Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [245]
“My opinion is that if anything comes out of this Roosevelt Panama matter it will be through Jerome,” he told Cobb, referring to New York’s district attorney William Jerome. The World had long supported Jerome but had recently aroused his ire by criticizing his prosecutorial decisions. It was an attack that now seemed ill-timed. “We pitched into Jerome because he did not do anything about wealthy lawbreakers; now he turns against the World.” Pulitzer asked Cobb to convey a private message to Jerome that though he took responsibility for everything in his newspaper, he had known nothing of the articles and had been out of touch when they appeared. In effect, he was throwing his editors to the wolves.
Legally, Pulitzer’s guess was on the mark. Stimson had already told Attorney General Charles Bonaparte that he had found no law, precedent, or means to charge Pulitzer in federal courts. Stimson met at his house with Jerome. “He is ready and anxious to cooperate in any way, and he has told me he considers the movement of the utmost importance,” Stimson said, adding that such an approach would benefit the president. “This would tend to minimize the danger of the Panama prosecution being criticized as personal to President Roosevelt.”
Despite Stimson’s hesitance to pursue the president’s plan to prosecute Pulitzer in federal court, Roosevelt felt confident. On January 30, 1909, he lunched with Douglas Robinson, one of the supposed victims of the libel; his sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson; and the treasurer of the Republican Party. Roosevelt and his brother-in-law reviewed the case. “Both the President and Mr. Robinson,” said an aide who sat in on the lunch, “think they will put Pulitzer in prison for criminal libel.”
Later that night, Roosevelt attended the Gridiron dinner—an annual press gathering, characterized by bawdy humor and skits—in Washington’s Willard Hotel. The one representative of the World who attended reported privately to New York that he had overheard the president promising to make an example of Pulitzer for crooked journalism in deceiving people about government. “I mean to cinch these men, the ringleaders and not their hired men or agents for the damage they have done.”
With the clock ticking on his term of office, Roosevelt stepped up the pressure on the Justice Department to get Pulitzer. The intensity of the investigation was felt at the World. Pulitzer and others on the paper became convinced that federal agents were snooping through the mail and examining the documents carried by hired messengers between Washington and New York. The fear made the use of Pulitzer’s codebooks an even greater imperative. Soon a new code word, “Charlotte,” was added to the 5,000 entries already in the book. It meant extradition, and Pulitzer wanted to know if he could be extradited from Bermuda should he go there.
Pulitzer could not restrain his anxiety. He repeatedly asked Cobb to play up his infirmities to “dispel the general myth and assumption that a totally blind man and confirmed invalid can be the editor of a paper like the World in any responsible sense whatsoever.” At the same time, Pulitzer knew that the stakes were more than personal. If Roosevelt were to win, he told his editors, “it will stop all criticism and free thought in the majority of papers and absolutely abolish opposition of any kind—and it will give the government—nay not the government but the administration—the party in power—complete license and make it more powerful than even Roosevelt has been.”
The Justice Department’s attorneys convened two grand juries—one in Washington, D.C., and another in New York City—and began issuing subpoenas to a wide cast of characters that included editors in New York and a boy who sold newspapers on the streets of Washington. Government lawyers, however, remained mum on the