Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [107]
Pulitzer talked Daniel Houser into accompanying him to New York to look for a newspaper to buy. Houser, who co-owned the Globe-Democrat, had helped Pulitzer plan his purchase of the Dispatch four years earlier. They took rooms at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on June 19, 1881.
After scouting around Park Row, they failed to discover any major newspaper for sale. There was one paper, a daily called Truth, which might be bought. It had started in 1879, had been an instant hit, and had quickly attained a circulation of more than 100,000 with its irreverent, light tone, bordering on the vulgar. Recently, it had run into financial difficulties, and Pulitzer made a halfhearted bid of $50,000 for it, but he was turned down. Thinking maybe he would do better to launch his own newspaper, Pulitzer asked Houser to go in with him. “I told him I was tied up with the Globe-Democrat and that the only field in New York would be for a Democratic paper, that I could not print a Republican paper in St. Louis and a Democratic paper in New York,” Houser recalled. “I advised him not to start a new paper but buy one with a location—an office, a name, a franchise.”
Almost as if he did not want to return to St. Louis, Pulitzer found excuses to stay in the East through the summer of 1881. He dashed up to Albany to report for the Post-Dispatch on Roscoe Conkling’s fruitless bid to win back the Senate seat he had resigned over a patronage dispute with President James Garfield. The political drama culminated on July 2 when Charles Guiteau, an obscure follower of Conkling’s stalwart faction who was also a disappointed office seeker himself, pumped two bullets into the president. Doctors spent the summer battling to save Garfield’s life.
In September, the president was moved to Elberon, part of the coastal town of Long Branch, New Jersey, where fresh sea air might speed his recovery. Pulitzer joined the pack of reporters at the West End Hotel covering the president’s convalescence. It didn’t take long for him to become skeptical about the doctors’ optimistic bulletins. Probably, most of the reporters were also doubtful about the official pronouncements. But lacking the freedom of writing for a paper they owned, most of them dutifully transmitted to their editors the morsels of upbeat news provided to them by the president’s staff. GREATLY IMPROVED reported the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post predicted, THE PRESIDENT SURELY ON THE ROAD TO RECOVERY.
When his turn came at the telegraph office, Pulitzer handed the operator a far gloomier assessment. “There are not many in the inner circle who do not well know that the bulletins are reliable only in this, that they exaggerate and embellish to the uttermost every favorable and utterly ignore every unfavorable sign of the case,” he wired to the Post-Dispatch. The operator, one of eight brought in by Western Union to handle the volume of traffic, was impressed by what he transmitted. “Mr. Pulitzer always filed what we termed ‘good stuff,’” he recalled. “From the first line of his first story, Mr. Pulitzer predicted the death of Garfield and pilloried several of the attending physicians for their false bulletins on the President’s condition.”
At the beginning of Garfield’s second week in Long Branch, ominous reports about his health began circulating. Most reporters, however, continued to report otherwise. They stuck to the story that the president was improving and that any news to the contrary was a product of the sensational press. A few nervous reporters covered their tracks by mentioning the rumors. Pulitzer, on the other hand, pressed on with his baleful version of Garfield’s condition. “As I said last week, the President is growing worse,” he wrote. “He is wasting away. It is only a question of time. All of his troubles, all his weakness come from the blood. It is poisoned.” The doctors, he said, were lying. Pulitzer was convinced that