William B. McKinley was the polar opposite of Benjamin Harrison. Harrison could do a man a favor, it was said, and make an enemy; McKinley could refuse a favor and make a friend. "He had an innate dignity," said Senator Robert La Follette, "and at the same time a warm, sympathetic nature." When Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts came to the White House to protest the decision to annex the Philippines, McKinley asked him how strongly he felt about the matter. "Pretty pugnacious, I confess, Mr. President," exclaimed Hoar. McKinley took his hand and assured him, "I shall always love you, whatever you do. On another occasion an angry Congressman stormed into McKinley's office to complain about something, but when he came out afterwards he told his friends, somewhat resignedly, "I don't know a blamed word he said, but it's all right, boys." Once, when McKinley asked Senator Shelby M. Cullom whether he would be angry if he overruled him on the appointment of an Illinois man whom the Senator was pushing, Cullom confessed: "Mr. President, I could not get mad at you if I tried." Speaker Tom Reed was frankly envious: "My opponents in Congress go at me tooth and nail, but they always apologize to William when they are going to call him names..."

McKinley's handshake was famous. To save wear and tear on his right hand at receptions, the President developed what came to be called the "McKinley grip." In receiving lines, he would smile as a man came by, take his right hand and squeeze it warmly before his own hand got caught in a hard grip, hold the man's elbow with his left hand, and then swiftly pull him along and be ready to beam on the next guest. McKinley's remarkable memory for faces and names was also well known and highly appreciated. Once, while waiting for ceremonies to begin at the dedication of a monument at the Antietam battlefield, he walked over to the edge of the platform and called down to an old veteran in blue, "Hello, comrade, I saw you in the crowd at Gettysburg last month when I spoke there, didn't I?" Astonished, the veteran exclaimed, "Yes, but how did you recognize me?" Queried about his memory afterward, McKinley shrugged it off: "Oh, I don't know, it just comes naturally."

Senator "Billy" Mason said that when McKinley couldn't give a man the office he sought he looked so unhappy about it that the office-seeker went away filled with sympathy for the President. Sometimes McKinley soothed the feelings of a disappointed caller by taking the flower out of his buttonhole and pinning it to the other man's lapel. Once he had to refuse a labor leader some favor, and the man was deeply offended. McKinley told him how sorry he was; then, shaking hands with him, asked if he was married. When the man said he was, McKinley took a carnation from his coat and handed it to him, saying, "Give this to your wife with my compliments and best wishes." Completely mollified by this gesture, the man smiled and said as he left, "I would rather have this flower from you for my wife than the thing I came to get." McKinley was tactful even with children. One afternoon his secretary George Cortelyou's two boys came to the White House to meet the President. McKinley shook hands with them, chatted a bit, and then, as they turned to go, gave the carnation in his lapel to the older boy while the younger looked on enviously. But right away McKinley took a fresh carnation from a vase nearby, put it in his buttonhole for a moment, then gave it to the younger boy. Years later Cortelyou's son recalled his first lesson in tact and diplomacy from McKinley.

McKinley's solicitude for his ailing wife, Ida, was the talk of the town. Ida was a semi-invalid, subject to headaches and epileptic seizures, and her dependence on "the Major," as she called her husband, was heavy. She covered the walls of the house with pictures of him because, she said, "he's a dear good man and I love him." McKinley, for his part, always kept her in mind. When he was Governor of Ohio, he breakfasted with her each morning, then walked across the street to the State Capitol and, before entering the building, stopped, turned, and waved to her. And promptly at three every afternoon he stopped whatever he was doing, opened the window in his office, waved a white handkerchief, and waited for her to wave back. As President he abandoned the rule that the President escorted the wife of the Secretary of State to the dinner table, insisting on escorting Ida instead and sitting next to her. If, perchance, she h ad a seizure at one of these dinners or at a reception, he continued t he conversation as if nothing had happened. William Howard Taft, chatting with the McKinleys at dinner one day, asked the President for a pencil so he could make a note of what they were discussing. As McKinley reached into his pocket for the pencil, "a peculiar hissing sound" came from Mrs. McKinley. McKinley quickly picked up a napkin, dropped it over her face, handed the pencil to Taft, and continued talking. When Mrs. McKinley recovered a few moments later, she resumed her part in the conversation where she had left off.

There is irony in all this: McKinley, the kind and gentle President, is remembered primarily for taking the nation into the Spanish-American War. Having seen action in the Civil War, he was no war lover. "I have been through one war," he said on the eve of our war with Spain. "I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another." "We want no wars of conquest," he told the American people in his inaugural address on March 4, 1897; "we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression. Wars should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed; peace is preferable to war in almost every contingency."" Shortly after entering the White House, he told Carl Schurz: "Ah, you may be sure that there will be no jingo nonsense under my administration."" But there was plenty of "jingo nonsense" abroad in the land during McKinley's Presidency, and in the end he succumbed to it himself.

In the beginning, McKinley hoped to act as mediator between Spain and the Cuban rebels fighting for independence. But it was not to be. The pressure for military intervention by war hawks like Theodore Roosevelt was unremitting. TR called McKinley a "white-livered cur" for holding back; the Hearst papers excoriated him day after day for cowardice; and people hissed his name, tore his picture off walls, and even burned him in effigy in some cities. An angry Senator burst into the State Department one day and started yelling: "By --------! Don't your President know where the war-declaring power is lodged? Well tell him, by-----! that if he doesn't do something, Congress will exercise the power and declare war in spite of him!" McKinley was extremely sensitive to public opinion Senator Joe Cannon said he kept his ear so close to the ground that it was full of grasshoppers-so that finally, in April 1898, he asked for and obtained authority from Congress to intervene in Cuba. During the war that followed, McKinley became a devout expansionist himself and, like other promoters of empire, criticized anti-imperialists as short-sighted isolationists.

When the war began, McKinley was extremely vague about the location of the Philippines, but quickly learned his geography and warmly supported the idea of taking them from Spain when the war ended. "We are all jingoes now," said the New York Sun; "and the head jingo is the Hon. William McKinley." Though annexation was followed by a bloody insurrection in the Philippines which took more than three years to quell, McKinley had no difficulty in his bid for re-election. Not only did he win in 1900 by the largest plurality up to that time; he also began his second term amid feelings of good will in the nation at large.

On September 5, 1901, attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, McKinley made an address denouncing isolation and urging the expansion of American foreign trade. The following day he planned to hold a reception in the Temple of Music. George Cortelyou, however, thought the President was needlessly exposing himself to possible danger and wanted to cancel the reception. "Why should I?" asked McKinley. "No one would wish to hurt me." Cortelyou then argued that since McKinley could only greet a few people in the ten minutes allotted for the reception, others might be offended at not getting to shake hands. "Well," said McKinley, "they'll know I tried, anyhow." Cortelyou sighed, added another man to the Secret Service staff, and hoped for the best.

The following afternoon, McKinley began using his famous handshake on a long line of people in the Temple of Music. Before he had greeted many an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz approached the President with a revolver concealed in a handkerchief and fired two shots at him. Horrified, people nearby grabbed the assassin, knocked him down, and pinned him to the floor. McKinley slumped into a chair, looked up at the scuffle, and cried, "Don't let them hurt him." Then he gasped: "My wife-be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her-oh, be careful!" And as he was being carried to a little hospital nearby he sighed: "It must have been some poor misguided fellow." A few days later, when it was clear that the end was near, McKinley said quietly, "It is God's way. His will, not ours, be done," and repeated some lines from his favorite hymn, "Nearer my God, to Thee." He then embraced his wife' who exclaimed: "I want to go, too. I want to go, too." "We are all going." murmured McKinley. "We are all going." They were his last words."

Source: Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Anecdotes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 188-92.