Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  As he mediated between Russia and Japan, he was secretly doing the same between Germany and France. Wilhelm II had become so strident in calling for a conference on the Moroccan question (ranting about a Franco-British plot to contain the Reich) that Roosevelt saw the danger of a “world conflagration” that would make the war in the Far East look like a border skirmish. The French government must accept the idea of a conference. He was accepting it himself, if only to make Wilhelm feel wanted. “Let not people in France take it amiss if I am found particularly flattering toward the Emperor,” he told Jusserand, before handing Speck von Sternburg a memo of near-Levantine obsequiousness.

  The French Ambassador himself needed stroking, because his superior and patron, Delcassé, had just resigned over the Morocco problem. Roosevelt made a point of consulting Jusserand as if he were an honorary Cabinet officer, and told a bewildered congressman, “He has taken the oath as Secretary of State.”

  Another—and surprised—recipient of presidential confidences was Sir Mortimer Durand, unaware that Roosevelt privately rated his intelligence at “about eight guinea-pig power.” A summons to the White House at 10:00 P.M.; the Washington Monument dark against the full moon; fireflies striking sparks over the lawn; magnolia blossoms stirred by the southern breeze. A long wait, then one of the President’s patented sudden entrances. Two cane chairs drawn up on the porch. A torrent of Rooseveltian talk.

  “He told me,” Sir Mortimer informed Lord Lansdowne, “that he wished me to know the exact course of the recent negotiations, England being the ally of Japan.… He had told no single person except Taft [sic]—Hereafter a month or so hence, he might tell Lodge and one or two others, i.e. everyone.”

  The British Ambassador might have been less beguiled by this frankness had he been aware that Roosevelt had already given Lodge almost a mirror version of it. (“You are the only human being who knows … except Edith, though I shall have to in the end tell both John Hay and Taft.”) Lodge, in turn, did not know some of the things that Sir Mortimer now knew: that the President had “lashed out savagely” when Count Cassini implied that Russia was going along out of sheer magnanimity, and had told Takahira to be content with the Tsar’s willingness to appoint plenipotentiaries, because the very word meant “persons with full powers.”

  So with speech both soft and hard, white lies and colorful confidences, Roosevelt coaxed the peace process along. Durand noted how happy he was that June, how proud of his quiet game, and how “perfectly confident of success.”

  JUSSERAND HAD NO sooner gotten used to being teasingly addressed as “John Hay” than the real owner of the name sailed home to claim it. “Cordial congratulations on your peacemaking,” Hay wrote after disembarking in New York. “You do not need any Secretary of State.”

  The weather in the capital was already hot, and Roosevelt urged Hay to go straight on to his place in New Hampshire. Hay, however, seemed determined to come south.

  “I suppose nothing will keep John away from Washington,” the President wrote Clara Hay. “But he must not stay here more than forty-eight hours.… He must rest for this summer.”

  She knew as well as Roosevelt that Hay would not see another. His German “cure” had been ineffectual, and he hardly had the strength to walk, let alone work. Some obscure desire to reconnect with the scenes of his youth in the nation’s capital drove him. In the mid-Atlantic, he had dreamed of reporting back to the White House and being greeted not by Theodore Roosevelt, but by Abraham Lincoln. The vision had filled him with an overpowering melancholy.

  “I am going to Washington simply to say Ave Caesar to the President,” Hay wrote, in the last of his letters to Henry Adams.

  A White House dinner invitation awaited him when he got in on 19 June. He declined, but crossed the square later and found the Roosevelts still at the table. Refusing to be tempted by ice cream, fruit, and coffee, he joined the President on the same porch that had recently accommodated Durand. Roosevelt was in cordial humor, and gave Hay a full report on the peace negotiations. As they talked, there was a strange guttural sound in the darkness, and an owl flew over their heads. It perched on a window ledge and looked down on them with an expression that struck Hay as wise, yet also full of scorn.

  NEWS OF THE SECRETARY’S death on 1 July from a coronary thrombosis reached Roosevelt that day, just after he had moved to Sagamore Hill for the summer. Simultaneously, William Howard Taft headed to San Francisco, accompanied by Alice Roosevelt and a large Congressional party, to embark on a slightly mysterious “goodwill tour” of the Far East.

  Taft’s renewed assignment to diplomatic business underlined a need, now critical, for a strong Secretary of State—someone who could be relied on to restore morale at the State Department after more than two years of moribund leadership. “Elihu,” the President said after Hay’s funeral, “you have got to come back into my Cabinet.”

  Root sat silent, eyes downcast. In his seventeen months away from the government, he had attained happiness and wealth at the New York bar. His wife, who hated Washington, was re-established in Manhattan society, and Thomas Hastings was building them both a splendid town house on Park Avenue. Listening to the President’s words, Root felt nothing but an immense tiredness.

  He exchanged glances with Roosevelt, then heard himself accepting.

  ROOSEVELT WAS QUITE willing to ease Root’s return to service by relieving him of responsibility for the current peace negotiations. Apart from an emerging consensus that the conference might possibly be held in Washington, as more neutral than any other major world capital, Russia and Japan seemed more determined than ever to find reasons to go on fighting.

  A sense gathered among scholars of foreign policy that more had passed than the last nineteenth-century Secretary of State, and more was coming than the mere settlement of a Far Eastern quarrel. Other current developments presaged ill for world peace: a sudden decline in French diplomatic prestige, triggered by Delcassé’s resignation; a reciprocal increase in the strategic power of Germany; mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin at Odessa, along with enough riots and strikes elsewhere in Russia to convince George Meyer that the Tsar’s subjects were in a prerevolutionary state; a loss of imperial will in Britain, in the wake of the Boer War debacle (to Roosevelt’s exasperation, Lord Lansdowne would not even lean on Japan, his Far Eastern ally, to moderate her peace terms, as Delcassé had done on his ally, Russia). Flabby Sir Mortimer, with his disinclination to shin up large, steep obstacles in Rock Creek Park, struck Roosevelt as a pretty good symbol of a culture that had lost its force.

  Wilhelm II seemed to feel differently. In a manipulative letter, dated 13 July, he warned Roosevelt that the British were opposed to “the great work that the President is so ardently pursuing for the benefit of the whole world.” They sought an indefinite prolongation of the war, in order to weaken both belligerents and ultimately bring about the partition of China.

  Roosevelt was reinforced in his own opinion that Lord Lansdowne did not really want peace. Cecil Spring Rice tried to make him understand that the Foreign Minister could not force an ally into accepting peace terms contrary to that ally’s interest. Had Lansdowne done so, “we would have broken our word.” But this did not mean Britain looked for a settlement so humiliating for the Tsar that it would amount to a military defeat. “If Russia is excluded from the Pacific she must seek an exit for her energies elsewhere—in Persia, Afghanistan, or in the Near East.”

  “Now, oh best beloved Springy,” Roosevelt replied, “don’t you think you go a little needlessly into heroics when you say that … ‘honor commands England to abstain from putting any pressure whatever on Japan to abstain from action which may eventually entail severe sacrifices on England’s part?’ ” He did not notice the French having any such shrinking scruples about their alliance with Russia, even though they had more to worry about in eastern Europe than the British in Asia Minor.

  My feeling is that it is not to Japan’s real interest to spend another year of blo
ody and costly war in securing eastern Siberia, which her people assure me she does not want, and then to find out that she either has to keep it and get no money indemnity, or else exchange it for a money indemnity which, however large, would probably not more than pay for the extra year’s expenditure and loss of life.… Practically the only territorial concession they wish from Russia is Sakhalin [Island], to which in my judgment they are absolutely entitled.

  Knowing he could rely on Spring Rice’s discretion, he wrote that Lord Lansdowne and Prime Minister Balfour “ought to know” that it had been Japan, not any other power or person, that had first asked him to intervene in the crisis. Their precious ally, therefore, was probably in a less advantageous position than they imagined.

  Roosevelt’s admiration for Japan had by now passed its peak. He was still amazed that the little Island Empire had managed to humiliate Russia on land and sea, while actually increasing her exports and building up her industrial might. The very efficiency with which she had accomplished such miracles, however, made him wonder what future expansion Japan was capable of. Eight years before, in a strategic question posed to planners at the Naval War College, he had written, Japan makes demands on Hawaiian Islands. This country intervenes. What force will be necessary to uphold the intervention, and how should it be employed? Now, he was even more convinced that the United States had to commission more warships, build them bigger, and launch them faster. Or what had happened at Tsu Shima might happen in Pearl Harbor—and not too far ahead, either:

  In a dozen years the English, Americans and Germans, who now dread one another as rivals in the trade of the Pacific, will have each to dread the Japanese more than they do any other nation.… I believe that Japan will take its place as a great civilized power of a formidable type, and with motives and ways of thought which are not quite those of the powers of our own race. My own policy is perfectly simple, though I have not the slightest idea whether I can get my own country to follow it. I wish to see the United States treat the Japanese in a spirit of all possible courtesy, and with generosity and justice.… If we show that we regard the Japanese as an inferior and alien race, and try to treat them as we have treated the Chinese; and if at the same time we fail to keep our navy at the highest point of efficiency and size—then we shall invite disaster.

  The oracular tone of this “posterity letter,” addressed to Spring Rice, betrayed anger and embarrassment over an upsurge of anti-Japanese prejudice in California. Members of the state legislature had officially declared all immigrants from Japan to be “immoral, intemperate, [and] quarrelsome.” Roosevelt considered this resolution, passed unanimously, to be “in the worst possible taste.” He was afraid that it might compromise his image as a neutral broker between what Ambassador Cassini was pleased to call the “white” and “yellow” parties to the peace conference. He asked Lloyd Griscom to inform the Japanese Foreign Office that the vote in Sacramento did not represent American popular feeling.

  HAPPILY, THE PRESIDENT could rely on two more effective emissaries to communicate this message in a way certain to beguile Prime Minister Taro Katsura’s government. Alice, now twenty-one, and Taft were an odd couple to send halfway around the world on a steamer named, significantly enough, the Manchuria. But her floaty-hatted, butterfly charm and the Secretary’s jovial purposefulness (as palpable, yet unbruising, as his embonpoint) had captivated huge crowds in Honolulu.

  “FLOATY-HATTED, BUTTERFLY CHARM AND … JOVIAL PURPOSEFULNESS.”

  Alice Roosevelt and William Howard Taft en route to Japan, 1905 (photo credit 24.1)

  A complement of about thirty members of Congress and their wives, plus staff and servants, gave Taft’s party the air of a presidential delegation—which in fact it almost was. He insisted that his main purpose was to take the congressmen on a tour of the Philippines (putting paid, presumably, to any lingering illusions they might have about the readiness of islanders for independence), but Roosevelt had asked him to visit Japan first, for public as well as secret reasons.

  Alice was by now an assured celebrity, inured to the flare and smell of press photography, and incessant speculation about her romantic intentions. She was, if anything, wilder than ever, smoking cigarettes whenever she felt like it, mastering the abdominal jiggles of the hula, and occasionally firing impromptu fusillades with her pocket revolver. Taft felt obliged to remind her that he was responsible to the President for her conduct abroad.

  When they arrived in Tokyo on 25 July, Alice dazzled the Japanese to such an extent that the Congressional wives might just as well not have disembarked. For all her independent Western ways, she took to the local culture at once, lunching with the Mikado, posing prettily with Princesses Nashimoto and Migashi-Fushimi, and sitting cross-legged for hours without fatigue.

  She was also present when Taft dined with Prime Minister Katsura, but had no idea that the two men were engaged in business that directly affected her father’s peacemaking. On 27 July, they agreed on a “memorandum of conversation,” which Taft thought important enough to flash to the White House, in a cable of Brobdingnagian length.

  Although the memorandum was only agreed on, not agreed to, it was plainly an informal declaration of intent regarding the security concerns of Japan in East Asia, and of the United States in the eastern Pacific. Since the conversation enjoyed executive privilege—Taft representing his President, Katsura his Emperor—legislators in neither country were required to ratify it, or even know about it. Unenforceable yet morally binding, friendly yet wary, its importance lay in its timing, just weeks before the presumed negotiation of a peace treaty that would recognize Japan as a power of the first rank. Taft wanted a statesman’s assurance that Hawaii and the Philippines would not be menaced in future years. Katsura wanted Korea.

  As the Prime Minister observed, Korea had been “the direct cause” of the Russo-Japanese War. Japan was entitled to suzerainty over the peninsula as “the logical consequence” of her military successes. Allowing Koreans to mismanage their destiny, as they had in the past, would merely invite further wars, or an indefinite extension of this one.

  Regarding the Philippines—which Katsura understood was a subject of peculiar importance to Taft—Japan’s “only interest” would be to see the archipelago governed “by a strong and friendly nation like the United States.” If the word like conveyed a slight hint of ambiguity, Taft did not seem to notice it, so encouraged was he by the Prime Minister’s emphatic tone.

  Taft said that, in his judgment, “President Roosevelt would concur” with Japan’s views on Korea. However, he cautioned that he had no authority to nullify the American-Korean protection treaty of 1882. The most he could do, if the Prime Minister needed further evidence of concurrence, would be to communicate the substance of their conversation to Roosevelt and Elihu Root—who had just been sworn in as Secretary of State, and whom he felt some “delicacy” in supplanting.

  “If I have spoken too freely or inaccurately or unwittingly,” Taft wired Root afterward, “I know you can and will correct it.… Is there any objection?”

  Roosevelt answered with two terse sentences.

  YOUR CONVERSATION WITH COUNT KATSURA ABSOLUTELY CORRECT IN EVERY RESPECT. WISH YOU COULD STATE TO KATSURA THAT I CONFIRM EVERY WORD YOU HAVE SAID.

  As far as Roosevelt was concerned, Korea was better off as a Japanese colony than a Russian one, or even a Chinese one. And American interests were greatly enhanced. Unless Count Katsura was as big a liar as Count Cassini, he knew now that Japan would not take advantage of the fragility of the Philippines’ civil government. Hawaii, too, was safe. Japan’s postwar development of Korea should create another immigrant market, and slow the “yellow” influx that Californians were objecting to. Last, a gratified Japanese delegation to the peace conference must surely, now, listen to his pleas for magnanimity toward the Russians.

  ALICE, UNAWARE OF why Katsura smiled at her with such satisfaction, passed her five days in Tokyo in a daze half ecstatic and half erotic. Her ph
ilandering idée fixe, Congressman Nicholas Longworth, was a member of Taft’s party, and dancing with him on warm nights aboard ship had reduced her to a state of almost desperate lust. “Oh my heart my heart. I can’t bear it. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.… He will go off and do something with some horrible woman and it will kill me off.… Oh my blessed beloved one my Nick.” She kept reminding herself that he was bald and had a roll of fat at the back of his neck, but in vain; one moment alone with him in some dark corner, and she was again in raptures.

  At a dinner entertainment at the Maple Club, she tapped Lloyd Griscom on the shoulder. “Do you see that old, bald-headed man scratching his ear over there?”

  “Do you mean Nick Longworth?”

  “Yes. Can you imagine any young girl marrying a fellow like that?”

  Since her father had never once mentioned her mother to her, she had no way of knowing that Theodore Roosevelt had had a similar conversation, at a similar event, when he, too, had been twenty-one, despairingly in love with Alice Hathaway Lee. Her determination was as great now as his had been then.

  “Why, Alice, you couldn’t find anybody nicer,” Griscom said.

  On the night of 29 July, she stood with Taft on the balcony of Shimbashi station and waved good-bye. Her last impression of Tokyo was a medley of thousands of paper lanterns, densely packed people, grinning—or snarling—teeth, and barking roars of “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!” The roars were interspersed with a chant that, so far as Alice could make out, meant, “Japan a thousand years, America a thousand years.”

  ALTHOUGH ROOSEVELT, on the whole, breathed more freely when Alice was in another hemisphere, he missed her company. Of all his children, she was the only one with an original intelligence. He identified with her quirky reading tastes, her strong passions, her ravenous curiosity. Vicariously, half enviously, he lived through “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (as the press kept reporting them), and sent her one of his quaint “picture letters,” a mix of deliberately naïve drawings and allusive prose. It included a sketch of his daughter and the Empress Dowager of China exchanging ceremonial puffs of opium.