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Cromwell?”
    “Mr. Holt,” Goethals said in his even tone, “by now you should have realized this is a high-stakes situation. Why else would you have been sent here by President Roosevelt?”

I well knew of William Nelson Cromwell, as did anyone in America who followed headlines in regard to presidential politics and the Panama Canal, two of the most popular subjects in the media. After all, if one takes delight in observing vitriol, blatant lies, character assassination, cronyism, and corruption, then American presidential elections provide first-class entertainment—happily repeated by newspapers of all stripes. We read those headlines and tut-tut with the delicious sense of self-righteousness that it allows us; it would be hypocritical to suggest I had been any different during the campaign the previous fall. In the Dakotas, where I saw a newspaper only once a week, those headlines drew me into the pre-election battles as if I were watching our locals compete for a mayoralty. As a result, like most Americans, I had a thorough knowledge of the running battle between the Republican candidate, William Howard Taft, and his Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan, who was making a third attempt to secure the presidency.
    Theodore Roosevelt was the extremely popular incumbent, a man of honor who kept his promise not to run for a third term. He had persuaded his Republicans to nominate Taft, Roosevelt’s close friend and his Secretary of War.
    In contrast, Bryan’s base consisted of the liberals and populists of the Democrats, and he ran a campaign designed to take advantage of the distaste and distrust of the nation’s business elites.
    One month before the election, Joseph Pulitzer’s
New York World
handed Bryan a gift—one that should have sealed the election for him. Pulitzer ran a front-page story accusing Taft’s brother and Theodore Roosevelt’s brother-in-law of being members and beneficiaries of a secret syndicate. This syndicate had allegedly been set up to profit from France’s forty-million-dollar sale of its Panama Canal Company to the United States at the turn of the century. This very sale allowed America to start building the canal on the heels of a convenient and successful Panamanian revolt for independence from Colombia. Headline after headline dragged Taft and Roosevelt through mud, to the point that an outraged Roosevelt initiated a libel suit against the
New York World.
    In short, given populist sentiments against the business elite and these unproven—yet widely believed—allegations, Bryan should have won. He overestimated that sentiment, however, and made a huge error in judgment by calling for the socialization of railroads. Bryan lost resoundingly, and at the upcoming inauguration in March, Taft would become Roosevelt’s successor, the twenty-seventh president of the United States.
    The relevance of all this for me was that William Nelson Cromwell had been at the heart of all those allegations of corruption, bribes, and cronyism. The
World
called him the Secretary of War in regard to the Panama Canal, and his law offices on Wall Street were commonly viewed as the real executive offices of Panama. The biggest unanswered question was about the disbursement of a now-vanished twenty-five million of the forty million dollars allocated for the United States to purchase—from Cromwell’s client—the French rights to the railway cutting through the heart of the Canal Zone.
    Twenty-five million dollars was a staggering number that I was unable to grasp. An average wage nowadays was twenty-two cents an hour. How was one to conceive of twenty-five million dollars?
    Yet when William Nelson Cromwell strutted into the office from the doorway in the rear, his appearance gave me a better sense of the kind of man who would be involved in that kind of money.

    He was a dandy, all right, enough to make Buffalo Bill Cody a jealous man. They shared the same loving attention to flowing locks of hair.