I've recently been picking around in the autobiography and it has 
occurred to me that conversations between these two men, in regards to 
politics, may have been a bit "guarded".  I just noted a comment Rogers 
made to Clemens in a letter  sometime around November of 1896, how happy 
he was that McKinley had been elected.  Just by coincidence I was 
reading in the autobiography Twain's conversation with the Russian 
revolutionist, Tchaykoffsky,(3/30/1906) his rather scathing comment 
combining McKinley, Roosevelt and Jay Gould.  "...have quite completely 
transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable 
ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no ideals now 
that are worthy of consideration..."

I haven't had the opportunity to read the letters between these two men 
but I am given to understand that they were fast friends.