Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [49]
The most fail-proof way to secure an appointment, Guiteau had decided, was to convince Arthur to let him stump for Garfield. Finally, Arthur agreed, giving Guiteau an opportunity to deliver a single speech at a small gathering in New York. Guiteau had spoken for only a few minutes, explaining later that it was too hot, he didn’t like the torch lights, and there were plenty of other speakers waiting to talk. He was convinced, however, that the speech he gave that night had played a pivotal role in putting Garfield in the White House, and that it should certainly guarantee him a position of prominence in the administration.
Within days of his arrival in Washington, Guiteau was at the White House. As he entered the waiting room, he handed the doorman his calling card and quietly took his place among the dozens of other office seekers, perched on wooden tables and chairs before a large, unlit fireplace. The day Guiteau chose to make his first visit to the White House was, even by the standards of the time, an exceptionally busy one. “No day in 12 years has witnessed such a jam of callers at each Executive Dep’t,” Garfield would write in his diary that night, complaining that “the Spartan band of disciplined office hunters … drew paper on me as highway men draw pistols.”
After waiting for a few hours without seeing anyone, Guiteau put his hat back on and left, disappointed but not discouraged. Since November, he had had a change of heart about the Austrian Mission, and he wrote to Garfield that day to deliver the news. “I think I prefer Paris to Vienna, and, if agreeable to you, should be satisfied with the consulship at Paris,” he wrote from the lobby of a hotel where he was not staying but which had more impressive stationery than his own. “Senators Blaine, Logan, and Conkling are friendly to me, and I presume my appointment will be promptly confirmed. There is nothing against me. I claim to be a gentleman and Christian.”
Guiteau also made the case to Garfield that he had been instrumental in his election. He argued that the speech he had delivered in New York, and had handed to every man of influence in the Republican Party to whom he had access, including Garfield’s own vice president, had not only won votes, but had been the source of an idea that was central to the campaign’s success. “The inclosed [sic] speech was sent to our leading editors and orators in August,” he argued. “Soon thereafter they opened on the rebel war-claim idea, and it was this idea that resulted in your election.”
Not long after Guiteau began visiting the White House, he met Garfield face-to-face. One day, after entering the anteroom as usual and handing the doorman his card, he was led upstairs to Brown’s office, which connected directly to the president’s office. A moment later, he found himself standing before Garfield, watching silently as he spoke with Levi Morton, one of the men Conkling had forced to resign from the cabinet. Guiteau waited for the two men to finish their conversation, and then, introducing himself as an applicant for the Paris consulship, handed Garfield the campaign speech he had been carrying in his pocket for the past year. On the first page of the speech, he had written “Paris Consulship” and drawn a line between those words and his name, “so that the President would remember what I wanted.” “Of course, [Garfield] recognized me at once,” Guiteau would later say. He watched with satisfaction as the president glanced down at the speech, and then left, confident that his appointment was now only a matter of time.
After that day, Guiteau quickly became a familiar face at the White House. “His visits were repeated … quite regularly,” Brown would remember. “I saw Mr. Guiteau probably fifteen times altogether at various places, about on the street and about in the Executive Mansion and on the grounds.” When he wasn’t waiting in the president’s anteroom, Guiteau was sending notes into him by the doorman, or simply sitting on a bench in Lafayette Square, staring at the White House.
Before the end of March, Guiteau found another