Luckily I already had a pleasant working relation with Mr. Cleveland. It had come about in my last two years on McClure’s, when my chief editorial task had been trying to persuade him that it was his duty to write his reminiscences for us, incidentally offering myself as a ghost if he felt that he needed one.

As his letters to me at this time show he was not entirely unfriendly to the project:

I want to do the thing; and yet I am afraid the difficulties in the way of doing it are fundamental and inexorable. You see the project requires me to exploit myself and my doings before the public. I do not see how I can do this, though I am terribly vain and often bore my friends privately by tiresome reminiscence. And yet I cannot but think that there are incidents and results in my career, which, by their narration might be of service in stimulating those who aspire to good citizenship—“and there we are.” This latter consideration hints of duty; but then comes the fear that what seems to me duty is a mere fantastic notion, and thereupon the old disinclination resumes its sway.

I have frequently thought no one could help me so much as you; and it has seemed to me more than once that you and I might possibly “cook up something” in a summer vacation’s freedom from distractions.

Nothing came at this time, 1904, of the “Tarbell-Cleveland fantasy,” as Mr. Cleveland gaily dubbed it, and two years later the project was dismissed, but in a letter so friendly that I cannot resist quoting from it:

I do not believe a man who has turned the corner of sixty-nine years, is any less vain and self-satisfied than when he was a youth. At any rate here I am, in this sixty-nine predicament, delighted with the generous things you say of me in the goodness of your heart, and more than halfway deluding myself into the notion that I deserve them. I want to be very sensible and hard-headed in this affair; but in any event I am entitled to rejoice in your good opinion of me, and your hearty wishes for my welfare and happiness.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for them; and I shall gratefully remember them as long as I live. Somehow I have an idea that you know me well—and surely I need not afflict myself with the fear of vanity if I have found a friend in you.

With those letters in my files I felt free, when I undertook the tariff work for the American, to ask Mr. Cleveland to talk to me about the making of his tariff message in 1886, and the failure of the Wilson bill in 1893. He was most generous, and when I had completed my story of the two episodes I asked him to read the manuscript and give me a candid judgment and of course his corrections and his suggestions. The chief suggestion that he made showed a sensitiveness to his literary style in public documents which I had not suspected. Charming letter writer as Mr. Cleveland was, in his public documents he was ponderous. I must have enlarged a little on this, for I find this paragraph in his letter with which he sent back the proofs:

I have ventured to suggest a little toning down of your characterization of my style—thinking perhaps you would be willing to make an alteration to please me if for no other reason. You know we are all a little sensitive on such a point.