Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [249]
Arrest warrants were brought to New York. McNamara was champing at the bit to put Pulitzer in custody. New York, however, would be a hard place to do so. The city’s judges were known to be reluctant to permit an extradition to Washington for this sort of indictment, as a previous case had shown. In 1895, they had refused to send the editor Charles Dana to the capital when he had been indicted for libel in a case that involved neither the federal government nor unusual applications of law. (Ironically, Dana’s defense attorney, Elihu Root, was now Roosevelt’s secretary of state.) “Menacing as was the Dana case to the liberty of the press, it was far less serious than this Roosevelt persecution, for the complaint against Mr. Dana was made by a bona fide resident of the District of Columbia,” Pulitzer told Cobb. “The President of the United States did not instigate the proceedings and direct the persecution thereby perverting the powers of the government to the gratification of personal revenge.”
McNamara consulted the attorney general about the feasibility of arresting Pulitzer in Norfolk, where his yacht was to dock on its way back from a cruise to Havana. They believed it would be easier to extradite him from Virginia than from New York. But sloppy paperwork on McNamara’s part thwarted the plan, and the Liberty sailed as fast as it could toward New York. Stimson was of no help to the case in Washington, either. Convinced that it was a waste of time, he ignored it while working on his own indictments in New York. The rush to arrest Pulitzer came to a standstill. Florence White sent word to Pulitzer that the attorney Nicoll had said an arrest was no longer imminent. “He also says he believes there is no danger of arrest in Charleston, and that Mr. Andes [Pulitzer] might cruise in that vicinity and return to New York when he heard from Mr. Nicoll.”
Meanwhile, the grand jury in New York continued gathering evidence. Only the president and his lawyers knew that Pulitzer himself was no longer a target in Stimson’s planned prosecution. Half an hour after Roosevelt left office on March 4, 1909, the jury in New York issued indictments containing fourteen counts of libel against the Press Publishing company (the corporation that published the World), and Van Hamm. Despite his growing opposition to Roosevelt’s vendetta, Stimson had purposely delayed the issuing of the indictments in order to protect his political patron. He was worried that Pulitzer’s lawyers might try to embarrass Roosevelt by serving him with a subpoena as he prepared to sail for a well-publicized trip to Africa. “I am trying to engineer my indictments,” he told the attorney general, “so there will be no issue of fact pending at the time of his departure, or if there is such an issue, I will be in a position to call the bluff and bring it on for immediate trial.”
These indictments, like those in Washington, were based on an unusual interpretation of law. In this case, the old federal law brought to bear was an “Act to Protect the Harbor Defense and Fortifications Constructed or Used by the United States from Malicious Injury, and for Other Purposes.” Stimson reasoned that the paper could be charged under federal law for its allegedly libelous actions because twenty-nine copies of the World had been mailed to West Point and one had been delivered to the city’s federal building. Noticeably absent from the indictment was Pulitzer’s name.
By the time the Liberty steamed into Brooklyn’s Gravesend Bay, other fissures had appeared in Roosevelt’s strategy. Joseph Kealing, the U.S. attorney in Indianapolis, resigned in protest after eight years on the job, rather than pursue the case. Kealing told Bonaparte he believed the government was overreaching in trying to drag the defendants in