When the Lansing
appointment was announced Mr. Knox observed: "I would as soon ask
Eddie Savoy an opinion on foreign affairs as Robert Lansing."
The roots of Mr. Knox's superciliousness dip down deep into the
relationships begun a score of years ago. To understand him as he
is it is necessary to understand him as he was when his career was
before him. William McKinley asked him to become Attorney General
in his Cabinet. He was then forty-two years old, a political
nobody. What reputation he had was confined to Pittsburg and a
selected few of the steel millionaires in Wall Street, but among
the selected few were names to be conjured with, such as Andrew
Carnegie and Henry C. Frick. Whether President McKinley's interest
in Knox was spontaneous or prompted by Mr. Frick I do not know. Mr.
Knox likes to believe that Mr. Frick did not enter into the
equation. Mr. Knox declined, saying that he could not sacrifice his
lucrative practice but that in four years he would accept the
invitation if the President cared to renew it.
It was renewed. At the age of forty-six, Mr. Knox quit the bar for
politics, or, as he would say, statecraft. His appointment evoked a
storm of protest from such immaculate journals as the New York
World. They dubbed him, "Frick's man," and predicted that the
Department of Justice would be turned into a Wall Street anteroom
for the convenience of the capitalistic combinations then flouting
the Sherman anti-trust law.
Pages:
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172