The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [249]
Racing down the mountain to rendezvous with his family, his combustible spirit restored, Roosevelt packed his belongings and then headed to the North Creek station. His drafts were now open and his chimney was drawing new air. Like a young giant he had sneaked Mount Marcy in just under the wire.88 Although McKinley had eminent physicians at his bedside, they had failed to detect a gangrenous infection. “For more than twelve suspenseful hours, the nation had no President,” the historian Margaret Leech noted in In the Days of McKinley. “Theodore Roosevelt was speeding on Saturday morning across the breadth of New York State.”89
At every railroad depot—Albany, Amsterdam, Utica, Rome, and Syracuse—reporters mobbed Roosevelt’s train in search of a quote. He stayed mum. Roosevelt was soon going to be the new president. He arrived in Buffalo at one-thirty PM on September 13, lodging at his friend Ansley Wilcox’s colonial mansion on Delaware Avenue. Every labored last minute had been an hour of agony for poor William McKinley. Roosevelt’s usual good nature and high spirits weren’t on display. He had a distracted look on his face and seemed self-contained. At two-fourteen AM on the morning of September 14, eight days after being shot, McKinley died. For the third time in thirty-six years an American president had been assassinated. A solemn Roosevelt, dressed in a frock coat, a thin gold watch chain hanging out of a pocket, was immediately sworn in as America’s twenty-sixth president; the time was three-thirty PM.
At only forty-two years old Roosevelt had become the youngest president in American history. Oddly, when taking the oath, Roosevelt didn’t swear on a Bible; owing to the constitutional separation of church and state, nobody thought it was necessary. Perhaps his recent moments on top of Mount Marcy had brought him as close to God as he was going to get. And he waved off the military escort, claiming that a couple of mounted policemen were quite enough. An American president, he insisted, didn’t cower when something dreadful happened. Roosevelt, however, understood that the public needed to be reassured that the government was in stable and experienced hands. Immediately, he announced that all of McKinley’s cabinet officers—John Hay, Lynam Gage, Elihu Root, Philander Knox, and Ethan Hitchcock among them—would be retained. The old McKinley administration would continue to provide all the springs to the government. “I wish to say,” Roosevelt told the press, “that it shall be my aim to continue, absolutely unbroken, the policy laid down by President McKinley for the peace, the prosperity, and the honor of our beloved country.”90
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE CONSERVATIONIST PRESIDENT AND THE BULLY PULPIT FOR FORESTRY
I
Roosevelt’s wide, toothy smile took on a glint of extra assurance in the last days of September 1901 after he was sworn in as America’s twenty-sixth president. Indeed, the forces of destiny seemed to have had a governing hand in his triumphant storybook career. All over Washington, the phrase being bandied about was “Roosevelt luck.” Nobody, it seemed, enjoyed being president more than T.R., even though he had reached the mountaintop of American politics because of an assassin’s gun. In a conversation with the diplomat William vanden Heuvel during the 1970s, Alice Longsworth, Roosevelt’s daughter, was asked about the circumstances of her father’s suddenly learning, in the desolate Adirondacks, about President McKinley’s imminent death.