Excerpt from The Life of William McKinley, Vol. 1 During the whole of the McKinley Administrations, Mr. George B. Cortelyou, who, as Secretary to the President, was associated with him more intimately than any other man, kept a close lookout for biographical material. With a thoroughness and care seldom if ever equaled, he treasured all the official and private correspondence, documents of every description, memoranda in the President's handwriting, drafts of speeches and messages, reports of telephone conversations, photographs, pamphlets, and countless other items of interest. In addition he preserved his own shorthand notes of occasional remarks made by the President, and kept a diary in which were recorded, from a peculiarly intimate point of view, all the daily happenings of importance, in the White House, at Canton, or in the trains which carried the President to various parts of the country. Without reservation this entire collection was generously placed at my disposal. Its very bulk would have been appalling but for the pains with which it had been arranged, classified, and indexed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.