Free The Admiral and the Ambassador by Scott Martelle

that “if Spain lets Cuba go, stops the enormous expenditure of men and money … and devotes her energies to developing her resources at home and her possessions in Africa, there will be a prospect for the creditors to get a better price for the securities which they hold.”
    Woodford arrived in Paris in late July and spent a couple of weeks consulting with Porter and others. Porter, whose military experience had been forged in the direct confrontations of the Civil War, saw in the persistence of the Cuban rebels signs that they ultimately would succeed. “If we ever get this infernal Cuban question settled we will have some peace and quiet,” he wrote to his old friend and neighbor Cornelius Bliss, McKinley’s secretary of the interior. “It is perfectly absurd that Spain with 200,000 regular troops cannot handle 30,000 insurgents and it is the best proof that Cuba will some day be free in spite of everything. The administration has shown great patience, which is wise.” 2
    Despite his own military history, or perhaps because of it, Porter was among those who would welcome war with Spain—and maybe even with Great Britain, if it came to it. While Woodford was in Paris, Porter arranged a series of private dinners for American diplomatic figures, as well as military attachés. The Cuban crisis was never far from their minds during those gatherings, but the conversations roamed far. Woodford’s naval attaché, George Leland Dyer, was bouncing around European ports to assess both military strength and happenings in those cities. Yet he was at the ambassador’s elbow during most of those Paris meetings and discussions, as well as at the less formal dinners. Dyer found Porter an odd figure. Over a meal of sweetbreads, duck, and champagne on the evening of August 17, Dyer listened to Porter in all his patriotic fervor. Woodford was the focal point of the dinner, and in addition to Dyer, he was accompanied by his army attaché, Tasker H. Bliss, and the new first secretary to the embassy in Madrid, John R. MacArthur. Andrew D. White, the ambassador to England, was also at the table. 3
    Porter, Dyer later reported in a letter home to his wife, “did most of the talking and the rest of us, notably Bliss, MacArthur and I, did most of the listening. It was real good American jingo talk” by Porter, who repeatedly made himself the center of the stories he told, stories in which he inevitably “twisted the lion’s tail.” In one of Porter’s stories, he told of a conversation with “an Englishman of note and standing” who had asked Porter why Americans hated Great Britain. Porter launched into a monologue that began with British atrocities in the Revolutionary War, some of the same acts that had so incensed John Paul Jones. “He made out an indictment which took him a half hour to repeat” and that finished with detailing British military presences “from Halifax through Bermuda, the West Indies around to Belize, just for the purpose of watching us.” Porter told the group the United States should prepare itself for eventual war with Great Britain to ensure that the Americans maintained supremacy in the Western Hemisphere. The dinner dragged on until well past 10 PM, when Dyer and Bliss “left to give the high muckety-mucks a chance to talk together.”
    Summer in Spain, as in France, was a popular time for vacations, and there was no sense of urgency to the timing of Woodford’s arrival there. He needed to learn as much as he could about the general mood of the European powers before dealing directly with Spain. War against Spain would be one thing; war against Spain and a range of powerful European military allies would be something else entirely.
    A crisis within Spain itself added to Woodford’s delay. Prime Minister Cánovas and his wife left Madrid in July for a vacation at the Santa Águeda spa in Mondragón.