Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (22 page)
Authors: Howard Blum
A
t the end of the long checkerboard-patterned first floor of the U.S. Capitol Building, adjacent to the mahogany door leading to the vice president’s office, were two tall arched windows that looked out across the city toward the Washington Monument. A deep alcove stretched beneath the windows, and it was there that a telephone switchboard had been wedged. It serviced a row of phone booths, their elegant raised paneled doors carved from the finest walnut, reserved exclusively for the members of the U.S. Senate. A senator could give the switchboard operator a number anywhere in the country, and within minutes she’d make the connection.
On the afternoon of Friday, July 2, the Senate was not in session, and the switchboard was covered with a canvas drop cloth. Tourists, though, were allowed to walk through the Capitol. As Holt rambled through the hallways, a suitcase in his hand, he walked past a door whose gold-leaf lettering announced, “Office of the Vice President.” This would do, he decided.
He surveyed the hallway and saw the covered switchboard across the way. He knew he had to act now, or he would never find the nerve. He glanced to see if he was being observed, and when he was certain no one was watching, he quickly shoved the suitcase beneath the canvas, placing it directly under the switchboard. Unless someone lifted the canvas, then got down on his hands and knees, they’d never notice a thing, he reassured himself. Still, at about 4:00 p.m., as he hurried as best he could with his gimpy leg down the long stone Capitol steps, his heart was pounding.
Inside the suitcase was a bomb.
AFTER ARRIVING AT UNION STATION
the previous day, Holt had wandered until he found a boardinghouse. He checked in, immediately went to his room, and then made sure the door was locked. For further security, he wedged a chair against the door. He didn’t want the landlady bursting in while he was assembling his bomb. Its core was three sticks of dynamite.
When he was done, he reread the letter he had drafted during his long evenings in the Central Park bungalow. He had made five copies, one to President Wilson and the others addressed to the four principal Washington newspapers.
Satisfied with what he had written, he put the five envelopes into the inside pocket of the pin-striped brown suit jacket he’d be wearing tomorrow. Then he cleaned up carefully. He still needed to plant the bomb, and he wanted to make sure the maid tomorrow morning found nothing that would prompt any concerns while he was on his way to the Capitol.
All had gone off as he’d planned. Even better, in fact. No one would ever notice the suitcase; finding a switchboard covered by a drop cloth had been a genuine bit of luck. Walking down the block from the Capitol, he passed a mailbox. He pushed the letters one at a time through the slot. In case anyone was watching, he tried to act as if he were mailing off nothing more significant than a payment for an outstanding bill, which was precisely what he believed he had done—paid America back for its great unfairness.
Holt returned to the boardinghouse, retrieved his suitcase, and checked out. Then he walked the city, waiting.
He expected to hear the blast crashing through Washington at any moment. The wait was excruciating. And the steady, even hum of city noise was a constant reprimand. How can I have failed? What has gone wrong? he wondered, close to panic.
He knew he shouldn’t return to the Capitol Building, but he couldn’t restrain himself. At 10:30 on the hot, quiet night he was pacing back and forth on the Senate terrace, his eyes fixed on a pair of tall, arched windows.
Growing tired, he found a bench at a nearby trolley stop, where he sat with his back turned to the road, all his shivery attention on the Capitol. He watched and listened, but the domed building remained swathed in an immense silence.
At 11:23 p.m. the bomb exploded, violently shaking the Capitol Building to its foundations. The roar reached across the city. Sitting at his desk in the basement of the Senate, Frank Jones, a thirty-five-year veteran of the Capitol police, was thrown from his chair. “It sounded like several cannons going off,” he said. “I thought the Capitol dome had toppled.”
Inside, plaster rained down from walls and ceilings, gaping holes were punched through stone walls, doors were blown off their hinges, crystal chandeliers crashed to the floor. The East Reception Room was in shambles. No one had been killed, but a message had been delivered: America was under siege.
Holt had seen it all happen. He was sitting on the trolley bench when the huge noise burst into his ears like a victory trumpet. As a curious crowd gathered, he walked off, tingling with a great, proud excitement.
It was three blocks to Union Station, and he covered the distance in time to make the 12:10 a.m. train to New York City. The conductor showed him to a berth in car 27, but sleep was impossible. Alone in the darkness, he listened to the sounds of the powerful train racing down the tracks, taking him to his destiny.
A photograph taken in the aftermath of the explosion that rocked the U.S. Capitol on July 2, 1915.
(National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress)
AND THEN IT WAS SATURDAY,
July 3.
In Manhattan, Holt transferred to the Long Island Rail Road, boarding an Oyster Bay line train.
It was 8:30 on the quiet holiday weekend morning when he stepped off the train at the Glen Street station. He wore a stiff-brimmed straw hat on his head, and in his hand he carried a suitcase. It was filled with newspaper clippings about the war in Europe—and two sticks of dynamite. In his brown suit coat were the .38- and 32-caliber revolvers, one in each pocket. An inside breast pocket held another stick of dynamite.
At the station, he hailed a Glen Cove yellow cab. He told the driver, Arthur Ford, to take him to the Morgan estate.
It was a two-mile drive.
In Washington, he expected the president and the newspaper editors would soon be reading his typewritten letter.
“Unusual times and circumstances call for unusual means,” it began:
Would it not be well to stop and consider what we are doing?
We stand for PEACE AND GOOD WILL to all men, and yet, while our European brethren are madly setting out to kill one another we edge ’em on and furnish them more effective means of murder. Is it right?
We get rich by the exportation of explosives, but ought we to enrich ourselves when it means the untold suffering and death of millions of our brethren and their widows and orphans?
And there was a handwritten postscript:
We would, of course, not sell to Germans if they could buy here, and since so far we only sold to the Allies, neither side should object if we stopped.
It was signed, “R. Pearce.”
Now that he had their attention, he hoped that they would read his words and understand that he was right. Men like him, those who were special, had a responsibility to make other people—even the president of the United States or the richest man in the world—listen. It was his natural duty. He could not turn away.
The taxi drove through the open gate toward the big brick house. It stopped in the circular driveway across from the front door.
“Oh, I forgot,” Holt told the driver, hesitating for a moment before he got out. “I have to get my card.”
He opened his suitcase and searched for the card that identified him as Thomas Lester of the
Society Summer Directory
.
He found it, and put it in his jacket.
Ford, watching, wondered: Was that a revolver sticking out of the passenger’s suit pocket?
But before he could ask, Holt had left the car.
He walked up the three short brick steps to the front door and rang the bell.
P
hysick, the butler, was immediately wary. As soon as he opened the door and took quick measure of the man in the rumpled brown suit, holding a battered suitcase, he knew something was not right.
“I want to see Mr. Morgan,” the caller said, and handed the butler a business card.
Physick glanced at the card identifying the stranger as Thomas Lester, a representative of the
Society Summer Directory
. But he was still not persuaded. The hollow look in the man’s eyes was reason enough to remain on guard.
“What is your business with him?” the butler asked, his curtness deliberate.
“I can’t discuss that with you,” he answered. “I am an old friend of Mr. Morgan. He will see me.”
Physick did not appreciate the insistence in the man’s tone. It was inappropriate, and certainly not how a gentleman would conduct himself. “You must tell me the business you have with him,” the butler repeated firmly.
So it had quickly come to this, Holt decided. During his weeks of planning, he’d liked to imagine that he’d be swiftly ushered in for an audience with Morgan; and that as they sat face-to-face the financier would be not merely persuaded by but impressed with the powerful logic of his argument. Morgan would appreciate that he was talking to an equal; a friendship would blossom. And violence would not be necessary.
But even as the vision took shape in his mind, he also knew it would never become a reality. He had prepared for rejection: guns were in his pockets, and his suitcase was packed with dynamite. He had offered an alternative, but they refused to listen. Now he would do whatever was necessary to complete his mission.
Holt pulled the .38-caliber revolver from his jacket and charged into the front hall. “Where is Morgan?” he demanded, the gun trained on the butler.
“In the library,” Physick lied. He knew his employer was at the other end of the big house, in the breakfast room dining with his houseguests, including Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, British ambassador to the United States. When he led the armed intruder down the hallway to the library, it was a diversion. It was all he could think of to protect the household.
The library double doors were open, and Holt rushed in, waving his gun. It was a spacious room, and with the curtains drawn and the dark mahogany paneling it seemed bathed in perpetual night. Adjusting his eyes to the shadows, he surveyed the space.
It was empty, he quickly discovered. He had been tricked!
In the same moment Physick bolted, taking advantage of the gunman’s confusion. He ran down the hall in the opposite direction, toward the breakfast room, his feet slipping on the well-polished marble floor, his frock coat constraining his movements. Terrified that any second a bullet would slam into his back, he ran as fast as he could down the mansion hallway, all the time shouting at the top of his lungs, “Upstairs, Mr. Morgan! Upstairs!” It was imperative to warn his employer. Mr. Morgan needed to lock himself in an upstairs bedroom. “Upstairs, Mr. Morgan! Upstairs!” he repeated as he fled.
As Physick approached the breakfast room, it occurred to him that it would be a mistake to enter. He’d be leading the intruder straight to Mr. Morgan. Instead, he hurried down a narrow staircase that led to the basement servants’ hall. He’d recruit an army of footmen and valets to subdue the gunman.
Holt tried to pursue the butler, but his deformed leg made running impossible. And then, before he could understand how it had happened, the butler had vanished. He looked down the long hallway, but he might as well have been peering down the wrong end of a telescope. The house was vast and empty. With his gun drawn, he moved forward with caution. He felt completely exposed, and very alone.
“WE WERE AT BREAKFAST IN
the room on the ground floor, when the butler was heard shouting from the main entrance by the library to Mr. Morgan to go upstairs quickly,” Sir Cecil would remember. “We did not know what was the matter, whether it was fire or burglars, and the whole party left the table and ran up the rear staircase, which was nearest to the door.”
Morgan led the way. He was a man who always took charge. His authority was instinctive, and a lifetime of experiences had proved that he had the power to shape events to conform to his will. He was not frightened, but he was annoyed. It wouldn’t do to have any sort of disturbance—fire? burglars?—in
his
house. Especially this weekend, with so many guests, and Junius’s party tonight.
Rosalie McCabe, the ancient nurse who took care of the youngest children, was standing at the top of the stairs. She had also heard the butler’s shouts and wondered what was happening.
“What has gone wrong up here?” Morgan demanded petulantly. “What do you want me for?”
“Nothing has happened up here that I know of,” she answered at once. She wanted to make it clear that she was not the one responsible for disturbing her employer.
Perhaps, Morgan wondered, it had all been a mistake. He’d need to give Physick a good talking-to. But even as his anger started rising, he knew that this sort of thing wouldn’t be like Physick at all. Something must’ve occurred. He told Sir Cecil to take a few of the guests up to the attic floor and check the servants’ rooms. He would inspect the second-floor bedrooms with the others.
JANE MORGAN, THE FINANCIER’S WIFE,
saw him first. She was standing outside her bedroom on the second floor with her husband when she turned.
And there he was
. He was coming up the main staircase. He had a revolver in each hand and a wild look in his eyes. And right behind him were her two youngest children.
Minutes earlier, as Holt was wandering through the downstairs hall, he’d heard voices. He pulled open a door and found Frances and Henry Morgan in the playroom. He pointed a pistol at them. “Come with me,” he ordered. He led them out of the room, and told them to follow as he started up the staircase.
Jane Morgan came from old Boston stock, and she was by nature a quiet woman, happy to read her books and grow award-winning roses while her husband stormed the citadels of finance and politics. But this man had her babies! She let out a small shriek and, sheer instinct pushing her, moved toward him.
The instant he heard his wife’s cry, Morgan turned and saw the intruder. The man held two revolvers, and both were leveled at his wife.
He pushed her out of the line of fire and charged at the gunman.
“Now, Mr. Morgan, I have you,” said Holt.
Morgan was not deterred. He hurled his 220-pound body at the intruder.
Holt fired once. Then again. The noise echoed through the house.
The first bullet entered Morgan’s abdomen. A red stain quickly began to spread across his white linen waistcoat. The second bullet passed through his left thigh. A river of blood gushed down his leg.
Holt pulled the trigger two more times. There were two distinct
click
s, and after each one it was as if time had stopped as Morgan waited for the inevitable explosion. But on each occasion the caps did not detonate.
Despite his wounds, Morgan fell on Holt. Bleeding profusely, he wrestled with the thin, spindly gunman, his full weight pressing against the intruder like a massive boulder. Both of Holt’s hands were pinned to the floor, and his grip on the revolvers loosened.
Morgan twisted one of the guns from Holt’s hands. His wife and the elderly nurse worked frantically to pry away the other.
“I have a stick of dynamite in my pocket,” Holt managed to shout.
He might have been warning that he was still a threat. Or perhaps he was begging for some restraint; if they treated him too roughly, the house could come tumbling down around them.
But events were now rushing by so quickly that no one was paying any attention. Morgan’s clothes were soaked with blood. It looked as if he was dying. Then suddenly there was Physick, accompanied by the members of the household staff, charging up the staircase.
The gardener had a shovel, a valet had a broom, and the butler had armed himself with a large chunk of coal. As the man who had introduced himself as Lester lay pinned to the floor, Physick kept pounding and pounding the rock-hard lump of coal into his head until at last the gunman lost consciousness.
MORGAN WAS CARRIED TO HIS
bed, and as soon as he was settled in, he demanded a phone.
He dialed the number of his Wall Street office. “I’ve been shot in the stomach,” he announced in a weak voice. “Get the best doctor you can.”
The first doctor to arrive at Matinicock Point, though, was a local man, Dr. William Zabriskie. He had little experience with shooting victims, and his examination of Morgan left him very concerned. The hip wound, he quickly decided, was only an annoyance. The bullet had passed through the thigh muscle and apparently exited. The other bullet, however, had penetrated the lower part of the abdominal cavity, and that was a genuine danger. If it grew infected, the prognosis was dire. Yet since there was no hospital in Glen Cove, he decided the most reasonable course would be to wait for the arrival of the New York specialists.
Matinicock Point, meanwhile, became an armed camp. The partners at J. P. Morgan & Company did not know if the assassin had accomplices, or if he did, whom they were working for, and whether they would attack again to complete the botched job. Police officers from all over Long Island and New York were summoned to protect the estate. A shotgun-toting officer stood at every entrance to the main house. Private detectives patrolled the driveway. A squad of burly armed men stood in front of the now tightly locked entrance gate. Charles Price, the gatekeeper, toted a large repeating rifle and made it clear to curious neighbors that they should stay away. “There are scores of men with shotguns up there on the grounds. They are men who are not taking any chances.”
When the pair of New York doctors arrived, they found that Morgan’s condition was stable, but an extensive examination brought new concerns. The first bullet had traveled through the abdominal cavity and apparently lodged in the financier’s spine. They would need to probe for the bullet, a dangerous, life-threatening procedure.
Since the two-hour ambulance ride to New York risked exacerbating Morgan’s condition further, it was decided to perform the operation in Morgan’s bedroom. The doctors went into his private bath to scrub. But minutes later, one of the doctors hurried back into the room. He ordered the butler to summon all the servants.
“I need your help,” he began fervently. “I need you to find the bullet. If we can establish that it exited, then a probe won’t be necessary.” He knew that they had already conducted a search, but, nearly begging, the doctor asked them, please, to look again.
Twenty minutes later the bullet was found. It had passed through Morgan, ricocheted off a wall, and lain hidden in the dark floral design of the carpet on the second-floor landing.
That night, the relieved doctors issued a statement to the many reporters who had gathered outside the front gate: “A further examination of Mr. Morgan’s wounds shows that the bullets did not involve any vital organs. The condition of the patient continues excellent.” The crisis had passed.
As for the gunman, he had regained consciousness. Dr. Zabriskie treated the cuts on his skull and forehead and, after washing away the blood, found they were superficial.
Erich Muenter
(center)
after his capture. On his left is chief constable Frank McCahill, who arrested him at Matinicock Point.
(© Bettmann/Corbis)
“Who are you?” the doctor asked as he applied antiseptic to the wounds. “The butler says your name is Lester.”
“I am a Christian gentleman,” was the cryptic reply, the words spoken with pious conviction.
Before the doctor could ask another question, the local justice of the peace and the chief of constables hurried into the room. They snapped handcuffs onto the assassin’s wrists. Then they led him out the front door and into a waiting police car.
A THICK WHITE CLOTH BANDAGE
was wrapped around Lester’s head like a turban. One eye had been blackened. The other was a narrow slit. But as soon as Lester was brought into the Glen Cove jail after his arraignment, he informed the arresting officers that he wanted to draw up a statement. They brought him ink and a sheet of paper, and he started to write:
I, F. Holt of Ithaca, N.Y., formerly professor of French of Cornell University, make the following statement: “I have been in New York ten days, and made a previous trip to Mr. Morgan’s a few days ago. My motive was to try to influence Mr. Morgan to use his influence in the manufacture of ammunition in the United States and among millionaires who are financing the war loans, to have an embargo put on shipments of ammunition so as to relieve the American people from complicity in the deaths of thousands of our European brothers.”
As he wrote, he hoped this would appease them. He would give them this much: I am not Thomas Lester but rather a college professor named Holt. And they would not bother to dig for other, more deeply buried secrets.
