The truth of his dining at the White House, of which so many imaginary versions have been given, was this: having received so many expressions of approval from all sections of the country on his appointment of ex-Governor Jones to a Federal judgeship in Alabama, which appointment was made, as described in a previous chapter, on the recommendation of Booker Washington and Grover Cleveland, President Roosevelt asked him to come to the White House and discuss with him some further appointments and other matters of mutual interest. On arriving in Washington he went to the home of his friend, Whitefield McKinlay, a colored man with whom he usually stopped when in the Capital. The next morning he went to the White House by appointment for an interview with the President. Since they did not have time to finish their discussion, the President, in accordance with the course he had often followed with others under similar circumstances, invited Washington to come to dinner so that they might finish their discussion in the evening without loss of time. In response to this oral invitation he went to the White House at the appointed time, dined with the President and his family and two other guests, and after dinner discussed with the President chiefly the character of individual colored office holders or applicants for office and, as says Colonel Roosevelt, "the desirability in specific cases, notably in all offices having to do with the administration of justice, of getting high-minded and fearless white men into office--men whom we could be sure would affirmatively protect the law-abiding Negro's right to life, liberty, and property just exactly as they protected the rights of law-abiding white men." Also they discussed the public service of the South so far as the representatives of the Federal Administration were concerned--the subject upon which President Roosevelt had wished to consult him. The next day the bare fact that he had dined with the President was obscurely announced by the Washington papers as a routine item of White House news. Some days later, however, an enterprising correspondent for a Southern paper lifted this unpretentious item from oblivion and sent it to his paper to be blazoned forth in a front-page headline. For days and weeks thereafter the Southern press fairly shrieked with the news of this quiet dinner. The very papers which had most loudly praised the President for his appointment of a Southern Democrat to a Federal judgeship now execrated him for inviting to dine with him the man upon whose recommendation he had made this appointment.