President McKinley and his wife spent the summer of 1901 in their modest home in Canton, Ohio, where Ida enjoyed a steady recuperation, while her husband indulged in the simple relaxations of a placid Midwestern town—picnics, drives in the family buggy, excursions to nearby county fairs, and an occasional game of euchre. As the summer progressed and Ida continued to improve, his plans to visit Buffalo were renewed. By late August, newspapers around the country were announcing that President’s Day at the Pan-American Exposition had been officially rescheduled for Thursday, September 5.
At precisely 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday, September, 3, the president’s three-car private train pulled into Buffalo’s Terrace Railroad Station overlooking Lake Erie. The following day, McKinley toured the fair then, after a brief rest at the Milburn mansion, attended an evening concert by John Philip Sousa’s band.
Thursday began with an early sightseeing trip to Niagara Falls. Following lunch, McKinley returned to Buffalo for his final appearance at the exposition—a public reception held in the Temple of Music, a gaudy, byzantine structure on the north side of the fairgrounds, where he would personally greet the well-wishers who had lined up by the thousand to shake him by the hand.
In accordance with instructions given by McKinley’s fiercely devoted personal secretary, George Cortelyou, extra precautions had been taken to ensure the president’s safety. In addition to the three Secret Service men who routinely watched over him, a squad of exposition policemen had been stationed at the entrance and a contingent of Buffalo detectives posted in the aisle. Ten enlisted artillerymen and a corporal, all in full-dress uniform, had also been called in, with orders to prevent any suspicious-looking persons from approaching McKinley. Altogether, more than fifty guards were there to keep an eye on the crowd. For the handshaking, McKinley stood between Cortelyou and John Milburn. Four soldiers flanked them, two on each side.1
In spite of these heightened security measures, one cardinal rule for protecting the president was flagrantly disregarded. No visitor was supposed to get close to the chief executive unless both hands were plainly visible and completely empty. It was an unusually warm and humid day, however, and the crammed reception hall was sweltering—at least ninety degrees. Sweat poured from every brow, and so many handkerchiefs were in evidence that the guards simply paid no attention to them.
At 4:07 P.M.—just a few minutes after the reception began—a slender, mild-looking young man reached the front of the line. Like so many other people, he was clutching a big white handkerchief. Or so it appeared. In reality, the hankie was wrapped around his right hand, concealing a loaded .32-caliber Iver Johnson revolver. As McKinley reached out to greet him, the young man—a self-professed anarchist named Leon Czolgosz—lunged forward and fired twice into the president’s body.
A moment of stunned silence followed the shots. Then pandemonium erupted. While the president staggered back into the arms of the men around him, Cszolgosz was pounced upon by the soldiers and guards, who knocked him to the floor and began to beat him with their rifle butts and fists. One tried to stab him with a bayonet.
“Go easy on him, boys,” cried McKinley, now seated in a chair, his face drained of color and a spreading red stain on his shirtfront.
While Cszolgosz was hauled to his feet and dragged to an inner office, the Temple was cleared. A few minutes later, an ambulance clanged up to the entrance and the desperately wounded president was carried out on a litter, loaded into the vehicle, and driven to the exposition hospital.
Housed in a small gray building a quarter mile from the Temple of Music, the hospital was, in actuality, little more than an emergency first-aid center. Exactly eighteen minutes after the shooting, McKinley—fully conscious, though in severe shock—was carried into the rudimentary operating room and laid on the table.
As the nurses began to undress him, one of the bullets, which had glanced off his breastbone, causing only a scratch, fell from his underclothing. Even at a glance, however, it was clear that the other wound was far more serious, perhaps even fatal. It had torn through McKinley’s abdomen, approximately five inches below his left nipple.
The first and most urgent order of business was to round up the best physicians available. Dr. Roswell Park, the exposition’s medical director and a man with long experience in the treatment of gunshot wounds, was the obvious choice to take charge. But Park was in Niagara Falls, operating on a lymphoma patient. Arrangements were quickly made to rush him back to Buffalo at the earliest possible moment. In the meantime, John Milburn took command. Upon his orders, the president’s life was put into the hands of another prominent Buffalo physician, Dr. Matthew Mann.
A short, gray-bearded fifty-six-year-old, Mann had a worldwide reputation. He had trained in the United States and Europe, served on the staff of the Yale Medical School, and authored a standard textbook. Unfortunately, his specialty was gynecology, not abdominal surgery. Nevertheless, he was deemed the most qualified surgeon available at that moment of crisis.
Though the city of Buffalo had recently opened a state-of-the-art general hospital, Mann chose to operate without delay. At 5:20 P.M., the life-and-death procedure began under the least favorable conditions imaginable. Mann, who had arrived without his surgical case, had to work with borrowed instruments. No one wore a cap or gauze mask. Though the fairgrounds blazed each evening with the brilliance of countless incandescent bulbs, there were no electric lights in the operating room. As the daylight waned, the doctors were reduced to using a mirror to reflect the light of the setting sun onto the incision in McKinley’s abdominal wall.
Exploring the president’s wound, Mann discovered that the bullet had gone straight through the stomach, puncturing both the front and rear walls. He couldn’t find the bullet itself, though. An X-ray machine was on display at the fair, but Mann declined to use it. The two holes in the stomach were sutured, the abdominal cavity was flushed with saline solution, and McKinley was stitched back up with the missing bullet still inside him.
At 7:20 P.M.—two hours after the operation began—the groaning, corpse-pale president was taken from the hospital and transported back to John Milburn’s residence.
Over the course of the next week, a steady stream of increasingly hopeful communiqués issued from Buffalo. On Friday, September 6, the doctors reported that McKinley was “rallying satisfactorily and resting comfortably.” On Saturday, a bulletin described his condition as “quite encouraging.” On Sunday, one of his physicians characterized the president as “first rate.” The official word on Monday was that his “condition was becoming more and more satisfactory.” By Tuesday, newspapers across the country were proclaiming that the president was “on the high road to recovery.” The following day, September 11, Dr. Charles McBurney, a prominent New York surgeon, paid lavish tribute to his colleague, Matthew Mann, telling reporters that “the judgment of Dr. Mann in operating as he did within an hour of the shooting in all probability saved the President’s life.”
But the president’s life had not been saved. At 5:00 P.M. on Friday, September 13, the venerated leader suffered a heart attack.
Nine hours later—his stomach, pancreas, and one kidney poisoned by the gangrene that had spread along the path of the unfound bullet—William McKinley died in John Milburn’s home after gasping out his final words: “Good-bye all, good-bye. It is God’s way. His will be done.”2