Shooting were landing to explain the governor state. The first year you develop some kind of an illness, an element and never was quite explain what a biased, but he had to return to in that time he he recuperated he couldnt go back to college because economic difficulties had rendered in need all of the family members to go to work. He got two jobs as a schoolteacher and u. S. A. Postal clerk he enlisted immediately and whether his family was a strong abolitionist, his mother particularly subscribe to the weekly tribune in the mail and he and his cousin decided within a day and how first though they couldnt add of the war and was a Pretty Amazing war record. And immediately as Commanding Officer and became a general and was wounded five times and became governor and his remarkable organizational ability. And was taking care of supplies and visibility day of battle in our history was two miles behind the line in the unit that had gotten caught essentially in the area of that battle or they couldnt move, couldnt get out, nobody could get in to help them and they were starving and they had run out of water. And now its Late Afternoon they hadnt had lunch and they ran out of water. With bread and coffee and a few other things in these troops would have to go right to battle to do it. And some of their young soldier in the encounter to officers who say this is ridiculous from the u. K. And do this and is an associate went on and got to the clearing and then they made a run for it. And they managed to get the provisions in the veteran and was promoted to commissioning and put it directly in harms way and each time he got another promotion and the 22yearold major. So he goes back to poland, and decide he to become a lawyer and run for Congress Like his mentor, Rutherford Hayes and he sent a letter that this is what he wants to do. I want to do what you did. But frankly with all of this industrialization going on, and maybe should go into business. You could become a man by the age of 40. He carefully preserved the letter, but he knew what he wanted. So he missed a kid in ohio were had become a schoolteacher and becomes a lawyer and hangs on a shingle and becomes a civic leader in canton. He joined everything featuring veterans church, he joined the chamber of commerce and immediately he was pulled into positions of leadership and there is Something Special about this guy that led people to turn to him for leadership comic even though he was not a flamboyant person. I have a little passage in my book here describing him after his civil war experience and i think we see here in the book the first hint of what becomes an element of the history of William Mckinley. So the civil war transferring as much as his fathers porches transformed crude iron ready for more sophisticated uses. Is only a vague sense of who he was or what he was doing with his life. An adult who had been severely trusted with intellect come administrator ability, leadership and courage. He passed the test and demonstrated men gravitated to a site in many older men were drawn into roles that solicitous mentorship. Yet this new confidence settled upon him softly without toronto comedian simplicity of temperament to produce demeanor of heavy quiet he learned the power of mystique, that which didnt need explicit expression of keeping people guessing as to his intentions or motives with intellect to resolve he didnt seem bothered by it and some of the elements of his persona, and easygoing demeanor shrouding an increasingly restless ambition. So he does run for congress. He serves 14 years come and becomes chairman of the ways and Means Committee where hes in a position to perch his pet issue, terrorist or protectionism, high trade tariffs to protect American Manufacturing and agriculture eventually at a time when america was in burgeoning as a project that machine in the evening, as chairman of the ways and means craft the bill, a tariff bill, very high tariff bill, the mckinley tariff of 1898 turned out to be a bad move. The tariff didnt go into effect for quite some time in a lot of businesses took the opportunity to raise prices because they were going to race anyways. The American People didnt like that very much in the result was a disaster for republicans in the 1890 elections and poor mckinley is sitting in his office as they come in to shovel the office all messed up with posters everywhere and buttons any sitting there smoking a cigar and walks his friend, the editor of the news paper and they says jim freeze, it all over. He says what am i going to say in the newspaper . Became he looks up and he says, in the time of darkest travail, the areas nearest. What . He couldnt get pessimistic about anything. So he lost his seat, beauty or later runs for governor and now hes ready to run for president of the United States for this campaign in 1895. His good friend in the man who serves him so well, martina and he wants to find out from tom platt of new york, matthew quay in pennsylvania who want about state that he wanted to know if their boxes to work under them if they would support mckinley because if they did come they did come he was the frontrunner anyway and you would probably have the nomination sewed up. It wouldnt even be a battle. He comes back to cleveland and mckinley is there and they have a nice dinner and they go into this study language books and settled themselves into overstuffed leather chairs and light up their cigars and its pretty excited and says governor its all about the shouting. These guys will all go for you. He didnt seem particularly disturbed by the positions. He says where are you . He says manley wants the whole new england and a couple others and then platt also wants to be treasury secretary and he wants it in writing. Eight years earlier at the beginning of the administration had gotten a similar commitment for his support, but the treasury secretary never materialized, so he wanted a promissory note. Mckinley puffs on a cigar and he stands up and walks forward and says theres some things in life that come at too high a price. If thats the price and not have it. Hold on a says. Im just saying we can beat these guys and thats what they do because these guys were so upset that they went to other major politicians in various states and got them to become in those states so they could deny mckinley a nomination that which case they thought maybe they could pull off somebody else who could play their game and price but he beat them. He became the nominee you know this story. He had two terms in the house and he lost that seat and he was one of the greatest in our history and we all know he got himself on this platform at the Democratic Convention and he made this speech. Thou shall not press the throne of torrents upon the head and you shall not crucify and the commission and the reason was the panic of 1893 was still very much with the country in the south and west in the rural areas were really suffering. What they needed is the three coins and silver and that is what the rally cry was and became who would read that chart. He was bending amazing amounts of time. He couldnt compete with that. You can talk about gardening q a but i will keep this going but he didnt want so he had this from porch strategy. They came to canton ohio and came and spoke with the governor on his front porch. Who cares. And it was amazing at her. You know what we say in politics that they control the message well, mckinley controlled the message because these groups could be a church group or a labor group were African American motivation and they say they like to come and they send back a letter and said what are you going to say . What questions do you have . So he knew exactly what they were going to say. He basically it was cause i orchestrated. Well, it works. He became president. So now, im going to step back and try to describe what kind of a man they have emerged to these experiences starting with the civil war and that sort of sense of self that he developed as a result of his success in the war. So he seemed on the outside to be a very present person, congenial. He didnt seem to be a to be amanda for some a lot of people wondered whether he was really a leader. He was an incrementalist in terms of the way he managed things. He didnt try to push too hard and i will say that he was not a visionary. He was not a man of imagination. And his take, Theodore Roosevelt was a man of imagination. Henry cabot lodge, these are men of imagination, great vision about american greatness and how they can bust out into the world. It turns out he had amazing capacity that they were unfolding with clarity and find ways to mash them in ways that would allow them in a favorite direction and this gave him a great deal of sort of subterranean force, and i have the quiet i was talking about. The iron wall beneath the surface. He always seemed to get his way somehow indebted by convincing people to do what he wanted to do by thinking it was their idea. One of the great warriors of his time and his war secretary said that he didnt care who got the credit. That just wasnt important to him at all. He had a close friend who set up the mckinley never let anything handed the way of his own advancement and the wife of a very prominent ohio man at the time an ally and adversary of mckinley talked about the masks that the war and they were phony. He was the president fellow, was generously spirited, but behind those masks was this fire and well and desire to succeed. My favorite example of this is a word from a congressman by the name ben butterworth. I came across 10 in the marking of papers because they were very Close Friends and a lot of letters sent back and forth and initially concluded that he must be part of that politicians in ohio that clustered around the hannah to make up more and more into these letters that butterworth wally loves him and then he came across a Washington Post article in which butterworth was talking about mckinley and used his illustration, sort of an idea of how mckinley operated. He said why is mckinley and i were walking through an orchard in the tree had two apples, mckinley would walk under that tree, pick the two apples, but one in his pocket, take a bite out of the other went and turned to me and say do you like apples . The butterworth was trying to say as he was very congenial, but he always seemed to get the apples. And as he managed the shadows. Im going to talk a little bit about some of the examples of the mckinley resolve that emerged in big ways during his presidency. One would be the war. The book on mckinley and im going to talk briefly later about why i think what has kept him from having the reputation that i believe he deserves. The book on mckinley is that he didnt really want to go to war and the American People, congress basically thrust to make it does well toward the war that he didnt want. My view is if you study this carefully, you realize this isnt what happened at all. When he was select to do with the terrible, very bloody, very awful insurrection going on in cuba. They wanted independence from the spanish. Had it been a previous 10 year insurrection. I cant remember. And they had settled finally, but now it had reemerged in the destabilizing the caribbean. It is putting americans who were trying to do business in cuba at risk. It is also opening up the possibility that other european powers could be the chaos and come in and take over cuba. It was one thing to have a saving power in the caribbean, which we consider to be our serious influence what the legacy imperial power, but to have germany say for some other european power come in would be untenable. And so, there is a great deal of anguish and anger in the country. They stand humanitarian grounds, not geopolitical fact is, but that was a are as well. Mckinley comes into the presidency and takes over grover cleveland. He had essentially favored the spanish over the cubans, not because they like the spanish particularly, but because he was the status quo guy. His viewers as soon soonest they can put down the insurrection and go the status quo in everything will be stable and fine. We are not very realistic. It was almost from day one. From day one, he concluded that the record is very clear if you study carefully, he wanted out of the caribbean. He wanted to stay out of cuba, but he didnt want to go to war to do it if you could avoid that war. So what did he do . He opened up the negotiation, sort of a program of diplomacy and realized america is becoming a pretty powerful country in the southern neighborhood and it would be very difficult if they went to war with us and so they entered and as well. Pretty soon they could see that mckinley, his diplomacy was behind this club with an iron fist and he was essentially saying to them, we want this war to end. We dont care how you do it. You can win it or you can negotiate an end to it and probably that means more autonomy if the cubans would accept that, but they dont seem to want that as a possibility, but shes got to get this war over it because its destabilizing the region and its untenable in the American People are not going to put up with it for much longer. So they sort of sad, you cant talk to us like that. Cuba belongs to us. I dont care how close it is to your shores. I doubt they essentially said. Mckinley never wavered. He just kept pushing and got more and more angry. The battleship had not blown a in the harbor, but the fact that with ayers went also to mckinley is resolved that he was going to make sure that they surrounded the caribbean because offensively was to protect american lives, and the insurrection because the spanish people and cuba are getting increasingly angry at america. Nevertheless, it did grow up in the war became inevitable. Another example is hawaii. We have to understand this amazing story and not in a particularly entirely savory story about americans, but hawaii had been a stopping off police for americans for decades and for other countries as well, but ultimately people from america settled there and they were there for generations mostly running sugar plantations, getting fabulously wealthy in the process and pretty soon they had so much financial power that they felt they should have political power to go with it and they ended up offending the polynesian royalty that had been governing in presiding over the Hawaiian Island for decades, centuries and not happened when Benjamin Harrisons watch. He was very upset about it and even contemplated going in the and removing those people from the government, but he didnt want them fighting former americans of that was the state of play. Mckinley again reject the policy of his predecessor and made it very clear through subterranean diplomacy, that he was very interested in acquiring cubans through annexation and the americans wanted but also. But it generated a lot of antiexpansionist sentiment and fervor in congress and other places among intellectuals and writers and others, but he never wavered. He got the negotiation. He sent it to congress. He couldnt go to the treaty, so we sent it back to congress to be dealt with by both houses, which didnt require two thirds vote and that is how we got hawaii. And then there was the philippines. When the spanish sued for peace after that war, he basically said okay, fine, i will happily negotiate a peace treaty, but here is the deal. We have to leave cuba. Temporarily its going to be independent. Spain has to leave puerto rico. That came out of nowhere, but we had conquered puerto rico and spain has to give us an island in the pacific. Turned out to be gone and not has to happen before we enter into negotiations. That is really tough diplomacy. And he basically said that for the philippines, which we essentially acquired, we took over the drone after admiral dewey destroyed the spanish freedom, he said the philippines is open to negotiation. Thank you, mr. Mckinley and the spanish were saying. They asked the french a master of the United States to operate on their behalf. Kimberlin said to mckinley, you cant get anywhere glory than you are detained in this war of yours, so im sure hell be very generous. But the question was, what is he going to do about the philippines and while negotiations in paris are going on, peace treaty negotiations, he pondered it in the concluded ultimately he had to have a station because we were billing dispute global navy and you couldnt have a global navy without controlling territory around the globe and so the best place would be the day, but he couldnt control unless he had the island and if the moves on the whole rest of the philippines, spain was not going to build to keep the philippines at all. The people of the philippines hated the spanish, so now they were going to be able to go back in there. So whos going to have the philippines. It wasnt going to be the filipino people unfortunately, so its going to have to be us or germany or some other european power. Germany was on the trial for possessions for colonies. And if germany had all these other highland, they basically decided im taking the whole thing. That got them into a war as you know, very much like the vietnam war as a global work for her, very difficult, sympathetic figure, guy by the name of greg although a number of the back of the uncertainty and the uncertainty in that one on for years to Teddy Roosevelt said minnis ration. So, as i said it, that seems to be a consequential presidency. So why doesnt he get more credit . Why doesnt he get more respect . One reason has to do with his successor, Teddy Roosevelt. Im a great admirer of Teddy Roosevelt or he might have been the greatest genius ever became president. What he could do was Pretty Amazing. But he never shared credit with anybody and he was self absorbed, even this kid said he wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. [laughter]. And the market didnt swoon, soe didnt feel like he had to say those things numb. He said anymore. He said i intend to govern as if the electors have elected me as president and not mckinley, which was a remarkable thing to be said while mccountryly was lying in state in the capitol rotunda. Ing but roosevelt was always conscious of the narrative, and he always put himself at the center of the narrative. And over