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William McKinley The modern campaign

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential

This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Just this past year, President Obama announced that the Alaskan mountain named after McKinley, Mount McKinley, would be renamed -- its original Native American name. And not really, as we've seen in the case of some other monuments some memorials, not really because of any failings or controversies that had come to light about President McKinley, but just really because it had seemed inappropriate and insensitive to many in the first place that we had written over a part of Alaskan's heritage to commemorate a president from who had no connection to this mountain and who had never even seen Alaska.

So, today there is no more Mount McKinley, and there are very few other cultural nods to McKinley today, either. So, other than his , what else is a “Presidential” podcast episode on McKinley supposed to focus on? Well, you're going to find out.

I'm Lillian Cunningham, and this is the 24th episode of “Presidential.”

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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: There are actually quite a few directions that I thought about taking this McKinley episode in. We could have looked at the rise of American , which would have been really interesting, by talking about the Spanish-American War. McKinley had reluctantly entered that war and the U.S. helped free from Spanish rule and the U.S. also ended up gaining control over , and bought the .

So, there's that. I also thought about potentially digging really deeply into the debates over the . But I ended up deciding that, for this episode, we're actually going to mostly skip over McKinley's time in the itself, and we're going to examine two other transformations that were brought on by McKinley.

Now, one is that his assassination in 1901 prompted sort of the birth of the modern Secret Service -- we're going to talk about that at the end of the episode with my Post colleague Carol Leonnig.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 And the other thing, which we're going to look at for the bulk of the episode, is why -- who was the architect of George W. Bush's presidential campaigns and served as his chief of staff - - why it is that Karl Rove thinks McKinley's election in 1896 was one of the most important and transformational elections in American history.

He feels so strongly about that that he recently wrote a book all about McKinley's election and the lessons he thinks American political campaigns today can take away from it.

So, OK, so here we go. William McKinley, born in 1843. President from 1897 until 1901. McKinley's first vice president was and his second was .

And now let's see McKinley through the eyes of Karl Rove. I mostly want to talk to you about the 1896 election, but --

KARL ROVE: You bet.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Before we do that, just to make sure that everyone who listens to this podcast has a real image of McKinley in their head. Say I'm about to go on a blind date with him, and you know him and I don't. Can you describe this man for me?

KARL ROVE: Well, William McKinley is the unknown president of the . The 25th president is mainly remembered for having been assassinated and then followed in office by Theodore Roosevelt.

But he is a much different figure when you get to examine his life. He is a self-made man, came from a large family that lived in northeast Ohio. His father ran a iron smelter. His mother was a deeply religious woman -- 'Mother McKinley,' they called her. He was born in Niles, Ohio. But his parents, believing in the importance of education, moved to Poland, Ohio where there was a good school.

And at the age of 18, in April of 1861, McKinley, encouraged by Lincoln's call, enlisted in what became the 23rd Ohio. And McKinley began the war as a private. He ended the war four years later as a , having received three battlefield commissions for unbelievable valor.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, this is, of course, the Civil War, and he's fighting on the Union side. And well, you mentioned his bravery. In one particular instance, he rode straight across the open battlefield all by himself to carry a message to other Union troops, right?

KARL ROVE: His tentmate said it was a suicide mission. At one point, a cannon shell goes off right next to him, and his tentmate Russell Hastings says, 'We thought he was gone.'

But he wrote later, 'Out of the crack, the cloud of gray smoke, came the small brown horse with the erect horsemen.' Somehow or another, McKinley, once again, makes it through, just in the nick of time. He rides back, walks into the command tent, and his commander turns around and is startled to see him there. His brigade commander, Rutherford B. Hayes, himself a future president, says, 'My God, I never expected to see you in this life again.'

And the rest of his life, he was a congressman, governor of Ohio, he was president of the United States. The title he preferred to be called above all others was 'The Major.' He said, 'I don't know

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 about those others, but I know I earned that one.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Right, so he has this reputation for bravery. But what were some of the other hallmarks of his character?

KARL ROVE: One of the few things that Republicans and Democrats could agree upon was the sterling character and personal charm of -- and friendship of -- William McKinley. , the future speaker of the house said, 'My adversaries in the House go at me tooth and nail. But they feel obliged to apologize to William before they call him names.'

He had enormous personal charm. He was completely, totally devoted to his wife. They lost two daughters -- one as an infant and one at the age of five. They never had any other children. His wife spiraled into a life of depression and --

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Epilepsy.

KARL ROVE: And seizures. She probably had epilepsy that came on from a fall during one of her pregnancies, and McKinley was totally devoted to her. And he's a man of enormous compassion for the working man as well. As a young lawyer, during his first race for Congress, he was asked to take on the defense of 22 minors who were accused of acts of violence against the mine owners, and no one would defend them.

And he took them on, got all but one of them off, and then refused to take a fee for it because he felt that the money would be better spent to care for and feed the families of the miners who were out on strike, so he was enormously popular and appealing figure.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So when we look at his political rise from congressmen to governor, then to presidential candidate -- among the traits you've mentioned and then also ones you haven't yet mentioned, what do you think were some of the ones that are really key to his rise?

KARL ROVE: Well, first of all, he was very hardworking. He was not a show horse. He was a workhorse. For example, in his first term in Congress, he did not immediately speak. He waited months before he made his first address.

And when he did, he was thoroughly well prepared, and he was a good orator. He knew how to make an argument. As governor -- he became governor after he was defeated for re-election, and when the Republicans were wiped out in the 1890 elections, he was elected the governor, in large part, because of the support of working folks, you know, miners and factory workers who admired his leadership on economic issues and understood that he had a natural sympathy for them.

So, in his race for the presidency, he runs the first modern presidential campaign -- both the first modern presidential primary campaign and the first modern presidential campaign. And a big focus of it was on the interests of working folks. I mean, there's a letter from one of his cousins, who writes him a letter saying, 'I reminded the executive committee of what you've often told us. It is with the interests of the working man that we must be concerned. Capital can take care of itself.'

So, this natural empathy for working class folks shone through in everything that he did.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And so, his election is in 1896. This is essentially the height of the , which some people today would look back and see a lot of parallels between our time and then. And one of those is this idea that working people in the country were angry at the time, particularly about the widening income inequality.

KARL ROVE: Well, I think they were less worried about income inequality than having a job and having an income themselves. America, as we approach the 1896 campaign, is in the midst of what is the greatest depression the country has ever suffered -- or will suffer -- until the Great Depression itself. And it's brought on by a lot of different factors, some of which are out of the control of ordinary folks. We're becoming part of a global economy. But we're also going through a very disruptive period of innovation, where an artisan who used to make a tin plate by hand and sell it for a quarter now has to compete with a machine that turns out those plates with a speed that he can't keep up with and a uniformity he cannot match and at a price that is well below his.

And this is happening in every part of the economy. Remember, this is a period during which the electric light bulb was invented and electrical engines and the automobile and the refrigerated rail car and the telephone. And, I mean, all kinds of things are roiling the economy. It's also a period that looks sort of like ours when it comes to the politics, only worse.

We have five presidential elections in a row, leading up to the 1896 election, where no one gets a majority of the popular vote. Nobody gets 50 percent. We have two presidents elected during that period who have a majority in the Electoral College, but lose the popular vote. One of those involves a five-month long dispute about the Electoral College votes of Florida, and the political parties are at each other's throats and the politics contains a bitterness that's hard for us to understand -- because not only do the two parties deeply disagree, but they are also still fighting the Civil War.

So, they don't get anything done. In fact, that's one of the things that is sort of emblematic of the period -- that very little gets done because the two parties can't come to an agreement. And this is why the 1896 election is so important. Political scientists have studied it for years as one of the great five realigning elections in America.

We talk about Jefferson and the emergence of the Democratic Republicans in 1800. We talk about and the emergence iof the modern political system with the Democratic Party in 1828. and the emergence of the Republicans in 1860. And 1932 and FDR and the creation of coalition.

But 1896 -- we ignore McKinley, who ends this era of broken politics and ushers in a 36-year period where Republicans dominate the landscape.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Alright, we're ready to dive into why it is that this 1896 campaign was ultimately so transformative. To set the stage, the two presidential candidates end up being McKinley, of course, for the Republicans and then for the Democrats.

Now, if anything about this election sounds vaguely familiar, it's probably Bryan's famous speech at the Democratic convention where he says, 'You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.'

KARL ROVE: You could take Bernie Sanders and take what he says, and you would find many of those phrases echoed in what William Jennings Bryan says. He is focused on defeating the money

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 4 bearer. He is attacking the eastern financial interests -- the money grubbers of Wall Street and Lombard Street. He talks about the idle holders of capital . The joblessness at certain points during that Depression: One out of every six Americans was out of work.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And McKinley takes a different approach.

KARL ROVE: McKinley is talking about, 'We're all in this together.' Neither capital nor labor can be prosperous unless the other is prosperous.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: During the campaigns, one of the policy debates that is front and center is this question over whether the currency should be on the gold standard or whether silver can serve for the basis. And McKinley is for gold; Bryan is for silver.

Maybe you can just explain why people at the time cared so passionately about this debate and what in it today is still interesting or informative for us?

KARL ROVE: It is hard for us today to grasp what this is all about. The advocates of silver were essentially calling for an inflationary currency, and this was essentially the cry of the agrarian South and West, mortgage holders and people who were on the crop-lien system, people who owed money to either distant financial companies that held their mortgages or who owed money to the local merchant.

The idea of a silver currency was the idea of, 'We're going to free ourselves from the money power and be able to discharge our debts in money that's worth half as much.' The idea of a gold currency was that money ought to be worth something, and that we ought not to devalue and debase the currency.

But what's interesting to me is at the heart of this was an old argument that we're even fighting today . In the , Bryan says this: There are two ideas of government. Republicans believed if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, then their prosperity will leak through on those below." Democrats believe if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

So, it's an old argument. It's an argument that we're familiar with. It was just being fought over a different set of policies. What kind of a currency? What should money be?

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Right, and so these debates are really, I mean, in many ways, a proxy just for the larger question of: How do you grow an economy that ensures all Americans, at all rungs of the income ladder, reap some benefit from its growth?

KARL ROVE: Yeah, and Bryan answered by saying we must tear down the money power. We must break the power of Wall Street. We must have a silver currency that takes away the power that gold has upon us. And he made this argument in an extraordinary whistlestop campaign -- the first such a whistlestop campaign in America's history, traveled 18,000 miles by rail, made hundreds upon hundreds of speeches and took to excoriating his opponent.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Yeah, so I'd love to talk with you a bit more about the campaign tactics that really made this sort of the first modern presidential election and campaign.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 I mean, it is really striking. We've been moving in this podcast chronologically through the presidency, and, really up until this point, it's been standard that a presidential candidate doesn't actually go out and campaign for himself. What we see in 1896 is just a very different approach than we've seen up until this point, right?

KARL ROVE: As you say, prior to 1896, presidential candidates "left their fate in the hands of friends." They remain quiet. They had people who sort of helped organize their home state and find some allies in adjoining states. And you showed up at the convention, and your was to cut deals with other people. You'd basically make promises with regard to patronage, control of patronage and cabinet posts, and hope to cobble together enough votes so you became the nominee of the party.

McKinley set out to do it differently. McKinley set out to walk into the convention in St. Louis in June of 1896 with a majority of the delegates committed to him. And committed not through promises of boodle and patronage and cabinet posts, but instead, bound to him by a belief that he was the right man for the job.

He did so in a typical methodical way. In 1894, he travels the country during the mid-term elections, basically making friends, telling people that he's thinking about running and beginning to organize around the country. In January of 1895, Marcus Alonzo Hanna, a longtime friend and political associate, leaves his family business and begins to work full-time to organize the primary campaign.

And one of the most important and early things that they did is, they went south. A quarter of the delegates to the national convention came from the region. Those were half the delegates necessary for the nomination itself, and normally most of the people in the South who voted Republican were black and poor. And he does a particularly powerful thing on this trip to the South. He becomes the first candidate of either party to appear before a black audience during the primary and ask for their support. This happens in Jacksonville, Florida.

He then -- and this is the first time anything like this has ever happened -- the next day, in Savannah, Georgia, he speaks in front of a black audience at a church in Savannah. First time this has ever happened. And this is a powerful message that gets spread across the South -- that McKinley was an abolitionist. His family were abolitionists in sentiments. It's one of the great motivations for him in the Civil War -- not only that to save the Union, but it was also to end slavery.

In fact, at the end of the war in 1865, his former brigade commander Rutherford B. Hayes runs for governor, and he throws himself into the campaign. But he spends almost as much time and energy helping fight for a constitutional amendment to guarantee black suffrage in Ohio. So, this moment where he meets with black Republicans in the South is a powerful symbol of the changing nature of his primary campaign.

McKinley does this all across the country. He methodically organizes, so that when he shows up in St. Louis, an absolute majority of the delegates are already committed to him. And as a result, the outcome is foretold and happens on the first ballot. It's the first convention since 1872 and the renomination of Ulysses S. Grant, in which somebody is nominated on the first ballot.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: There's also, toward the end of the 1800s, an enormous influx of

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 6 immigrants. What is McKinley's approach to all these immigrant communities?

KARL ROVE: Well, McKinley understood that the Republican Party was in danger of losing any chance at the White House unless it stopped being the north, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant party.

And he, throughout his entire career, had shown an openness to working people, many of whom were Catholics and immigrants. Remember, we'd always been a country of immigrants. But starting in the 1870s, there was relatively less immigration from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Germany and increasing immigration from Ukrainians and Bohemians and Poles and and Spaniards and Italians.

These were not the places where immigration had been, and many of them were Catholic. And the largest pressure group in America was the American Protective Association, a virulently anti- Catholic, anti-immigrant group. And McKinley took them on. In fact, at the convention, in order to demonstrate that he was in command of the Republican Party and not the American Protective Association, the first day of the convention, McKinley chose as the invicator not a Protestant minister but a Jewish rabbi.

The first rabbi ever to give the invocation at a major party convention happens in 1896. The second day, McKinley asks a Protestant to give it, but it is the bishop of the AME church in Ohio, who's a close personal friend.

And when when he holds his famous , he invites to Ohio groups of Bohemian barrel makers and Croatian miners and Portuguese sponge fishermen. And this has never happened in a Republican campaign.

It's rewarded by -- in early October -- the endorsement of the bishop of St. Paul Minnesota -- the Catholic bishop -- Bishop Ireland. It is the first time a Republican presidential candidate has been endorsed by a member of the Catholic hierarchy.

So, there's this enormous change, and it helps the Republicans in the next 36 years in large part because McKinley has created this robust, frothy coalition of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant traditional Republicans plus Catholic immigrants.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And so, what do you see as some of the big takeaways and lessons today for the Republican Party or for both parties in how they move forward?

KARL ROVE: McKinley won because he conducted a campaign based on big issues, sound money and protection. He didn't want to talk about one of those -- sound money. But he was forced to, and he found the right voice on it. McKinley was not comfortable. He had a speckled record on it at best. One of his first votes in Congress was for a measure. So, you know, he wanted to avoid the issue. He thought it split the Republican Party. And as a result, in July and August and early September, he's losing the campaign.

But by September, he realizes he's got to address the issue and he comes out full- throated, full- heartedly for gold and tries to find the right language to explain to people why it is that they ought to support the gold standard, and ultimately found that language.

His whole message was: We're all in this together, and the only way that we're going to be

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 prosperous as a nation is if we care about the prosperity of every single American, and the way to ensure prosperity is a stable currency that has value and the restoration of prosperity through a program of protective tariffs.

Voters were interested in both these big questions, and he found a way to describe his vision. He took on Bryan's strength, he took on his opponent's strength -- Bryan's advocacy of free silver -- and turned it into a negative. He turned it into a weakness.

He modernized his parties, and he did so by by reaching out to two groups that typically were not Republican. He brought the electoral battlefield.

The last two were: McKinley-ran as a unifier. He ran his campaign in a way that demonstrated his commitment to national unity. He is the first president, first Republican president, to have ever campaigned in front of a group of Confederate veterans. He gives an emotional and deeply personal and very short speech. He says, 'Sectionalism was surrendered at Appomattox, not the Confederacy.’ He says, 'If we're ever forced to fight again -- and God forbid that we do -- we shall fight together as brothers under a common flag.' And McKinley -- this was his message -- on the economy, on the country, on the future prosperity and the future direction of the country: We're all in this together.

And finally, he ran the first modern presidential campaign. It was bigger, stronger, better organized than any effort in history. And ironically enough, the actual campaign is run by a 31- year-old kid in Chicago, Illinois, where the headquarters is, who organizes it so that 750,000 people get on trains and go to Canton, Ohio day after day after day to see McKinley. He produces 250 million pieces of literature -- 18 pieces for every voter. He organizes a list of 5 million targeted households who need to receive a special assistance every week in the fall. They get a packet of material.

He supervises a gigantic surrogate campaign -- 1400 surrogates traveling around the country on behalf of McKinley. And this kid, red hair parted in the middle, smoked a corncob pipe that was most of the time turned sideways. He was constantly having burning ash on him. When he swore, he yelled 'Hellfire and Maria!’ He was an accomplished methodical, thoughtful, energetic young man.

He later became, when McKinley gets elected president at the age of 32 -- G. Dawes becomes the controller of the currency in charge of the nation's banking system. He becomes the first director of the very first bureau of the budget under Warren G. Harding; vice president under ; ambassador to Great Britain; first head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation; and the fourth American to win the . But in 1895, when McKinley puts him in charge of his campaign in Illinois, Charles G. Dawes is a nobody. But McKinley saw and was a great picker of talent, and he saw that this young man had great talent.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: The fundraising -- the campaign fundraising -- was also pretty incredible for their campaign, too. They raised millions of dollars, which was a kind of unheard of in campaigns up until this time.

KARL ROVE: And a large measure of this goes to Hannah, who is the fundraiser. Dawes is a very meticulous guy. He's in charge of the money, and so we actually know how much they spend and how they spend it. The Chicago headquarters, the main headquarters, spent $1,962,326. And the

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8 office spent another $1.6 million -- so it's a $3.5 million/$3.6 million campaign. The Democrats raised $300,000. One of the interesting things, though, is that most of this $3.6 million came in in the last six weeks of the campaign.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, you mentioned how McKinley had a knack for being able to spot talent. So, once he's in the White House, what would you tell me about his leadership style and how exactly he operates – like what his strengths and his weaknesses are?

KARL ROVE: Well, he considers carefully. He's not an impulsive guy. He has deeply felt convictions about things. But, you know, you get a sense that this was a guy who understood the importance of keeping an open mind. So, he listens to people, takes opinions, takes their counsel and makes a decision. He doesn't like to be pushed.

There's one man who plays an active role in his campaign. He's a member of the Republican National Executive Committee -- Henry Payne of Wisconsin. And he comes and asks McKinley for something, clearly a big post in the government, and McKinley refuses. And why? Because McKinley was worried he was a lobbyist and an influence peddler in Wisconsin and he was worried about his morals.

McKinley did not like the Gilded Age politicians. He had served in the Congress during the Gilded Age. He saw what was happening in the politics of the time, and that's why he tended to gravitate towards young men like Charles G. Dawes ,because he was trying to inspire the rising generation. That's why he makes the future of Theodore Roosevelt -- not because he likes it. He doesn't like him. He doesn't trust him. Bbut he recognizes the talent that the young man has, and he recognizes the ability he'll bring to the job.

So when Roosevelt's boosters say to McKinley after the election, 'Look, we know you don't like him. But he gave you good advice during the campaign, and he worked hard and he is fit for this job. He actually understands what needs to be done about the Navy, and make him the assistant secretary of Navy.' McKinley says, 'Ok, I'll consider him, but I do not trust your young man, Roosevelt. He's too pugnacious.'

But despite these misgivings, he literally creates Theodore Roosevelt's future. Without this appointment, we would not know Theodore Roosevelt. He can't resign in a blaze of glory and organize the . He can't charge up Kettle Hill at San Juan Hill, be recommended for the Congressional , he can't be mustered out of the military in September of 1898 and be elected . He can't be made vice president and then succeed McKinley when McKinley is assassinated in September of 1981.

None of this will happen unless McKinley says, 'You know what, not my cup of tea, but he is a rising young leader. And he's capable of doing this job and he deserves a shot.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Given how transformative you've talked about McKinley's campaign was, his presidency. Why is it that you think he isn't remembered more today by Americans?

KARL ROVE: Well, look, he does create a new governing coalition that dominates American politics, and he restores the confidence of the country and its prosperity. He lays the groundwork to take on the trusts and end some of the worst aspects of the growing industrial era. He presides over a short but popular war.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 9

And these are all exemplary things, but I think this: I think that the reason that he is not better thought of and more widely seen for what he is, is that history is written by historians. And the generation that follows McKinley are the first progressive historians, and they found more in the message of Bryan and more in the actions of Roosevelt that they admired. So, they gloss over McKinley.

When he's assassinated by a terrorist, the country grieves like it had not grieved since Abraham Lincoln and would not grieve again until JFK. He's enormously popular. But these people were not the people who in the 1910s and '20s and '30s wrote the history of the era.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: In September of 1901, six months into his second term in the White House, McKinley went to the Panamerican Exposition in Buffalo, New York. The White House had already, for quite some time, been receiving various death threats toward McKinley. But McKinley insisted on being able to greet citizens in a receiving line at the Temple of Music on the fairgrounds.

You see where this is going. There was a man named , an anarchist who waited in the line to meet the president. And when he got to the very front, he shot McKinley twice in the stomach.

So, joining me in the studio now is my Washington Post colleague Carol Leonnig. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the Secret Service. And Carol, you're now working on a book about the history of the Secret Service, which is fitting for this McKinley episode because it was actually McKinley's assassination that really prompted the birth, I guess you would say, of the modern Secret Service as we know it today.

CAROL LEONNIG: Right. That's right. President McKinley was the third president U.S. president killed, and that finally prompted Congress to give one law enforcement agency the responsibility for the president's security.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So before that, presidents either had no protection at all or, in the case of McKinley, security was sort of handled informally by bodyguards who were kind of doing it on the side, right? Because the Secret Service did already exist as an organization, it was just an agency that originally had a very different mission.

CAROL LEONNIG: And that is actually really fascinating. When you look back to the person who created officially, or agreed to create, the Secret Service -- that was President Lincoln, by the way.

It was created in 1865 really to protect our currency and to deal with what was then considered a menace -- the amazing proliferation of counterfeit bills in the wake of the Civil War. So, the day that Lincoln is assassinated, he has a cabinet meeting that morning with his treasury secretary and a few other members. And that is where he agrees that they need to create a special entity that will just be responsible for fighting currency.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I will admit that before I started doing some research for this podcast, actually I didn't realize that the Secret Service was initially established for fighting currency fraud, and I also didn't know that that's actually still part of its mission today.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 10 CAROL LEONNIG: Yes, it was created for this reason. At the time that it was created, anywhere from a third to half of the currency in people's cash registers and purses was fake. So, it was really quite a thing.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And so, how did an organization with that mission end up being the one – after McKinley's assassination -- that Congress puts in charge of protecting the president?

CAROL LEONNIG: Just hearing them said out loud, fighting counterfeiting and then protecting the president really don't seem to have a lot in common. It was like many things in Washington: an odd set of coincidences and evolutions of federal bureaucracy.

It happened that there were some Secret Service officers who had been protecting the president in an ad hoc way. And that's kind of how it morphed into a full-time job.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, in 2003, the Secret Service moved from being underneath the Treasury to under the Department of Homeland Security. Did that have any meaningful effect on its mission or its ability to sort of address different types of threats?

CAROL LEONNIG: Sure. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security was envisioned by Congress after the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington as a potential savior, a way to consolidate all of our terrorism fighting and domestic security operations under one roof.

Unfortunately, for the Secret Service, it was becoming the smallest redheaded stepchild in a behemoth and poorly run agency. And so, whether it was a good idea or not, it did not have a good result for the Secret Service. It wasn't the only challenge, but it wasn't a particularly good omen for it.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, I imagine that there's always been this tension between how much protection a president needs and how much is too much. Because it has been something of the premise of the American presidency, since even , that this is a different kind of leader and there's a certain amount of access that American citizens should be able to have, even with the person at the very highest position in the country.

CAROL LEONNIG: Absolutely. I mean, lawmakers, since the founding of the country, had found that a trapping of royalty, a palace guard. Jefferson talked about the people's house. And even today, after someone jumped over the White House fence and got inside the executive mansion, ran past the steps that lead up to the president's private quarters -- even after that, there are still people in Congress and around the country saying, 'You can't wall off our ability to both see the White House and to know that that's a property of the U.S. public, not the president per se.'

So, this idea of the royalism and the palace guard really is a stumbling block for our country, even today. We couldn't accept then that we should have these kings protected, and we struggle now with the idea of our access to the president.

Now, Lincoln, like many presidents after him and some before him, chafed at the idea of people being responsible for his safety. And the same was true for McKinley. He also bristled at the idea that he couldn't have a receiving line at the World Fair, which is where he was shot.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: At the , they have a letter from Todd Lincoln

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 11 that he sent to Theodore Roosevelt, shortly after Roosevelt was sworn in as president upon McKinley's death.

Robert had been at his father's deathbed after Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre in 1865. He had also been at the train station when President Garfield was shot in 1881. And now, he had been at the exposition in Buffalo when President McKinley was shot in 1901. That means he had been present or nearly present at all three presidential in American history until this point.

In his letter to Teddy Roosevelt, wrote, “I do not congratulate you, for I have seen too much of the seamy side of the presidential robe to think of it as an enviable garment, but I do hope that you will have the strength and courage to carry you through a successful administration.”

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 12