Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [55]
Despite his desperate circumstances, Guiteau did what he could to give the impression that he was a man of influence and means. When writing letters, he used the stationery either of the well-respected Riggs House, the hotel where Garfield had stayed on the night before his inauguration, or the White House. One day, when a White House staff member refused to give him more stationery, Guiteau slapped one of his enormous business cards down on a table and shouted, “Do you know who I am?… I am one of the men that made Garfield President.”
He also continued to try to associate himself with powerful men. He found out where John Logan, a Republican senator from Illinois, was staying and took a room in the same boardinghouse. One morning, hearing footsteps in the outer room of his suite, Logan stepped out from his bedroom to find Guiteau sitting in a chair near the door. When he saw the senator, Guiteau quickly stood up, greeted him by name, and handed him a copy of his “Garfield against Hancock” speech. Logan, who had no idea who this strange man was, found himself listening helplessly as Guiteau told him that the speech he was holding had “elected the President of the United States, Mr. Garfield,” and that he was now waiting to be appointed consul-general to France. Secretary Blaine, Guiteau said, had promised him the appointment if Logan would give him a recommendation. He then pulled from his pocket a piece of paper on which he had written a three-line recommendation in large print and asked Logan to sign it. Logan declined. “He did not strike me as a person that I desired to recommend for an office of that character, or for any other office,” he would later say. “I treated him as kindly and as politely as I could; but I was very desirous of getting rid of him.”
A few days later, however, Guiteau was back. This time, he was more forceful in his request, insisting that, as he had once lived in Chicago, Logan was his senator and so was obliged to recommend him for the position. Again he thrust the handwritten recommendation at Logan. The senator ignored the piece of paper but assured Guiteau, “The first time that I see the Secretary of State I will mention your case to him.” While he did intend to mention Guiteau’s application to Blaine, Logan later explained, “I intended to mention it probably in a different way from what he supposed I would.… I must say that I thought there was some derangement of his mental organization.”
As was his habit with the president at the White House, Guiteau followed up his frequent visits to the State Department with letters to the secretary of state. Late in March, he wrote to Blaine that it was his understanding that he was “to have a consulship” and that he hoped it was “the consulship at Paris, as that is the only one I care for.” After making the argument that he was entitled to the office and that it should be given to him “as a personal tribute,” he ended the letter by suggesting to Blaine that he too owed his position to Garfield’s generosity. “I am very glad, personally, that the President selected you for his premier,” Guiteau wrote. “It might have been someone else.”
In the end, Blaine was the only man to give Guiteau an honest answer. He had received his letters and seen him on dozens of occasions at the State Department, brushing off his persistent questions about the consulship with a terse “We have not got to that yet.” So frequent were Guiteau’s visits to the State Department that the chief clerk had instructed the messengers not to forward his notes and to do what they could to shield the secretary of state.
Finally, after