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evidence to indict Joseph and Ralph Pulitzer. “I am sorry for the President’s disappointment,” Stimson wrote to Bonaparte, carefully choosing his words, “but feel sure he appreciates the impossibility of my allowing the grand jury to indict a man without legal evidence, no matter how much reason there might be to imagine he was also probably responsible.” Further, he warned that the case in New York against the World would be endangered if the grand jury in Washington made the mistake of indicting the Pulitzers. Once they were indicted, their lawyers would be able to make public evidence revealing the weakness of the government’s case. “It will also go a long way,” Stimson said, “towards confirming the impression that an indictment was obtained by use of the overwhelming influence of the Government where it would not have been otherwise obtained.”

Bonaparte brought the U.S. attorney’s letter to the White House. Roosevelt was none too happy when he read it. He told Bonaparte that if Stimson was unwilling to go after Pulitzer in New York, he himself would insist that the U.S. attorney in Washington do so. At his desk the next day, Roosevelt rebuked Stimson. “This letter is purely private and is merely to explain why I agree with Bonaparte that no effort should be made to get the District Attorney here to abandon his position, as you suggest,” Roosevelt told Stimson. If the Pulitzers were not indicted, then the lesson he wanted to teach the press would be lost, he continued. “I think that much more service would be rendered by indicting the two Pulitzers with only one chance in three of convicting them, than by indicting their subordinates with three chances out of four of convicting them.”

Stimson did not cower. “If you had been sitting on the Grand Jury I feel perfectly confident that you would have agreed with me,” he told Roosevelt. The evidence was insufficient and the law unsupportive. “But in the second place, as a matter of policy and expediency, and not of official duty, I have a very strong conviction against pulling the trigger unless I have a ball-cartridge in the gun,” said Stimson, appealing to Roosevelt the hunter. In New York, as “there has been sedulously nursed a belief that the government is doing something unusual in this prosecution under pressure of your personal desires, there is more than ever before, in my opinion, the absolute necessity that the bullet discharged should be true to the mark.”

Roosevelt ignored Stimson’s warning. If he couldn’t get the U.S. attorney in New York to do his bidding, the one in Washington would. The prosecution in the capital was actually led by two men: Daniel W. Baker, who was the city’s U.S. attorney; and Stewart McNamara, his assistant. Most of the work fell to McNamara, whom Bonaparte elevated to special assistant to the attorney general to show the importance the administration attached to the prosecutions.

On his yacht, Pulitzer prepared for the indictment. The World’s reporters were watching the proceedings in Washington carefully, even compiling biographies of the grand jury members in hopes of predicting their behavior. Pulitzer told his editors that if he was indicted, they were to prominently publish a disclaimer saying that he had been away and that he had known nothing of the stories until Roosevelt lodged the complaint. They were also to drop all editorials on Panama.

On February 17, 1909, the twenty-three grand jurors in Washington indicted Pulitzer, his company, and the editors Van Hamm and Lyman on five counts of criminal libel. The indictment charged, among other things, that the men and the World had libeled President Roosevelt, Roosevelt’s brother-in law Robinson, President-Elect Taft, Taft’s brother Charles, the financier J. Pierpont Morgan, Secretary of State Elihu Root, and the lobbyist Cromwell. The grand jury also indicted Delavan Smith and Charles Williams of the Indianapolis News, which had used the World’s articles on the Panama Canal.

Frank Cobb was ready for this moment. He published an editorial ringing with defiance. “Mr. Roosevelt