family.
Zemro Smith sat down with Blaine. The presidential candidate and former secretary of state had the most extraordinary document in his possession. It was a copy of the letter Reverend George Ball had written to the Chicago Advance in which Ball claimed that Grover Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate son. Ball had written the letter on July 12. Five days later, it was in Blaine’s hands. How the letter got to Blaine has never been determined, but one likely source was Boss John Kelly, who had apparently obtained a copy on the final day of the Democratic Convention in Chicago and may have slipped