Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [47]
Garfield made it clear to Brown from the beginning that he not only liked him, but genuinely needed his help. When Garfield had returned to Washington for a few days after his nomination, Brown decided not to call on him, worried that his boss would think he was just another person asking for a favor. He realized how wrong he had been when he ran into Garfield on the street. “Where have you been,” Garfield asked him. “I need all my friends now.” Exhausted and worried, Garfield was in earnest, but he roared with laughter when Brown, who knew that he had had hardly a moment to himself since his nomination, replied, “General, I do not think you could have been very lonesome.”
As much as Garfield had come to rely on Brown, when it was time to fill the position of private secretary to the president, the young man who had served him so well was not even a candidate. The position, which was one of great influence and proximity to power, traditionally went to men of considerable political skill and experience. Thomas Jefferson’s private secretary had been Meriwether Lewis, whom he soon after entrusted with exploring and charting the Pacific Northwest. Garfield wanted for his private secretary John Hay, who had been Lincoln’s assistant private secretary twenty years earlier, and would, in another twenty years, be Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state. He felt strongly that Hay was the right man for the job, but Hay, who had greater ambitions, delicately declined. “He is very bright and able,” Garfield wrote in discouragement. “I more and more regret that I cannot have him for my private secretary.”
When Garfield finally offered the job to Brown, it came as a surprise to no one but Garfield. One night, as the family sat before a fire in the farmhouse in Mentor, he ruminated aloud on his options for private secretary after the disappointment of Hay’s refusal. Suddenly, he turned to Brown and said, “Well, my boy, I may have to give it to you.” The young man replied drily, “Well that is complimentary, to say the least, when all these other fellows have been first considered.” Everyone in the room burst into laughter.
As prestigious as it was to be the president’s private secretary, Brown had no illusions about what the job would entail. Immediately following Garfield’s nomination, more than five thousand letters had poured into Mentor from all parts of the country, and Brown had been forced to quickly devise a system to deal with them. On the morning of Garfield’s inauguration, when the president-elect had collapsed into bed after finally finishing his speech, Brown had stayed up to make a clean copy of it, leaving him too tired to attend any of the day’s events until the ball that night. Since then, he had been opening, sorting, and responding to as many as three hundred letters every day, and there was no one to help him. “There was no organized staff … with expert stenographers and typists,” he later recalled. “Only one pair of hands.”
Although Brown insisted that everyone who called on the president at the White House be treated with courtesy and respect, regardless of influence or station, he became very adept at shielding Garfield from office seekers. His first official act as private secretary was to issue an order that anyone who wished to see the president had to go through him first. This rule applied to even high-ranking politicians and old friends, many of whom exploded in rage when asked to wait in an anteroom filled from wall to wall with office seekers. “How the President and his Private Secretary stand the pressure of the many callers seems a mystery,” one reporter marveled. “They must have nerves of steel, muscles