President McKinley by Robert W. Merry

Author:Robert W. Merry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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FEW EPISODES IN McKinley’s career reflected more distinctly the man’s political and managerial style than his leadership of the war effort. Never inclined toward bombast or overt take-charge exhibitions, he displayed his normal indirect methods of management—listening more than talking, delegating to subordinates the execution of major decisions, soliciting opinions and advice from many sources while keeping his own counsel until it came time for decision making. Nor did he allow himself to get waylaid by the minutiae of the war enterprise.

Yet no one in Washington maintained a more detailed understanding of the big issues emanating from the war, and no one deflected him from his chosen path. “He is the strong man of the Cabinet, the dominating force,” wrote Cortelyou, who probably occupied the position of closest vantage over the president’s behavior. While McKinley carefully sought the views of his top military leaders, particularly Long and Alger, he also made clear that he would be the final arbiter on major decisions—and often on their execution as well. “No orders of importance were issued, from either the War or Navy Department, without his full knowledge and approval,” wrote Charles Sumner Olcott, an early biographer who conducted extensive interviews with McKinley associates, “and these were often revised by him.”

As usual, he fixed his attention on the large goals emerging from the challenges that descended upon him. He never displayed the Roosevelt-Mahan-Lodge zeal in behalf of American sea power—and certainly never talked in their idiom of national grandeur. Yet when the war he sought to avoid became inevitable, he quickly employed that new navy to insert American power into faraway Asia and the nearby Caribbean in ways never before seen. Perceiving clearly the political and military dangers in a protracted war, he moved aggressively to pummel the enemy and thus end the conflict as quickly and decisively as possible.

Now, with four major victories within three months, he faced the question of what kind of peace he wished to fashion—and what kind of America would emerge from those victories. For the short term, everyone knew what would happen: Spain would sue for peace, and America would exact a heavy price that would severely curtail the Iberian nation’s global reach. For the longer term, it wasn’t so clear, but few expected America to retreat to its position of old upon the North American continent. A British commentator named Henry Norman, writing in the London Chronicle, foresaw a new fate for George Washington’s famous admonition to his nation, “Avoid foreign entanglements.” This warning, said Norman, now “ceases to be the compass of the statesman and becomes the curio of the historian.” Whether McKinley shared that view remained, at this point, an open question. But a hint emerged from a scrap of paper upon which the president scribbled, “While we are conducting war and until its conclusion, we must keep all we get; when the war is over we must keep what we want.”

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