Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  They each needed self-control for this second farewell.

  “I hope and pray that you will visit my country,” Roosevelt said.

  “I will do so,” Rondon replied, “when I can help you be reelected President of the United States.”

  * Lieutenant!

  CHAPTER 17

  A Wrong Turn Off Appel Quay

  Far off one afternoon began

  The sound of man destroying man.

  THE FIRST PUBLISHED DESCRIPTIONS of Theodore Roosevelt returning to New York on 19 May 1914—haggard, malaria-yellow, limping on a cane, his belt hauled in six inches—were graphic enough to persuade political observers in Washington that he was now, in more ways than one, a spent force. He claimed that he had put back twenty of the fifty-five pounds he had lost on his journey into hell (“I don’t look like a sick man, do I?”), but word went around that he had suffered a relapse of fever before disembarking from the Aidan. When a private yacht transferred him to Oyster Bay, he had needed two helpers to climb the slope of the beach below Sagamore Hill.

  Consequently, the Colonel’s energetic demeanor only a week later, when he marched into Woodrow Wilson’s White House, took reporters by surprise. His gray suit hung slack, and his collar stood away from his neck. But the cane was gone and he was as ebullient as ever as he recognized some familiar faces—including that of Jimmy Sloan, the veteran secret service agent.

  The President had heard he was coming to town to address the National Geographic Society on 26 May, and had invited him to lunch. Roosevelt was as wary of getting cozy with Wilson as with Taft, four years earlier, and had pleaded a late train journey. This enabled him to get away with a mere courtesy call.

  At three o’clock he was shown into the Red Room, where his host was waiting. It was a freakishly hot afternoon, so Wilson suggested a glass of lemonade on the southern portico. For the next half hour the two men were able to take stock of each other, in a conversation that avoided politics.

  THEY WERE NOT STRANGERS, having been distantly acquainted since 1896, when Roosevelt was a police commissioner of New York City and Wilson a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton. As later chance would have it, Wilson had been in Buffalo at the time of Roosevelt’s emergency inauguration as President, and had visited him after the ceremony to pay his respects. Now their positions were reversed.

  Roosevelt had always breezily been inclined to like Wilson, as part of his general bonhomie toward everybody until they crossed him. Wilson’s attitude was ambivalent. He admired the Rough Rider’s exuberant activism and envied his popularity, but had been alarmed to see him elevated to supreme power. “What is going to become of us with that mountebank in charge?” Soon, however, he had been compelled to admit that Roosevelt was “larger” than most Americans realized, “a very interesting and a very strong man.”

  When Wilson became president of Princeton in 1902, Roosevelt had congratulated him for exemplifying “that kind of productive scholarship which tends to statesmanship.” Wilson had early on detected those same qualities in himself, along with “latent powers of oratory.” But as he became more and more a candidate for office, and less and less an academic, his misgivings about Roosevelt returned. “I am told that he no sooner thinks than he talks, which is a miracle not wholly in accord with an educational theory of forming an opinion.”

  Roosevelt’s reciprocal attitude of incurious goodwill had begun to change in 1911, when he saw Wilson’s political fortunes rising in contrast to his own. It irritated him to see an academic, peace-minded intellectual—exactly the kind of “dialectician” he had always despised—achieving reform after progressive reform as governor of New Jersey, then, as his Democratic opponent in 1912, coolly poaching most of the tenets of New Nationalism and adapting them as the New Freedom. Now here was Wilson, serene after a year in the White House, taking so many steps forward and back with regard to Mexico that wags were talking of a new dance—the “Wilson Tango.”

  Wilson had at first pursued a paradoxical policy of refusing to recognize the assertive populist government of General Huerta, on the ground that it had seized power by bloody means. He resented having to choose between either of Huerta’s more capital-friendly rivals, Venustiano Carranza and Emiliano Zapata, saying that “morality and not expediency” should be the code of American conduct abroad: “It is a very perilous thing to determine the foreign policy of a nation in terms of material interest.” This distanced him from William Howard Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy, but he had come to realize that other powers were profiting from his unwillingness to do business with Huerta. So he had lifted an embargo, imposed by the Taft administration, on the shipment of arms to Carranza and Pancho Villa. Enraged, Mexican authorities had stepped up their harassment of Americans south of the border.

  Just when Roosevelt was floating free of the Dúvida’s last rapids, Wilson had gone before Congress to say that if such “annoyances” were to continue, they could burgeon into an outrage “of so gross and intolerable a sort as to lead directly and inevitably to armed conflict.” He asked for advance approval of any military action he might deem necessary to take.

  This kind of personal appeal was something new in presidential politics. Roosevelt would never have gone to the Capitol, top hat in hand, to beg legislators for any indulgence whatsoever. His method had been to bombard them—and the press—with written messages that amounted to draft bills, ready to be signed into law. One such had featured what was now known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine:

  Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.

  Wilson at least seemed to have come to his senses on that score. In a development straight out of the Corollary, he had acted to prevent the unloading, at the port of Vera Cruz, of a consignment of German arms ordered by Huerta. He was convinced that these weapons might be used against the United States, and had directed the seizure of the entire town. This the Marine Corps had proceeded to do, at the cost of nineteen American and two hundred Mexican lives.

  Roosevelt had thrilled to the news of this casus belli when it reached him in Manáos. By the time he got home, however, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile had intervened as mediators, saving both Wilson and Huerta from a war that neither of them wanted.

  FOR A WHILE AFTER the Vera Cruz incident, Woodrow Wilson had looked sepulchral, his normally pale skin blanched to the color of parchment. “I never went into battle, I never was under fire,” he admitted to a naval audience. “But I fancy there are some things just as hard to do as to go under fire.”

  If any haggardness lingered as he sat making polite conversation with Roosevelt, it was due less to the burden of being commander in chief than worry about his wife, critically ailing upstairs with Bright’s disease. Roosevelt, haggard himself, made a polite inquiry about her health. For the rest of the interview, he and the President were content to talk about books and his expedition (Roosevelt joking that British geographers doubted there was any such thing as the “River of Doubt”).

  “HIS FORTE WAS ABSTRACT, ANALYTICAL THOUGHT.”

  President Woodrow Wilson. (photo credit i17.1)

  On the former subject, they had little to share. Wilson was not the sort of man to enjoy Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, a novel for boys that Roosevelt was currently devouring. Nor, for that matter, was he likely to curl up with Life-Histories of African Game Animals, the Colonel’s latest two-volume work of zoography. He had come to reading and writing late, after struggling with disabilities as a child, and when he did, his fields of interest had been as few as Roosevelt’s were many.

  During their prepresidential careers (Wilson was almost two years older), they had both wri
tten histories and biographies that showed they understood the American dynamic—its geographical push westward, and the centripetal forces that had worked against secession and defederalized the Constitution. But their respective attempts at a magnum opus—Roosevelt’s four-volume The Winning of the West, and Wilson’s five-volume A History of the American People—had nothing in common except the palpable ache of each author to be making history rather than writing it. Wilson had no gift for narrative, and absolutely no feel for the physical things Roosevelt reveled in: hunting, warfare, exploration, danger. He named no plants and heard no birds. Surprisingly, for a professor, he had been less willing than Roosevelt to scour archives and even attics for original documents. His forte was abstract, analytical thought, especially on governmental and legal issues. Questions of process and synthesis, the objective calculation of power balances (or imbalances, as in Congressional Government, his 1885 exposé of committee rule on Capitol Hill), and the logical resolution of conflicting ideas were the sort of cerebral challenges that delighted him. Roosevelt could no more have written Wilson’s Division and Reunion, about the polemics of the Civil War, than the President could have published The Rough Riders.

  Had Wilson not been so formidably sure of himself, with his calm gray gaze and air of aloof command, he might well have been intimidated by the recovering invalid opposite him. Aside from the facts that Roosevelt had served two successful terms as president, and would now be serving a third, if the Republican Party had not been so hostile to progressive reform, there was the prodigality of his worldly experience to take into account. At least a cat’s quota of lives, and easy adaptation to environments as irreconcilable as Nahant, Nairobi, and the piranha pools of Brazil were embodied in the cheerful sunburned man who sat drinking the President’s lemonade.

  When Roosevelt rose to go, Wilson escorted him to the north door of the White House and waved goodbye as he limped back to his automobile. A crowd of several hundred spectators had collected around it. “Hurrah for Teddy!” a young man yelled. “Hurrah for our next President!”

  Roosevelt, grinning, took off his panama hat and bopped the youth’s head with it.

  Afterward, Joseph Tumulty asked Wilson what he thought of the Colonel.

  “He is a great big boy,” Wilson said. “There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling. You can’t resist the man. I can easily understand why his followers are so fond of him.”

  IT WAS STILL HOT at 8:30 P.M., when Roosevelt arrived at the District of Columbia Convention Hall. The huge room was built over a street-level market, so a miasma of rotting vegetables saluted the nostrils of the four thousand people waiting to hear his lecture. Almost the entire membership of the National Geographic Society was present, in a show of solidarity against transatlantic critics who were alleging that the Colonel had explored very little, and discovered nothing new, in Brazil. An editorial in the Daily Graphic had compared him to Baron Münchhausen as a fantasist of improbable adventures.

  He came perspiring up the stairway, and was formally escorted into the hall by a group of geographers walking backward and applauding. The ovation was thunderous, especially when he took the stage and flashed his white-tile grin. Veteran observers of the capital scene could not recall any former president since Ulysses S. Grant being more loudly cheered. Those more future-minded looked ahead to the possibility of Roosevelt challenging Wilson in 1916.

  “ ‘HURRAH FOR OUR NEXT PRESIDENT!’ ”

  A thinner Roosevelt revisits Washington, 19 May 1914. (photo credit i17.2)

  “I’m almost regretful to see you all here,” he joked. “I have got to make a rather dry speech.”

  He proceeded, with the aid of a blackboard, a stereopticon screen, and three printed maps, to lecture learnedly on his expedition. “It is almost impossible for me to show you on these standard maps what I did, because the maps are so preposterously wrong. For instance, here are the headquarters of the Tapajoz de Juruena.…” To those in the audience who could think of Theodore Roosevelt only as a politician, the experience of seeing him, with his strangely drawn face and eroded voice, assessing bottom-flow rates at 4,500 cubic meters per second in the seventh degree of southern latitude was so bizarre that he might have been an impersonator. George Cherrie, Leo Miller, Anthony Fiala, and Father Zahm were conversely reminded that the man they had huddled with in Mato Grosso hailstorms was not, after all, their intimate, but a public figure making arch reference to them as “exhibits A, B, C, and D.”

  Again and again Roosevelt emphasized that he had not discovered the Dúvida, but had merely—with the professional assistance of Brazilian surveyors—“put it on the map.” He refrained from mentioning that the river now bore his name, and did not say that it had nearly killed him, except to admit that there had been times when life in camp “lacked a good deal of being undiluted pleasure.”

  He was plainly exhausted afterward. But that did not prevent a pium-like swarm of Congressional Progressives pursuing him to the Party headquarters and talking politics until it was time for him to take the midnight sleeper back to New York.

  TWO WEEKS LATER, in the kind of translocation only Roosevelt could find natural, he sat at lunch with the King and Queen of Spain in the fragrant garden of their summer palace outside Madrid. The guests of honor were Kermit and Belle Willard, who were due to be married twice over the next two days—first by a local magistrate at a civil ceremony, then in an Episcopalian service in the private chapel of the British Embassy, so as not to profane Spain’s Catholic orthodoxy. Belle’s father, Joseph E. Willard, was on hand in his capacity as the American ambassador, and Alice Longworth substituted for Edith Roosevelt, who at fifty-three was suffering vague female ailments, and had declined to accompany her husband overseas.

  Roosevelt and Alfonso XIII already knew each other, as fellow mourners at the funeral of Edward VII four years before. Their initial meetings had been awkward. Alfonso found it hard to forget, and forgive, the defeats his soldiers had suffered in the Spanish-American War, at the hands of adversaries prominently including the Colonel of the Rough Riders. Now it was necessary for him to be cordial, if only because of the diplomatic importance of tomorrow’s ceremony, linking the administrations of two American presidents. Roosevelt treated Alfonso with his usual affability, unbending him to the extent that they ended up laughing about the “wake” George V had held in Buckingham Palace.

  Royal favor notwithstanding, the Spanish government found it necessary to surround the Colonel with heavy security during his four-day stay. Plainclothes detectives followed him everywhere, and a detachment of police guarded his quarters at the American Embassy. He did what he could to improve his local image, holding a press conference to express love for the country of Velázquez and the Conquistadors, and saying that after what he had seen of the spread of Latin civilization in South America, he would not be surprised to see Spanish becoming the world’s universal language. Socialist and republican editors were unpersuaded that he had changed since the Battle of San Juan. “We know his attitude toward Spain,” El País remarked. “We cannot welcome him.”

  To Roosevelt’s mild irritation, he was pestered by cable requests from American newspapers for a statement regarding his future as leader of the Progressive Party. “This trip is just a spree,” he replied to The New York Times, “and I am not interested in politics now. I want to meet the litterateurs and geographers and see the museums.”

  A guest list drawn almost exclusively from the diplomatic corps, plus Edith’s inscrutable absence, infused the wedding on 11 June with a sense of impersonality and dislocation. Belle was rich, brittle, snobbish, and flighty, a toothy little blonde with the sinuous neck of someone adept at casing cocktail parties. Kermit was a moth drawn to her brightness. His intent, after they had spent a brief honeymoon in Europe, was to return to Brazil and manage a market in Curytiba. He thought they might stay there for nine or ten years, if not longer. Neither the Willard nor the Roosevelt families were sure how Belle would t
ake to social life in the Antipodes.

  “I believe she will be his sweetheart almost, but not entirely, as you are mine,” Roosevelt wrote Edith on the eve of his departure for London.

  HE STOPPED IN PARIS to change trains, seeing nobody but the American ambassador, Myron T. Herrick. En route south the week before, he had spent two full days in the city, breakfasting with Edith Wharton, lecturing Henri Bergson and a bored Auguste Rodin on the physical characteristics of European races, and paying his respects to President Raymond Poincaré. Paris that June was, more noticeably to visiting Americans than to herself, voluptuous, shabby, chaotic, tinged with the melancholy that had settled on her like mold after the conclusion of l’affaire Dreyfus. Georges Clemenceau’s passionate call upon his countrymen to vouloir ou mourir, to will or to die in response to Prussian militarism, had been answered to the extent that the French army was now as big as Germany’s. But the will, palpably, was still weak. As Claude Debussy wrote an artist friend, “For forty-four years we’ve been playing at self-effacement.”

  When Roosevelt saw London again, early on Saturday, 13 June, it too had lost much of the imperial self-certainty he remembered from the spring of 1910. Now the mood was more fearful than passive, after four years of worsening social and political unrest. He had no sooner moved into Arthur Lee’s Mayfair townhouse than a “suffrage bomb” went off nearby in St. George’s, Hanover Square. The old church was dear to him because he had married Edith there. Sylvia Pankhurst and her followers were unlikely to know or care about that. They were merely following up on their much more shocking detonation, two days before, of a bomb right beneath the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey.