He was a handsome war veteran elected to Congress while still a young man, a politician who, in the words of a powerful elder statesman, "represented the newer view." He became president, only to fall to an assassin's bullet as throngs of horrified supporters looked on.
But 50 years after his death, Buffalo didn't have much to say about President William McKinley.
As the nation bore up under Friday's media deluge of remembrances of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, I visited the State Library to get a sense of how an earlier generation marked the 50th anniversary of the violent death of another president. Reaching far back to middle school for muscle memory, I threaded the microfilm images of the Buffalo Courier-Express and the Evening News into the balky apparatus and set the spool spinning.
Buffalo was, of course, the city where, on Sept. 1, 1901, McKinley was shot twice in the grand music hall of the city's Pan-American Exhibition by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, who like Lee Harvey Oswald was an embittered zero with dreams of making a world-historical impact. As shocked bystanders grabbed Czolgosz, McKinley is reported to have said, "Go easy on him, boys. He could not have known."
The second bullet gravely wounded the president, who initially rallied but succumbed to an infection eight days later, elevating former New York Gov. Theodore Roosevelt — then vacationing with his family in the Adirondacks — to the White House. All of which makes the shooting, to borrow a phrase from Ron Burgundy, kind of a big deal.
But you wouldn't know it from the Sept. 1, 1951 editions of either Buffalo paper, where the front pages devoted banner headlines to international opposition to the military treaty that would allow the U.S. to keep troops in Japan. Both noted slightly lower down the page that local Republican Party Chairman Harry J. Forhead had been admitted to Millard Fillmore Hospital after collapsing from apparent exhaustion in the wake of what his wife described to the Courier-Express as a "bitter battle for control of the Erie County GOP" — a reminder that Erie County's Beirut-like political infighting is not a recent phenomenon.
But there was nothing on the front about McKinley — no accounts from witnesses, no interviews with sad-eyed Lackawanna matrons recalling where they were when they heard news of Czolgosz's attack.
I shuttled all the way to page 12 of the Courier-Express before finding an archival picture of the president about to enter the exhibition, next to a brief article about the assassination so dry it could have been cribbed from the World Book Encyclopedia.
The Buffalo Evening News found space on the front page for "German Rocket Expert Explains Plan to Land 50 Explorers on Mars," but deemed it sufficient to McKinley's memory to wait until page 30 to include two inches of copy in a box noting the anniversary. You can find it right next to "State Fair Shows Woman's Effect on Crop Raising."
I don't mean to poke fun at the journalists of six decades ago, who managed to fill enormous swaths of newsprint every day without assistance from the Internet or smartphones.
Was it a difference in the two men or a difference in the eras that accounts for the divergent ways in which 1951 remembered McKinley and 2013 remembered Kennedy? Surely the answer is both.
With a face like a well-groomed bird of prey, McKinley was a staunch defender of the power structure that Roosevelt would end up rattling. Kennedy, though a son of privilege, represented an overturning of the old ways — the first Catholic, and the youngest man in history to take the office.
Buffalo in 1951 was separated from 1901 by two hideous wars, the most recent only a few years in the rear view.
After the Holocaust and Hiroshima, a fatal wounding by pistol at a grand exposition can make one feel almost nostalgic.
But perhaps that's only because we weren't in the hall at the time, and because the technology to put the crime before our eyes was barely born.
There is, in other words, no Zapruder film of McKinley's assassination — not even a photograph of the incident and its aftermath.
John Kennedy, in contrast, captured the public gaze in life and achieved a sort of gruesome immortality in his sudden death.
So while we should remember McKinley, let us give thanks — for his sake and for posterity's — that he died in bed, in private.
cseiler@timesunion.com • 518-454-5619