At 4 p.m. on the afternoon of Sept. 6, 1901, the doors of the Temple of Music in Buffalo, N.Y., swung open and the public began filing past the president of the United States. An organist played Bach. William McKinley stood beneath a blue-and-gold dome, smiling and extending his hand to anyone who wished to take it.

As far as McKinley was concerned, making himself available to the public was part of the job. He had come to Buffalo for the Pan-American Exposition, an extravagant world's fair built partly around the still-new wonder of electricity. At night, hundreds of thousands of bulbs powered by Niagara Falls illuminated the grounds. There was even a nine-ton elephant, Jumbo II, whose owner later tried (and failed) to electrocute him after he attacked two people. (Electricity was still in beta testing.)

And there was the president, available to anyone who got in line.

An estimated 116,000 people had come to hear McKinley speak the day before. Now, after a morning excursion to Niagara Falls, he had returned for a public reception his personal secretary George Cortelyou had tried to strike from the schedule. McKinley put it back.

The receiving line moved quickly. McKinley shook hands with roughly 50 people a minute. Secret Service men watched the crowd, but no one was searched. Seven minutes after the doors opened, Leon Czolgosz, a 28-year-old former factory worker who had embraced anarchism, approached the president with a .32-caliber revolver concealed beneath a handkerchief wrapped around his right hand. McKinley apparently mistook the handkerchief for a bandage and reached solicitously for Czolgosz's left hand.

Czolgosz fired twice. One bullet caused a relatively superficial wound. The other entered McKinley's abdomen. Eight days later, the president was dead.

What seems almost as extraordinary as the........

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