Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [241]
By the time Roosevelt’s reaction became public, Pulitzer had left New York for a postelection cruise in southern waters. Seitz jumped onto a train and caught up with the Liberty as it docked in Charleston. Roosevelt’s letter, which had focused on the Indianapolis News, was on the front page of the local paper in Charleston, along with an interview with Delavan Smith, publisher of the besieged newspaper in Indiana. The two items were read to Pulitzer, who knew little of what had happened since he left New York.
An astonished Pulitzer listened as his secretary read on. Smith was backpedaling as fast as he could. “The President’s comments on the Panama editorial are based on statements made by a prominent New York paper, not the New York Sun,” Smith told reporters who caught up with him on a train leaving Chicago. He claimed that the Indianapolis News had credited the information to “the New York newspaper making the charge and distinctly disclaimed any responsibility for its accuracy.”
“What New York paper does Smith mean?” asked Pulitzer.
“The World,” replied Seitz.
“I knew damned well it must be.”
Roosevelt had not mentioned the World. It was entirely possible that the matter might blow over, now that he had let off steam with his attack on the Indianapolis News. But Speer was in no mood to let the president’s comment pass unchallenged. He and Cobb conferred. “Up to this time the World had not discussed the Panama matter editorially,” Cobb said. “But when Mr. Roosevelt went so far as to tell the American people that the United States government ‘paid the $40,000,000 direct to the French government,’ it seemed to the World that the time had arrived when the country was entitled to the truth and the whole truth.”
By the time the Liberty reached New York, Speer had published an unusually long editorial that meticulously demonstrated how Roosevelt’s statement contradicted the public record. In blunt terms, he accused the president of knowingly lying. “The fact that Theodore Roosevelt as President of the United States issues a public statement about such an important matter full of flagrant untruths, reeking with misstatements, challenging line by line the testimony of his associate Cromwell and the official records, makes it imperative that full publicity come at once through the authority and action of Congress.”
Pulitzer did not know of Speer’s remonstrations against the president. Whether Pulitzer wanted a fight with the president or not, he now had one.
Roosevelt still had three months left in office, and the power to pursue his quarry. On December 9, the day after the World’s editorial appeared, Roosevelt contacted Henry Stimson, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Two years earlier, Roosevelt had selected the thirty-eight-year-old Republican corporate lawyer—who shared the president’s love of hunting and the outdoors—over other, more prominent candidates for the post. The appointment put Stimson on a road that would eventually take him to the highest level of national government. Already, he was being touted as a candidate for governor, and he remained deeply grateful to the president for his good fortune.
“I do not know anything about the law of criminal libel, but I should dearly like to have it invoked about Pulitzer, of the World,” Roosevelt told Stimson. “If he can be reached by proceeding on the part of the Government for criminal libel in connection with his assertions about the Panama Canal, I should like to do it,” Roosevelt said, frankly confessing the depth of his enmity toward Pulitzer and setting Stimson on the publisher’s trail.
“When I was Police Commissioner I once and for all summed him up by quoting the close of Macaulay’s article about Barère* as applying to him.” The fights of 1895 between the World and Roosevelt, especially those when he sought to enforce the city’s blue laws, were never far from Pulitzer’s thoughts either. “Roosevelt as Police Commissioner was very much like he is in the present time,” Pulitzer had warned Cobb earlier in the year. “The child is father